Jurassic Park III

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SummaryIt is eight years after Dr. Alan Grant was first introduced to the live dinosaurs at Jurassic Park, where he was almost killed. Now he works only with the bones of dead dinosaurs. He studies their bones and writes books, but he needs money to continue his work.

Chapter 1: Thirteen-year-old Eric Kirby is stranded on the island of Isla Sorna after a parasailing accident. He knows that the island is inhabited by dinosaurs.

Chapter 2: Paul Kirby and his wife, Amanda, offer Dr. Grant and his assistant Billy, a lot of money to fly them over Isla Sorna, an island near Costa Rica, and tell them about dinosaurs. Dr. Grant accepts. He doesn’t like the idea, but Billy says that if they take the money then they can carry on their research.

Chapters 3–5: Alan and Billy, and the Kirbys along with three other men (Nash, Cooper and Udesky) fly over Isla Sorna in an airplane. As they reach the island, Alan learns the Kirbys’ true intentions. They want to land on the island in order to look for their son, Eric, who disappeared with Amanda’s new boyfriend in a parasailing accident two months earlier. Alan tells them that their son can’t possibly still be alive as the island is very dangerous. They are attacked and chased by enormous, angry dinosaurs. Cooper and Nash are killed. The others decide to stay on the island and try to find the Kirbys’ son.

Chapter 6: They soon find the parasail in the trees, but there is no sign of Eric. Then they find some raptor eggs. Alan is very afraid and tells everybody to run.

Chapter 7: They arrive at the InGen building. InGen is the company that created Jurassic Park. They try the phone, but it doesn’t work. Udesky. Alan, Paul, Billy, and Amanda

are then pursued by angry dinosaurs and in their attempt to get away, they are separated.

Chapter 8: Alan escapes from the Raptors by climbing a tree. That’s when the Kirby’s son, Eric, appears. Eric takes Alan to a hut and gives him some food. Alan tells Eric that his parents are on the island looking for him.

Chapter 9: The next morning, Alan and Eric set off towards the beach to find Eric’s parents. They come to some open ground near a canyon where they hear the sound of a phone ringing. Eric recognizes the sound – it is his father’s phone. He shouts out for his parents and they are reunited. But the sound of the phone is coming from inside a fearsome dinosaur – the one that ate Nash! The dinosaur attacks and they run to a nearby building. They are reunited with Billy who tells them that Udesky has been killed by raptors. Billy feels guilty because he took two of the raptors’ eggs and this must have made the raptors angry.

Chapters 10–13: Eric is captured by a pteranodon and dropped into the canyon. Billy tries to save him and succeeds, but he is caught by the dinosaurs in the process. There’s nothing the others can do to save him and they have to run for their lives. In the canyon, it seems they have lost Paul as well when he falls into the river.

Chapters 14–15: When Amanda fears that her husband has been killed, she realizes that she still cares for him very much. He manages to swim to safety and they are reunited. Eric is happy to see his parents talking together again.

The terror and excitement continues. With the help of Paul’s phone, which they find in the dinosaur’s dung, Alan manages to phone a friend who gets on to the United States government who send airplanes, ships and a boat to the island. Just after Amanda returns the eggs to the mother dinosaur, they are rescued. As they board the boat, they see that Billy has also been rescued and is still alive. They are all very happy to leave Isla Sorna and return to their quiet, happy lives.

Background and themes

The filmsSteven Spielberg directed all three of these very successful Jurassic Park movies, developed from Michael Crichton’s bestseller. The character of Dr. Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill, is based on Dr. Jack Horner, a paleontologist who worked as a consultant on the first

Novelization by Scott Ciencin

Jurassic Park III

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Jurassic Park movie. In fact, the filming of the dig site in Jurassic Park III is actually the site of Jack Horner’s excavation, where several large Tyrannosaurs and some Hadrosaurs were uncovered. They filmed on location in Hawaii, Los Angeles and Orlando, Florida. Special effects were expensive and amazing. They included the enormous spinosaurus, which is the largest animatronic ever built. It weighed twelve tons and hydraulics were used to operate it. The special effects crew had to use 950 liters of oatmeal to simulate spinosaurus dung. The audiences loved it!

Jurassic Park III continues the thrilling adventures of Dr. Alan Grant, an expert on dinosaurs. In the first of these movies (1993), he visits InGen’s bioengineering dinosaur “theme park” on Isla Nublar and nearly gets killed when the security system is disabled and the dinosaurs escape from their cages. This was followed by The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), when it is revealed that there is another island (Site B) where dinosaurs were bred before they were transported to Isla Nublar. There the dinosaurs have lived, bred and flourished. In Jurassic Park III (2001) Dr. Grant suspects that the raptors have evolved into a species that can communicate and are now smarter than primates.

Creating monstersIn some ways, Jurassic Park can be compared to the story of Frankenstein, in that it is another story where man creates a monster and then finds he cannot control his creation. The horror is unleashed and the world becomes a very dangerous place.

The fascination with dinosaursThe idea that dinosaurs might one day return to earth is both exciting and haunting. We only know of these enormous creatures from studying their bones. But do we really want to have first-hand experience of their strength, power and emotions? In reality, dinosaurs were on the earth long before humans appeared, and perhaps this goes some way to explaining our fascination with them.

Ethics of cloningScience may one day be able to reproduce creatures that have died out. This would be of great interest to scientists and to people generally, and could help us understand more about animals and life itself. Cloning of animals such as mice and sheep has already become a reality. Some people consider cloning to be a wonderful thing, while others think it an extremely dangerous enterprise. The debate over the ethics of cloning has been raging

for some time. These movies leave the audience in little doubt as to whether or not it is a good idea.

Discussion activities

Before reading 1 Discuss: Put the students in groups of three or four

and have them answer the following questions. You may need to pre-teach the word “sequel” for the last two questions. Have you seen any of the Jurassic Park films? Do you like films about dinosaurs? Why/why not? Can you think of any films that have had sequels? Make a list. Look at your list of films with sequels. Can the second or third film ever be as good as the first? After ten or fifteen minutes, conduct a feedback session with the whole class.

2 Pair work: Photocopy as many sets of pages 3, 8, 12, 15, 16 and 34 as you need. Cut off the captions. Put the students into pairs and give each pair a set of pictures and a set of captions. Ask the students to match the pictures with the captions. When the first pair has finished, ask them to read out the captions and see if the rest of the group agrees.

Chapters 1–5After reading3 Role play: Write the following names on the board

Dr. Alan Grant, Billy Brennan, Paul Kirby, Amanda Kirby. As a warm-up activity, tell the students to write one short sentence about each of these characters (e.g. Dr Alan Grant knows a lot about dinosaurs.). After five minutes, conduct a brief feedback session and then put the students into groups of four. Allocate one of the four roles to each of the students and have them imagine the conversation the four characters have in the restaurant on page 5. Each character must speak at least once. Give the students ten minutes to prepare the conversation. Go around the class as they work to help them with vocabulary as necessary. When they have finished, get them to act out the conversation in their groups. One or two of the groups can perform their text in front of the whole class.

4 Pair work: Write the following pairs of characters’ names on slips of paper (one pair of characters per slip of paper) – Alan and Mr. Kirby, Amanda and Ben Hildebrand, Paul and Ben, Eric and Paul. Put the students into pairs and give one slip of paper to each pair. Each student in the pair takes the role of one of the characters on the slip of paper. Working individually the students must think about how their character feels about the character allocated to their partner. After five minutes preparation time, the students tell each other what they think. Call on some of the pairs to present their ideas to the rest of the class. At this stage, the activity could be turned into a whole-class discussion.

Jurassic Park III

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5 Debate: On page 5, we learn that “Alan’s work was more important than a wife or children.” Is having a good career more important than having a family? Divide the class into two equally-sized groups. Tell them that they are going to have a debate on the above question. Write the following statement on the board: This house believes that it is more important to have a good career than to have a family. Regardless of their personal views, allocate to one half of the class the role of arguing in favor of the statement, and to the other half, allocate the role of arguing against the statement. Each student must write least one sentence to support the position of their group. Then proceed with the debate, by asking individual students to read out their sentences. At the end of the debate have the class vote on the question.

6 Role play: Put the students into groups of four and ask them to act out the conversation between Alan, Paul, Amanda and Billy which starts at the bottom of page 10 when Alan asks them why they brought him to Isla Sorna. Help the students with their pronunciation and intonation. Give them enough time to learn their lines and ask one or two of the groups to perform the scene in front of the rest of the class.

7 Discuss: Tell the students to re-read Amanda’s explanation on page 12 of how her son became lost in Jurassic Park. Then write the following question on the board: Was Amanda right or wrong to let her son go with Ben? Why/why not? Working individually, the students write down their answers in one sentence. Then put the students into groups of four and tell them to exchange their views. Conduct a feedback session with the whole class at the end.

Chapters 6–108 Pair work: Write the following words on the board:

backpack, parasail, raptor eggs, InGen. Put the students into pairs and tell them to discuss why these things are important in the story. After a few minutes, create new groups of four by putting two pairs together. The students now compare their answers with those of the other pair.

9 Discuss: Put the student into groups of three or four. Tell them they have to give each of these chapters (i.e. chapters 6–10) a different, better title. The new titles can be statements, questions or simply phrases. Give the students ten or fifteen minutes to prepare and then call on each group to present its suggestions. Write them up on the board. At the end of the activity, conduct a vote for the best new title of each chapter.

10 Role play: In pairs, students write out the dialog between Alan and the Billy on pages 24–25 as if it were a stage play. Then each pair performs the dialog until they can do it without reading the text.

11 Guess: Put the students into pairs. Ask them to imagine what is going to happen to Eric now he has been caught by the pteranodon. Each pair should note down their ideas so that they can read them out to the whole class during the feedback session.

Chapters 11–1512 Write: Divide the class into five equally-sized groups.

To each of the groups, allocate one of the following characters: Alan, Amanda, Billy, Eric, Paul. Tell the students to imagine that when they get home after their adventures, each of the characters writes an entry in their diary, telling the story of one or more of the last five chapters from their own point of point of view. Now divide each of the five groups into smaller groups of two or three and have them write the diary entry. When they have finished, call upon some of the students to read out their texts to the whole class.

Extra activities13 Research: Tell the students to use the Internet and/

or the library to find out as much as they can about the dinosaurs mentioned in the story. You might like to give the students a list of questions to help orient their research: e.g. When did the tyrannosaurus rex live? Where did it live? What did it eat? How big was it? When was it discovered? When did it become extinct? Where can you see a skeleton of a T. rex?

14 Role play: Put the students in pairs. Tell them to imagine they are television journalists. They are going to interview one of the characters in the story. Give the pairs three minutes to decide which character will they choose and why. Conduct a brief feedback session, asking each pair to say who they are going to interview. Then tell the students to prepare a list of a maximum of eight questions they would like to ask. After few minutes, ask the students to act out the interview – with one member of each pair playing the journalist and the other playing the chosen character. Tell them to practice it a few times and then to switch roles. Finally ask different pairs to perform their interview in front of the whole class.

15 Write: For homework, the students write a short review of the story. Their text should have the one of the following titles: Why you should (or should not) read Jurassic Park III. Tell them to include the following points in their text: a brief summary of the story; a brief description of the main characters; the things they liked about the story; the things they didn’t like about the story.