You can say what you like about JP3 as a film, but because I've been feeling all kinds of nostalgic lately, I'm going to pick out some absolute CHOICES that were made in just 90 minutes with regards to the Alan/Billy of it all:
"You never can tell about other people, can you?"..."Ain't that the truth."
Now, obviously, the above quote is in reference to the Kirbys posing as a rich married couple, who claim to have done everything under the sun from climbing K2 to having seats booked on the first commercial flight to the moon, and Mr Kirby presents himself as some big shot business man. However, it turns out it was all a lie to find their missing son, they're not rich at all, Mr and Mrs Kirby are actually divorced and Mr Kirby runs a kitchen and bathroom store. Similarly, Udesky is posing as a mercenary when he's actually just a booking agent filling in for someone else who pulled out of the job at the last minute.
Arguably, you could also add Eric Kirby into the mix because he was expected to be dead by the time the search party arrives, but against all odds, he has been surviving (thriving, even) alone on the island for the past 8 weeks.
Meanwhile, the film starts off with a bait and switch where it makes it look like Alan and Ellie are married with kids only for it to turn out she's had a family with someone else and Alan is actually still unmarried and childfree.
We're also introduced to Billy in a scene where he is flirtatiously teaching a female student how to tell the difference between bone and rock, complete with intimate hand touches, which make it look like he is going to be some sort of ladies' man or that at least there'll be a romantic storyline of some kind with a female character, only for her never to be seen again and for Billy to spend the rest of the film making heart eyes at Alan (never mind the two of them exchanging intimate hand touches of their own) and ultimately sacrificing his own life in an act of redemption because he can't deal with the disappointment Alan regards him with in the immediate aftermath of discovering the stolen raptor eggs.
So, like...WHAT WAS THE REASON for these choices with Alan and Billy? Why did they want us to think they were romantically involved with/interested in women that played no such role in the events of the film, then had the two of them basically go from married to divorced to reconciled complete with all the accompanying angst, betrayal, guilt, grief and redemption in the space of 90 minutes instead, when a running theme with most of the characters was them hoodwinking others into thinking something was true about them that wasn't? And on a related note, why was Billy repeatedly paralleled with both Ellie and Sarah (i.e. Alan's and Ian's romantic partners in the previous films)? WHAT DID THEY MEAN BY ALL OF THIS?
Having established the above re: Alan and Billy, we then see Billy answering for the both of them when Mr Kirby invites Alan to dinner, Alan pulling the classic 'arm round the back' move to put his hat behind Billy in a bar with country music playing whilst they sit huddled in a booth as though they're on a double date. What in the actual Brokeback Montana even was this?!
Objects of significance: Billy's lucky bag strap/Alan's hat/the replica resonating chamber
Firstly, this is some excellent foreshadowing:
On a related note, as is this:
Secondly, at the start of the film, Billy has his lucky strap (I see you, Sarah Harding parallel) and Alan has his trademark hat, but by the end of the film, each man has the other's object of significance. And we see at different points of the film, they each make the effort to retrieve it for the other (as an aside: oh the symbolism of them being on opposite sides of the fence in the top two screencaps given what the next scene is):
Unlike Billy's experience in New Zealand, by the time he is hanging from the cliff on Isla Sorna, he doesn't have his lucky bag; Alan does.
On the face of it, the bag doesn't seem so lucky anymore...at least not to Billy, anyway. But it does, of course, come in handy for Alan and the Kirbys later on when they return the eggs to the raptors. As Alan recognises, it would have been more dangerous for them to be caught by the raptors without the eggs than with them, and that's why he decides to hold onto Billy's bag. The bag that also contains the replica resonating chamber made by Billy, which Alan uses to attempt to communicate with the raptors. Therefore, arguably, it becomes Alan's lucky bag as much as Billy's.
Meanwhile, despite everything that Billy must have gone through after the Pteranodon attack, he still manages to retrieve Alan's hat. He obviously doesn't know he's going to survive when he's being swept down the river, or slashed and sliced by relentless talons and beaks from above. So he holds onto the only piece of Alan he has left in that moment.
As for the replica resonating chamber...the scene where Billy proposes to presents Alan with it kind of feels like a combination of their philosophy and approach to their work; they used cranial scans from the recently discovered fossilised raptor skull to make the replica with state-of-the-art technology and then Alan subsequently tries it out on the raptors on Isla Sorna. A team effort by the astronomer and the astronaut.
Alan spends most of the film telling Mrs Kirby to stop shouting her son's name in case it draws unwanted attention towards them, but when Alan gets separated from the rest of the group during the first raptor attack, Billy decides to repeatedly yell Alan's name across the jungle:
The contrast of Mr and Mrs Kirby's personalities sounds kind of familiar to me, but what do I know?
Never mind the fact that by the time Alan has found out about the eggs, he and Billy behave more like a divorced couple than the actual divorced couple on the island. The actual divorced couple, who appear to reconcile by the end of the film when they realise their differences are actually their strengths as a couple, which once again, sounds awfully familiar...
It's been 25 years and somehow this film and ship STILL live in my head rent free, damnit.
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