Jurassic Park III's Talking Velociraptor Scene Should've Been More Than Just a Dream

Jurassic Park III (now streaming on Peacock!) doesn’t tend to find itself near the top of most rankings of the six Jurassic Park or Jurassic World movies, but the 2001 film is not without its highlights. One such high point is a sequence when Dr. Alan Grant and Co. must escape from a bunch of Pteranodons inside a giant birdcage. Another memorable moment is when a dinosaur speaks English.

Grant (Sam Neil), having been convinced (albeit it under false pretenses) to return to Isla Sorna by Paul and Amanda Kirby (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni), is feeling nervous while on the plane back to the place where he narrowly escaped getting eaten by dinosaurs years earlier. He wakes from an uneasy nap to discover that all his companions are gone, but he’s staring right at a velociraptor who is inside the plane with him! The raptor opens its mouth, but rather than roar or attack, it simply says, “Alan.” Grant wakes up for real. It was a dream, and his assistant Billy was actually calling his name. 

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Now, some might call this sequence — which is absurd, short, and tonally out of place with pretty much everything else in the franchise — a lowlight rather than a highlight. However, consider this: What if, instead of being a dream, there actually was a talking dinosaur the whole time? Wouldn’t that have been something?

Imagine if the talking velociraptor from Jurassic Park III talked throughout the film

Wouldn’t it have been fun if, when the Spinosaurus first attacks, a velociraptor turned to William H. Macy and said, in perfect English, “Oh boy, we better get out of here!”

At the end of the movie, when Grant has a tense standoff with the raptors as he returns their stolen eggs, the friendly English-speaking raptor could’ve just cleared things up by saying, “Well jeez, fellas, it looks like we’ve had a big ol’ miscommunication here.”

John Hammond and InGen could extract dinosaur DNA from a mosquito trapped in amber and use pieces of frog DNA to fill in the gaps in order to bring long-extinct creatures back to life. You’re telling me they couldn’t have added some “talking” genes somewhere into those double-helixes? Maybe it was an accident, that could work too. The Jurassic Park dinosaurs became pregnant despite being bred to be all-female. Life finds a way, so maybe it would find a way to have a raptor who is friendly and talks with his best buddy Alan?

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The Jurassic World movies have Blue, and she basically talks to Owen Grady. Chris Pratt already headlined a blockbuster trio where he was friends with a talking Raccoon in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. How much more of a stretch would it have been if Blue could speak?

Jurassic Park is based on the book of the same name by Michael Crichton. The author also wrote Congo, a book about a gorilla that can “speak” using sign language and a special piece of technology that vocalizes her signing. At one point in Congo, the gorilla is on a plane and she orders a martini, calling it a “green drop drink” because of the olive. There is precedent for Jurassic Park III’s plane-bound raptor talking. It just shouldn’t have been a dream, and also the raptor should’ve ordered a cocktail. Thank you.

Jurassic Park III is now streaming on Peacock. The version of Jurassic Park III where there’s a talking raptor along for the whole ride exists only in my dreams.