The 2001 movie you couldn’t have paid Steven Spielberg to direct: “Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to do this”
It says a lot about a film if even Steven Spielberg, someone who seems to love the process of filmmaking and being on set, didn’t want to make it.
While there are directors like Terrence Malick and Quentin Tarantino who spend years in between projects, Spielberg seems to be working at a constant rate and has shown no signs of slowing down. His latest effort, Disclosure Day, is one of the most anticipated films of the summer, and he’s already announced that he will be working on making his first western in the immediate aftermath.
One of the most remarkable things about the director is that he has retained a level of consistency throughout his work, and has very few films that simply don’t work, mighty impressive for someone who has been directing for over 50 years. While not every entry in his filmography is going to be a masterpiece like Schindler’s List or Raiders of the Lost Ark, the average Spielberg film is better than the vast majority of what Hollywood otherwise churns out.
One of his films to truly miss the mark was 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which is the only non-Indiana Jones sequel he ever made, and while the film does have some inventive sequences, it simply lacked the magic of its predecessor.
Even though most agreed that there was a massive gap in quality between the two entries in the series, even at its worst, The Lost World was so popular that it was always going to get a sequel, which came in the form of Jurassic Park III. It was not based on one of the original books by Michael Crichton, but it did feature the return of Sam Neill in the role of Dr Alan Grant, as he had been absent in the previous instalment.
Spielberg decided to hand over the responsibility of directing the film to Joe Johnston, who remembered their meeting very clearly, telling The Chicago Tribune, “Steven stopped by the first time we did a shot for our first big sequence,” Johnston said. “He left saying, ‘Boy, I’m glad I don’t have to do this’”.
Stepping into Spielberg’s shoes is no easy task, but Johnston is an admirable director in his own right and one of the few people with as much experience working with advanced computer-generated imagery. Although he had gotten his start working for Spielberg’s best friend, George Lucas, as the art director on Return of the Jedi, he directed some of the best special-effects-driven films of the ‘90s with the fantasy adventure Jumanji and the superhero adventure The Rocketeer.
Jurassic Park III underperformed at the time of its release, and essentially led the franchise to go on hiatus until 2015’s Jurassic World, but time has been kind to Johnston’s film, as he made a sincere effort to do something substantially different with the franchise. Instead of trying to make a massive, thunderous epic like Spielberg had already done, he chose to make a smaller B-movie that only ran around 90 minutes.
Johnston’s work looks even better now when compared to how completely disastrous the Jurassic World films have been, as they’ve only catered to nostalgia and added nothing new, and he also managed to redeem himself in the eyes of the public when he directed Captain America: The First Avenger, which remains one of the best instalments in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
