Trailer
Plot summary
Alan Grant works on fossilized remains now, trying to prove that Velociraptors were intellectually and socially advanced, while funding for the research stays out of reach. Talk of the InGen incident and Isla Nublar follows him everywhere. Ellie Sattler, his former girlfriend, now married, and his assistant Billy Brennan both tell him to continue, and Billy builds a replica of a Velociraptor larynx. Paul and Amanda Kirby, a wealthy couple, then offer to pay for his research if he guides them on an aerial tour of Isla Sorna, saying they are allowed to fly there. Grant agrees without enthusiasm and sets out with Billy, the Kirbys, their associates Udesky and Cooper, and the pilot Nash.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Jurassic Park III (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Filming began on Jurassic Park III without a finished script: the first act was mostly ready, but the middle of the story was still incomplete and the ending had not even been written yet when shooting started.
- William H. Macy complained during filming about the painfully slow pace of production, saying that on some days the crew shot only an eighth of a page of script across a full 12-hour day.
- The Spinosaurus animatronic was so enormous, at 44 feet long and 13 tons, and more powerful than the 9-ton Tyrannosaurus rex prop from the earlier films, that Stan Winston's team had to remove a wall of his Van Nuys studio just to get it out the door.
- During filming of the Spinosaurus-versus-T. rex fight, the reused Tyrannosaurus animatronic from the earlier films proved no match for the new creature: the Spinosaurus prop was powerful enough to literally rip its head off mid-shoot.
- The Spinosaurus's distinctive roar was built by sound designers layering the low guttural sounds of a lion and an alligator with a crying bear cub and the stretched-out cry of a large bird, giving it a raspy quality unlike any dinosaur heard in the earlier films.
- Despite an unusually long 96-minute rough cut, the finished Jurassic Park III runs only 92 minutes with credits, making it the shortest film in the entire Jurassic Park series.
- A home-video promotion offering fans "the world's first disposable cell phone" collapsed after a San Francisco Chronicle investigation found that the sample phones Universal's partner Hop-On had shown off were actually just modified Nokia handsets, exposing the company's own design problems.
- Sam Neill turned down a role in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to stay with Jurassic Park III and reprise Alan Grant.
