^ It made $45 million domestically and was the number one film when it was released, and did huge business in China were apparently 3D films do much better than here.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=jurassicpark3d.htm
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/global-box-office-jurassic-park-614090
In trying to cut corners, when Ian, Ellie and Alan (and I guess the lawyer was there?) all get to see the raptors being fed a live cow in their pen. The cow up in the air with his hooves splayed out and circling, feeling for solid ground was a sight. But it's all done with sound effects, like we're not supposed to care or notice. Everybody looking into the pen, supposedly watching this gets a palm plant waved in their face, like ... what the hell's THAT? Not even a Raptor tail, up in the air, or nothing! The whole scene is just so stupid and pointless. It's just there to eat time.
Well, yeah, it's following the monster movie "less is more" philosophy that
Jaws inadvertently perfected because the shark was always malfunctioning. Keep the main "baddies" concealed and mysterious and dangerous until it's time for their big reveal to build up suspense.
Hammond's insufferable speech about his days with The Flea Circus is an automatic skip-through. Like Speilberg's trying to summon his Quint speech again, from JAWS.
I'm fine with Hammond's speech, but never have I considered it in any way a call back to Quint's terrifying monologue in
Jaws. They're just so tonally and thematically different.
The stupid kids who won't grab the gun on the floor, when Ellie and Alan are stuck keeping the door closed from a Raptor trying to get in is another situation that's just incredibly stupid and just there to eat up time. Have the kid get the gun! But no, Steven doesn't want to shoot that.
The gun wouldn't have helped them at that moment anyway. Grant and Sattler were doing everything they could just to hold the door closed from the Raptor. Shooting it would have required getting out of the way of blocking the door, which would leave them vulnerable to attack until they had gotten up, aimed, and fired. That kid wasn't big enough to accurately and safely fire a shotgun under distress with Grant and Sattler right next to the line of fire either.
The DNA cartoon goes on far too long and borders on annoying. It's just so stupid, as is the goofy "ride" their on, in the first place.
It's supposed to be goofy. That's the point. It was about Hammond trying to reduce these extremely dangerous creatures into something as mundane and kid friendly as a ride at Disneyland. It's an illustration of his hubris.
A lot of other things in this movie are Steven Speilberg's fault as well and it just makes watching this movie hard to watch without very long breaks, in between. And the worst thing about the story of JURASSIC PARK was that it's own premise wasn't even what ended up being the case. "Oh, noes! Man & Dinos can't co-exist! Man's playing "god," surely he will be punished and destroyed by his own creations!" Hammond's park had it's problems, yes, but that was necessary only to serve the story. Otherwise, JURASSIC PARK had these animals contained, if not necessarily controlled. Dennis Nedry's greed changed everything. It had nothing to do with "the system." JURASSIC PARK worked fine. Yet, everybody's convinced the Park's the problem, by the end of this movie, because of it's own movie-mentality. If Speilberg wasn't really interested in these kinds of movies anymore, than he shouldn't have been making them. It's just a hard movie to re-engage myself in, even though I love the robots and CGI involved.
A lot of the stuff you're blaming on Spielberg were features of the novel the film was adapted from, and Michael Crichton can hardly be called a liberal (at least not on certain issues like the environment), which was your source of angst about Spielberg in your last rant about him.
While I agree that having Nedry sabotage the park for greed undercuts the message that building a park was a bad idea from the start because you can't control nature (I guess there are no working zoos and nature reserves then), that's a feature of the book, not some insidious liberal message Spielberg inserted on his own, so blaming him makes no sense.
But there were already elements that the park was slipping out of their control and built on poor reasoning before Nedry's sabotage, namely with the poison plants the triceratops was eating, that dinosaurs were getting Lysine from the plant life --thus negating their Lysine contingency plan, that they bred a dinosaur like the Raptors that were too dangerous to display, and most importantly, that the dinosaurs were able to change sex and reproduce in the wild completely unbeknownst to them, which means they never bothered to check on the dinosaurs again once they released them into the park.
So while I don't think the idea of such a park being run effectively is impossible, I do think the idea of Hammond and InGen running a park effectively is. They never had the proper respect for what they were dealing with.
