‘Jurassic Park III’ at 25 - Remembering Sam Neill
I had always known that I would be marking Jurassic Park III's 25th anniversary with a retrospective piece.
I never expected it would be an obituary as well.
Sam Neill, the New Zealand actor who brought Dr. Alan Grant to life across three decades and three films in the Jurassic Park franchise, passed away earlier this week at the age of 78, and his loss undeniably casts a shadow over this anniversary. Jurassic Park III was always going to be a film worth revisiting. It is also a film that belongs, permanently and poignantly, to the record of what Sam Neill gave us.
The context in which Jurassic Park III arrived in theaters 25 years ago today matters. Steven Spielberg had made a pair of films in 1993 and 1997 based on Michael Crichton’s two Jurassic Park novels, giving us two of the defining blockbusters of the era. With both novels adapted and Spielberg’s creative interest in the property satisfied, the future of the franchise was genuinely uncertain. It was Joe Johnston – a friend of Spielberg’s and a director of lean and inventive genre entertainment including Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989), The Rocketeer (1991), and Jumanji (1995) – who expressed interest in carrying the series forward and was given the opportunity to do so.
What Johnston released on July 18, 2001 is not necessarily a great film. This is worth stating plainly, because honesty is part of what retrospective appreciation requires. Jurassic Park III does not have the depth of its Spielberg-directed predecessors, which were thrilling but also genuinely thoughtful explorations of human hubris and the fundamental illusion of controlling nature. It does not attempt these philosophical ambitions, nor does it pretend to. Roger Ebert, reviewing the film upon its release, called it “not as awe-inspiring as the first film or as elaborate as the second, but in its own B-movie way it’s a nice little thrill machine.” That is exactly the right description, delivered without condescension and without false inflation. Ebert understood that crafting a nice little thrill machine is a legitimate achievement, that not every film in a franchise needs to be the best film in that franchise, and that honoring what a thing actually is beats lamenting what it is not.
What Johnston did with Jurassic Park III was strip the franchise to its most essential mechanics. Out went the sprawling spectacle, the elaborate philosophical scaffolding, and the sense of wonder that Spielberg had cultivated so carefully in the first film. But in came a lean survival story – a small group of people stranded on Isla Sorna, hunted by prehistoric predators, trying to get off the island alive. The horror influence is pronounced and deliberate. The abandoned settings carry a genuine eerie dread. The Spinosaurus – the film’s apex predator and perhaps its most significant contribution to the franchise’s iconography – functions less like an animal and more like a slasher villain, an unstoppable force that refuses to stay down regardless of what is done to it. Viewed through a horror lens rather than an adventure lens, the film’s apparent weaknesses reconfigure into design choices. The relentlessness is the point. The dread is the point.
The film also gave audiences something the original novel had provided but the films had withheld: the Pteranodon aviary sequence, one of the most viscerally effective set pieces in the franchise’s history, brought to the screen with the commitment of a filmmaker who understood why Crichton had included it in his novel in the first place. It is terrifying in exactly the right way – using scale and sudden, disorienting movement to produce a kind of helplessness in the audience that the more controlled spectacle of the earlier films had occasionally smoothed away.
Sam Neill’s return as Dr. Grant was the film’s most significant casting decision and, in retrospect, one of its most undervalued achievements. Neill himself said in 2021, while promoting Jurassic World Dominion, that he thought he was actually better in the third film than in the original – that by the time he got to Jurassic Park III, he had worked out how to play an action hero in a way he hadn’t fully figured out before:
“I hadn’t really worked out how to do that until I got to number three, but I think I’m actually better in the third one. I don’t think it ends so well; it ends in a hurry. But I agree. I think it comes in for quite a bit of criticism and that it’s dismissed too easily. I think it’s actually, apart from that last 10 minutes, I think it’s actually really pretty damn good.”
The fact that most critics disagreed at the time did not seem to particularly trouble him. Neill had always been more interested in the work than in the reception, which is one of the things that made him such a reliable and frequently underappreciated screen presence.
Beyond its intrinsic qualities, the film’s historical significance to the franchise cannot be overstated. Jurassic Park III demonstrated that the series could continue beyond the novels that had originally generated it – that there was a version of this world that could sustain stories Crichton had not written. That proof enabled four further sequels, with potentially more to come. The tradition the third film began – of each installment centering on a different apex predator rather than returning to the T-rex – became a structural element of the franchise’s ongoing expansion. The Pteranodons leaving the island at the film’s close, heading for the mainland, seeded a story thread that the later films would develop into one of their central preoccupations. And the satellite phone ringtone – that absurd, cheerful interruption in the midst of prehistoric terror – has become a kind of shibboleth among franchise fans, a piece of sonic shorthand that identifies shared experience across a generation.
Joe Johnston went on to direct other great genre fare, most notably Captain America: The First Avenger in 2011, bringing to that project the same instincts for period-inflected adventure and efficient genre storytelling that had served him throughout his career. Most recently he directed the second season of the documentary series Light & Magic in 2025. Meanwhile, the franchise he helped sustain in its most uncertain moment has since become one of the most commercially successful in cinema history.
Sam Neill is gone now. He leaves behind a body of work that includes The Piano, Dead Calm, Event Horizon, and a great deal more besides three Jurassic Park films. But those three films – including Jurassic Park III, in which he finally felt he had cracked the code of what it meant to play an action hero – are as good a monument as any to what he brought to cinema.