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".

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.