Friday, August 19, 2016

The Purge #2: Jurassic Park III vs. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

by Rob DiCristino
It’s killer dinosaurs vs. killer robots as Rob is forced to choose between two ill-advised sequels.

Last time on The Purge, you voted to send Away We Go off into that good night, and I couldn’t agree more. But our noble work continues. We must rid our DVD shelves of the middling and the unworthy, the stuff your roommate left behind and the disappointing Blind Buys. When the movie gods judge your collection, how will they find you? Will you stare into the Face of Rahn with confidence or beg forgiveness from the Pope of Film? Now, the one-off middlebrow stuff is easy enough to compare in a vacuum, but how do we handle franchises? Let’s switch it up this week and look at second sequels to beloved action/adventure films:

Jurassic Park III - 2001, Dir. Joe Johnston

“Some of the worst things imaginable have been done with the best intentions.”
You never forget your first time on a Wild Dinosaur Murder Island. Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neil) certainly hasn’t, which is why he tells Paul and Amanda Kirby (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni) to go screw when they ask him to lead a guided aerial tour of Isla Sorna. However, because Grant chose to pursue the life of a scientist, making important new discoveries and helping people learn about the world around them, he’s fucking broke. The Kirbys write Grant an obscene check that gives him no choice but to grab his intern Billy (Alessandro Nivola) and board a private jet to the Second Best Exotic Dinosaur Murder Island. Ironically enough, he’s really into it at first. He’s marveling at the beauty of these majestic creatures and eager to share his expertise with people who might genuinely appreciate it. None of those people are on this plane, though, as Grant soon discovers that the Kirbys are actually a divorced couple searching for their son Eric (Trevor Morgan), who recently went missing nearby. Also, that check they wrote is worthless and a mechanical mishap has left them all stranded on the Island of Dinosaurs Who Murder. The search for Eric (complete with murdering dinosaur hijinks) ensues.

Jurassic Park III has all the classic trappings of a second sequel: the production values are low, elements are safely rehashed from the original, and the lead actors who refused to show up for Part 2 return to cash a paycheck. That being said, the film works hard to present a Dr. Grant whose experiences in Jurassic Park have left him in a different place in his life than when we first met him. While he still argues for slow and meticulous science in the face of quick and easy genetic manipulation, he’s now more hardened and cynical, which is decent enough character work for our purposes. The Kirbys’ search for their son works, too. If we have to return to the “rescue someone from the island” plot, we might as well do it through the eyes of some middle-class normal types who just got caught up in the chaos John Hammond hath wrought. Jurassic Park III’s premise isn’t to blame, here. Neither is the acting: Neil, Macy, and Leoni are all capital-F Fine and play what they’re given absolutely straight. Hell, even the “talking raptor” plot line isn’t the worst thing ever. It gives Grant something to investigate during his time on the island and creates an evolutionary through-line with the series overall. The longer the dinosaurs are left alone, the more they learn and grow. Science!
The problem is that Jurassic Park III is a glorified TV movie. The cinematography is flat and boring, the CGI is cheap and uninspired, and the set pieces are total garbage. There’s little regard to pacing or suspense; characters often just turn around to find Tyrannosaurus Rexes lumbering by on their way to murdering other dinosaurs. Most of the action scenes take place in full daylight, leaving the CGI and puppet effects even more weightless and cartoonish. The river and pterodactyl attacks are kind of neat, but Johnston lacks either the style or the budget necessary to make them land in any meaningful dramatic way. Nor does the film care about character arcs or causality. These people are all hapless dingbats who argue about raptor eggs for an hour while an offscreen Laura Dern scrambles to rescue their sorry asses. The aforementioned Good Enough Premise is completely abandoned about midway through in favor of absolutely nothing at all. The film just gives up and ends at one point, and we’re all expected to clap and say thank you.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines - 2003, Dir. Jonathan Mostow

“Our destiny was never to stop Judgment Day. It was merely to survive it together.”
What’s a soldier without the war? What do we do after our life’s work is finished? Ten years ago, with the help of his mother and a socially-awkward but well-meaning BFT, John Connor (Nick Stahl) stopped Judgment Day. The machines never took over. The nukes never launched. This is great for humanity, but really bad for John. In the years since his mother’s death, he’s drifted from one dead end to another, never fulfilling his destiny nor quite believing that the cyborgs haunting his dreams have been put down for good. Spoilers: they haven’t. While drunkenly raiding a veterinary hospital administered by his ex Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), he runs head-first into the T-X (Kristanna Loken), Skynet’s latest killer creation. This time, the Super Omnipotent Network of Murdering Robots is not only hunting John, but his future lieutenants as well. Thankfully, a T-850 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) arrives just in time to guide the wayward pair toward their destiny as First Couple of the Resistance. Turns out John and Kate have a post-apocalyptic future together and Judgment Day is inevitable.

Rise of the Machines is essentially Judgment Day updated for the millennium: the Cold War is over, Skynet lives in the internet, and the new Terminator is a progressive-yet-test-audience-approved white lady. She’s the kind of super weapon that kids designed in crayon after seeing T2 in 1991, a mix of the T-800 and the T-1000 with a little sexy thrown in for good measure. Arnold is old, but still spry enough to deliver robotic exposition and fire large-caliber weaponry. The film itself is fast-paced and tightly-edited; there’s almost no time for bullshit or breathing room. Stahl and Danes do the pouty-eyed dramatic thing that pretty actors do, shouting and pointing with concern at things offscreen. While their chemistry isn’t exactly the best, their relationship does add a wrinkle to the Terminator mythology that pushes the canon forward without compromising the integrity of anything that came before. Exploring how and why John Connor dies is genuinely interesting and provides a decent enough excuse to corrupt the original film’s stable time loop for the second time. Things end on a dour and bittersweet note that resets the franchise for future installments.
These should all be good things, but Terminator 3 also lacks the dramatic weight and sociological subtext of its predecessors. It’s much more interested in being an action film than a political allegory, but the mid-level CGI and flat staging leave everything feeling hokey and inconsequential anyway. Arnold’s T-850 has absolutely no arc or significant efficacy; he’s just there because someone has to punch Kristanna Loken. John and Kate literally run, jump, and fly toward the climax of the film without any real challenges. There are no personal conflicts to overcome or thresholds to cross. The hunt for John’s lieutenants goes nowhere and means nothing. Attempts at humor are cheap and strange, reading like Zucker brothers parody: “What if Arnold get his clothes from a stripper this time?” “What if he got kicked in the balls?” “What if he put on goofy sunglasses and told a gas station clerk to ‘talk to the hand’? That’s relevant!” They’re all sad and embarrassing and we should do our best to just forget them. Still, the film’s worst offense is that, unlike its predecessors, it has nothing real to say about the world or the people who inhabit it. It’s as if T3 was designed to remind modern audiences what the Terminator franchise is all about without making them suffer through those boring and complicated “talking” parts.

The Verdict:
Pre-verdict note: In order to compensate for my own bias and get a sense of general opinion, I polled a few of my nearest and dearest on this one. Jurassic Park III won overwhelmingly, with 71% of the vote. It’s really the lesser of two evils in this case. Neither film has any real re-watch value, so it’s coming down to which has the most interesting moments. While Jurassic Park III could easily win for “English-speaking raptor hallucination” alone, I’m going with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. It’s more of a cynical retread than JP III, but it chugs along at a decent pace, has a few semi-iconic shots, and sports an ambitious and unexpected ending. Not to mention that the DVD comes with a feature-length commentary from Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you’ve never listened to a feature-length commentary from Arnold Schwarzenegger before, you are doing it wrong. But let’s fight this out, F-Heads. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

26 comments:

  1. I'd toss both away, but if I had to choose one, the commentary would be the clincher.

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  2. This is tough, like choosing between your 2 least favorite kids. T3 sucks because it's a huge step back from the previous, JP3 has the good fortune is following the Lost World. However, JP3 is still unbearable, and has embarrassing production values and an even worse script, while T3 still has Arnold and a pretty sweet crane chase. T3 it is.

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  3. I don't know which should be the victor here, but I do know there was a huge missed opportunity with the title Wild Dinosaur Murder Island.

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  4. One has Laura Dern. The other does not. This is madness.

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    1. Barely! That might be worse than not at all. #DernTease

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    2. I remember being really upset in JP3 that she married that "treaty law" fuck nugget.

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    3. Any chance to use the phrase DernButt

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  5. I'd go T3.. but this is a tough one. It's funny that the movies that followed in both these series' made the 3rd installments look like masterpieces (Sorry Adam).

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    1. What makes you think Adam has seen either of these movies?

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    2. I was referring to the appalling Jurassic World. Although I'm one of those weirdos that enjoyed Independence Day 2, so I don't judge. Movies are fun.

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    3. I saw the good cut of Jurassic World. Not sure what everyone else watched.

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    4. That's the one called Jurassic Park, right?

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    5. Patrick, I know you've harshed on the "what did you expect, a good movie?" defense, and justifiably so, because it's obnoxious and vacuous and of course we as movie fans should demand good movies. That said, sometimes even fundamental rules have exceptions, and I think Jurassic World is one. Unless we demand something radically different, such as, say, a Before Sunrise-type take on a dinosaur theme park meltdown (and I would love to see that movie), what can one reasonably expect from a 2015 movie called Jurassic World, seeing as the original already took all the good bits? It'd be like asking Paul McCartney to write tunes as catchy and timeless now as he did back in the Beatles heyday. Now that "Yesterday" and "Eight Days a Week" have been written, so long as they're not forgotten, they can never be written again, neither by their original authors nor anyone else. Jurassic World is not a great film or a classic, certainly, but it's a danged fun movie about dinosaurs getting loose and messing up a theme park. (Dinosaurs being stupid lizards that can't even have personalities like the Transformers robots can, and I'm tempted to say that anyone who watches a Bayformers movie after the first one gets exactly what they deserve.) So, again, I very rarely say this, but, respectfully, and this is an honest question I'd be curious to hear an answer to, in the case of World, what else did you or anyone really expect?

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    6. It's not about expectations, really, because I didn't have any (there were already three JP movies and I only like one of them). I just don't like the movie. I don't like the script, I don't think the characters are well-written at all, I don't think there's any excitement or wonder or fun to be had. But you say you find it to be fun, so there you have it. I promise I'm not being sarcastic when I say that I'm glad you find it fun. That's a totally subjective response with which neither side can argue. It probably just comes down to that.

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    7. Yeah but didn't you say on the Suicide Squad show that you now hate the original JP too? :)

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    8. Yes, I distinctly remember Patrick saying that Jurassic Park is a garbage movie.

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  6. I love both of these messes!
    I vote to watch these as a fun, dumb double feature and get rid of The Lost World.

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  7. I unabashedly love T3. Yes, it lacks the substance of the first two movies (and T2 is one of my top two favorite movies), and is thus in some sense a betrayal, but it does play like gangbusters, and is tons of fun. Also, for time-travel nerds like me, it answers the question of where Skynet first came from, if Cyberdyne was developed from the CPU chip found in the factory which came from the future. Turns out, as my own Terminator Time Chart shows, it was originally a military project, which makes total sense. Also, Stahl and Danes are great actors, and I really like their chemistry.

    JP III, on the other hand, is a worthless movie with the most blatantly false poster tagline ever. "This time, it's not just a walk in the Park"?! That's precisely what it is! At least now we have the wicked fun Jurassic World to make everything better.

    Winner: Terminator 3, no question, if for no other reason than that epic Earl Boen cameo. And yes, Arnie's commentary is amazing. :D

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  8. T3 is a pretty solid winner in my book - it very much feels like a "fake" Terminator movie but Jurassic Park III is just trash: Not only is it a glorified TV movie, it's a glorified SyFy movie (and while I'm no fan of The Lost World, I'm not sure I understand the hate that's dwelled up over the last couple of years - when I saw that movie in the theatre back in 1997 the audience cheered and I've always thought it was an almost OK movie). T3 has enough to work with to fail properly, JP III should just not exist to begin with.

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  9. I would keep JP3 for three reasons.

    1) I prefer dinosaurs to robots.
    2) I don't remember anything about T3 despite watching it at least twice.
    3) I prefer stilted Leoni dialogue over stilted Danes dialogue.

    Also, the talking raptor makes me laugh ever time. Sometimes I watch the scene of it on the plane just to cheer myself up.

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  10. Good write up of a very tough race. As much as I hate it, I would keep JP3. This movie sucks, and I hate it more than Lost World, but for some reason I've seen it a lot. That might be due to the fact that it's 90 minutes. If I never see T3 again I'll be fine, but JP3 will probably reappear in my future again.

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  11. I'm putting that commentary on my list of things to do! The female Terminator in leather kinda always did it for me,to quote JBones, sometimes you want steak sometimes you want McDonald's

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    1. I guess what I'm saying is there both Micky Ds but some days that's okay, if I had to watch one now the tight leather pants win, tight leather pants with the Arnie commentary.

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  12. Believe it or not this is a bit of a Sophie's Choice for me - I have a hard time speaking ill of The Park and I've always found T3 very watchable - like, I know it's bad but it's a weird comfort movie for me for some reason, with a couple really good moments (I love when the T-X "tastes" John Connor's blood and has like a primary target teased robo-orgasm).

    I guess if I was forced to I'd have to toss JPIII. But then I'd sneak out later that night, take it out of the garbage and hide it behind my shelf or something.

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