Jurassic Park 3 (DVD)

...island (in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2") are understandably desperate to rescue their son and launch an illegal and ill advised mission to do just that.

Knowing they will need assistance, they enlist the help of Doctor Alan Grant, who was the advisor to the original "Jurassic Park" and someone they believe can help them survive the island. To persuade him, as he has already said he has no intention of ever ...
...the list "The Making of Jurassic Park 3" being the longest and the most generally informative. At just over 20 minutes long, this looks like one of the "Making Of…" style programs you see quite frequently on MTV. It covers every aspect of the film making, from the acting to the special effects, although it does only touch on most aspects quite briefly and was all very positive, as such programs tend to be. It did have a couple ... more

The film world is littered with films that were released to cash in on the success of previous films, attempting to make what was intended as a single film into a franchise and making a mockery of the good name of the original. The latter two "Matrix" films were such; films that were never intended to be until someone saw the huge sales of tickets for the original and "Pirates of the Caribbean was losing steam by the third instalment. "Be Cool" was only conceived, even as a novel, once the film "Get Shorty" had been a success and if no-one had watched "Basic Instinct", there wouldn't have been the travesty that was "Basic Instinct 2".

Compared to some of these films, "Jurassic Park 3" is almost a classic. Admittedly, it was an afterthought, with the first two films in the series starting life as Michael Crichton novels, but this was written entirely as a film by someone else. The director had also changed from the original films and only two of the original characters appear here; one only briefly. So "Jurassic Park 3" contains all the ingredients you usually need for an awful film, but manages not to be. Well, not entirely, anyway.

Whilst parasailing over Isla Sorna in the hope of catching sight of some dinosaurs, an accident forces two people, one a young boy, to land on the island. The boy's parents, being aware of events that occurred on that island (in "The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2") are understandably desperate to rescue their son and launch an illegal and ill advised mission to do just that.

Knowing they will need assistance, they enlist the help of Doctor Alan Grant, who was the advisor to the original "Jurassic Park" and someone they believe can help them survive the island. To persuade him, as he has already said he has no intention of ever going to the island, they offer him a substantial investment in his research, as his current project is quickly running out of money and hide their true intentions. By the time he finds out the real reason he is on this trip, it is far too late and they are stranded on an island filled with dinosaurs.

When the first thing that happens to the group is being attacked by a spinosaur, Alan Grant and his assistant Billy are concerned mostly with getting off the island, so they want to aim for the coast as quickly as possible. The Kirbys would prefer to stay alive, but are mostly concerned with getting their son back alive. Alan Grant doesn't believe any of them are going to get off the island alive, but he's going to give his own survival his best shot and with Erik having been stranded for around 8 weeks, doesn't believe he is still alive either.

From this contrived opening, the film moves onto the kind of thing that made the original "Jurassic Park" such a great spectacle at the time that came out. It's a battle of dinosaur against man and occasionally, dinosaur against dinosaur. This means that the majority of the characters after this point are computer generated and beautifully rendered. Despite the best effort of all the actors and script writers involved, the dinosaurs were always the stars of the earlier "Jurassic Park" films; here, they are more of a saving grace, as this is otherwise the weakest of the trilogy.

I think a large part of the problem with the film is that they've largely run out of new ideas and there's no longer anything to really get excited about any more. The soundtrack is a fine example of this, with the "Jurassic Park" theme being retained from the earlier films and nothing else seeming that much different or noticeable throughout the rest of the film, which more or less sums up the whole film; it's good, but it's nothing new or special. As for the action, dinosaurs chasing the humans were a large part of the previous two films and the intelligence and speed of the velociraptors is also a constant from the previous two films. Of the slightly different items, the big fight between the two big dinosaurs was far too brief to have all that much impact and the pteranodon enclosure was supposedly an idea that was dropped from one of the earlier films due to time constraints, so whilst it's a great idea, it is not exactly one freshly squeezed here.

That said, it is the pteranodons that provide the best example of how good the computer generated imagery is in this film. Being birds, there is a lot of movement from them, both in terms of speed and changes of direction and the imagery is seamless throughout all this. But it is the attention to detail when they are grounded that really stands out, with one scene in close up where a pteranodon turns around and sees them which looks particularly good, as it almost seemed to be glaring at them. Getting an expression on a face that is essentially all beak must take some doing, but they managed it in this case.

Unfortunately, the human acting isn't nearly up to the same level. Sam Neill does a pretty good job as Dr Alan Grant, but as his is a role he's played before, he should be able to manage it. He slips back into his old role effortlessly, even allowing for the 8 year break between films and he's by far the best actor on display here. Laura Dern also seems to slip back into her old role quite nicely, but she gets very limited screen time, so it's tough to tell. Of the other main characters, Trevor Morgan as Erik Kirby and Alessandro Nivola as Billy Brennan do fine, but their characters are little more than standard action film characters, so they don't have exactly stretching roles. The same is true of the older members of the Kirby family, but William H Macy never really seems to settle into his role as Paul Kirby and Tea Leoni's Amanda Kirby is even more noticeably wooden. For a couple that are supposedly divorced and discovering their feelings for each other again, there is very little chemistry between them and her reaction to finding her new partner dead was high in volume, but not emotionally convincing. Indeed, there was a better chemistry between Sam Neill and Trevor Morgan, which is a worry seeing as how Dr Grant used to hate kids!

The script helps with this, as it's Sam Neill who gets all the best lines and the banter between his Dr Grant and Erik Kirby provides the more amusing moments. There are a few other sharp lines that get spread around some of the other cast members, but these happen infrequently and occur quite early on in the film. Indeed, it is quite biased towards the start of the film, as if they've tried to put a lot of the action in early to distract the viewer from how contrived the set up is. Once the characters you would expect to be killed off have died, then it's just one long chase film, with little new to excite anyone. The length of the pterodactyl sequence shows the lack of ideas, as once there was something they hadn't used before, they took advantage of that novelty to the point at which it outstayed its welcome. Considering that the T Rex against spinosaur scenes were far too brief, it suggests that whilst they had the technical ability and the creative ideas to make for a well rounded film, they hadn't quite worked out how to use them all to maximum effect. Fortunately, the film is around half an hour shorter than the two preceding it at only 90 minutes long, so the ending doesn't seem to drag on too long, which is a relief as things seemed to be slowing down the longer the film went on.

"Jurassic Park 3" is a decent enough film, but nothing spectacular. Like many action films, it's something decent to watch, but not terribly involving on a mental level and not a film that will stand up to repeated viewings. The special effects save the film from being a complete loss, as for any fan of this type of film; the spinosaur in particular is worth a look. Unfortunately, "Jurassic Park 3" will ultimately be judged against the other films that bear the name and because they wrapped up the special effects in a far better story, thanks to having the original Michael Crichton novels as a starting point, they will always appear far superior. That isn't to say this isn't worth watching, but it's really only worth watching the once and if you watch it too closely after one of the others, it will seem a lot worse.

If the film had its moments, but they proved to be either too brief or happen all at once, the same could be said of the extras. Much like the film, they seem strangely superficial and are worth watching the once, but not really any more than that. Again, much like the film, the quality of the extras is mostly biased towards the start, with the first on the list "The Making of Jurassic Park 3" being the longest and the most generally informative. At just over 20 minutes long, this looks like one of the "Making Of…" style programs you see quite frequently on MTV. It covers every aspect of the film making, from the acting to the special effects, although it does only touch on most aspects quite briefly and was all very positive, as such programs tend to be. It did have a couple of points that particularly amused me, however, in that Tea Leoni looked more animated in this than she ever managed in the film and that one of the animatronics guys who was operating the spinosaur looked a lot like Iggy Pop.

The next feature, "New Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park 3" was more interesting to me personally, but again suffered from being a little too brief and unfocused. I especially enjoyed the parts where the film's dinosaur expert talked about the spinosaur and the velociraptor in terms of what they would have looked like and behaved for real and how he tried to make things as accurate as possible. The section on the pteranodon focussed mostly on the technical side of getting it on screen and so had less interest for me, although someone into computer graphics would probably find it fascinating. At 6 minutes, however, this was annoyingly brief, as I would have liked to have known more about the dinosaurs, with them having been an interest of mine since I was quite young.

However, if this section was annoyingly brief, then the "Tour of Stan Winston Studios" was even more so. Stan Winston and his company are the ones who made the dinosaur models and animatronics for the film, but if you didn't know this beforehand, you're left to guess. This is a 3 minute glimpse of what they do, but it has no explanation and no narration, it's just a look at the studio at work and isn't even chronological, so you get to jump about between models at different stages of development without ever being sure what is going on, so this has very little value at all, which is a shame, as it could have been really interesting if they'd done it as a proper tour and planned it better.

The "Visit to ILM" feature was largely spoiled by being presented in so many different sections, which meant there was a lot of going through menus to watch the whole thing and this spoiled the flow of things, especially as some of the sections showing the final shots were literally only seconds long. Most of the sections were a little technical and so would be more enjoyable to someone with a particular interest in this aspect of film making, although I did enjoy seeing how things came together. Some of the sections were a little too technical and a bit dry and some of the people presenting them didn't seem entirely comfortable being on camera. Personally, I enjoyed the sections on the raptors and creating the muscles the most, as these were almost show and tell sections, as this helped someone without any technical knowledge to see what they were talking about, which made them easier to follow. There was an amusing shot of one of the dinosaurs in what looked like a party hat and the unfinished shots looked quite strange as well.

I thought that the "Montana: Finding New Dinosaurs" section would be a lot more interesting than it was, as the title seemed to offer something about the dinosaurs themselves. Unfortunately, this 4 minute section mostly involved Jack Horner talking about how he gets his team together and how they found more than they expected in terms of quantity, but gives no real insight into how they dig and what conclusions their finds have helped them to draw.

The "Behind the Scenes" bits were fairly interesting, but they were just shots from the film intercut with shots from the filming with very little comment. Like the "Tour of Stan Winston Studios", I felt this could have been greatly improved by narration of some kind. It is worth watching the once to see the animatronics for the velociraptor legs in action, as that looked like a really cool piece of kit and, like many people seeing a great gadget for the first time, I looked at that machine and immediately thought "I want one!"

Sadly, this joy was not to be repeated in the "Storyboard to Feature Comparison" section, which merely took three scenes fro the film and showed them next to the storyboard drawings. There were very few changes between the two, so the comparison was almost a match and that made the feature largely a waste of time and only really of interest to those interested in the technical side of film making and even then, not of great interest.

The "Trailers" section was simply trailers for Universal releases, including all of the three "Jurassic Park" films, which added very little, as did the "Photo Gallery" section, which had 3 minutes of pictures of cast and crew and behind the scenes shots that were only on screen for around 3 seconds apiece and which couldn't be controlled by the viewer and so seemed to go past too quickly. By comparison, the "Posters" section was very slow moving, as they were on screen for 10 seconds apiece, which felt like too long, especially as some of the posters were quite similar in design. It was interesting to see some of the varying concepts, though, as well as the different titles the film was nearly given.

The "Dinosaur Turntables" was another idea I thought would be better than it was, but it turned out to feature little more than spinning computer generated shots of the dinosaurs, some of which had been shown during the ILM feature. Some of them also included shots of the dinosaurs in motion, which added a little bit extra, but mostly all they did was rotate and as they were spinning quite quickly and were only on screen for around 5 seconds at a time and couldn't be slowed down or zoomed in on, this didn't really allow me to get a proper look at them, which is what I was really hoping for.

The finish off was the standard "Feature Commentary", which can be found on most DVDs these days. Unusually here, though, the people doing the commentary were the special effects team. Whilst this meant that it lacked a lot of the breadth of some commentaries, it did provide an interesting point of view. The team are clearly enthusiastic about what they do and enjoy their work and given that the same team had worked on all three "Jurassic Park" films, they were able to talk about what had become possible for them to do since the first film. There were points where it did descend into merely them talking about which bits were computer images and which were the animatronics and the people they thanked over the end credits sounded like they were reading an Oscar acceptance speech, but the different perspective was refreshing, if only the once.

The DVD which contains only the film is on Amazon for £5.96, which compares favourably with the price of £19.99 for the version with the extras. Given that neither the film nor the extras are really worth watching more than once, a purchase seems a little like a waste of money if you can watch it for free on TV. That said, copies of both versions have been seen on eBay from 99 pence and, as long as the postage isn't too expensive, this would be a decent deal. The version I would recommend above all others, however, is the 4 disc "Jurassic Park Trilogy" set that I paid £10 for in an HMV sale and which can now be found on eBay from £4.49. Whilst this film alone isn't worth that much, the addition of the first two films to this, along with an array of features makes that the only way I would recommend a purchase of "Jurassic Park 3" at any price. 

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