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The other night I was looking around the house for a DVD to watch in bed all night and quite possibly fall asleep to, while everyone else was out having Halloween fun. The DVD I eventually stumbled across was the three Jurassic Park DVD. I'd last seen the first one several years ago, so that's where I started.
°°°Jurassic Park (1993)°°° The basic premise of this movie is an island full of dinosaurs; I imagine that most people know that one way or another. The island is built like a theme park, and we (the audience) are shown around part of the park in the form of a tour, including how supposedly they bread dinosaurs from blood found in mosquitoes trapped in amber. (It's an interesting theory but I don't know how scientifically fallible). The birth (hatching) of a raptor is quite impressive, even if it is all 'fake'. One of the first dinosaurs we come into contact with is a sedated triceratops. It lies on the floor breathing, blinking, and groaning. It could just as easily been a real rhino, it looks that real. All is running smoothly until the corrupt technology guy turns off various security systems and the electric fences fail - inevitably the most ferocious dinosaurs escape first and chase the cast around the set for the next hour. People
get eaten, dinosaurs get shot, but man wins in the end.
Made in 1993, there are times when the special effects aren't up to par with today's standards, but as a whole they are very convincing. The dinosaurs don't look fake and their movements are smooth enough to be natural. There are times when a mechanized dinosaur eats a computerized human, and these are the scenes that fall down, because the computering isn't up to date anymore.
The sound effects in the movie are something you don't notice at times, because they are so perfect. You forget that we don't know how dinosaurs sounded, and probably won't ever, but all the noises fit the dinosaurs so well that it doesn't matter.
There has to be a certain mount of gore in a movie about rampaging dinosaurs, but it is not overly so and you actually see very little blood - its more implied violence, hidden by a conveniently placed bush or car etc.
The cast is a nice ensemble; especially the two child actors - Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzello - (they are the owner of the island's grandkids) do a very good job at looking terrified and screaming loudly! Likewise Laura Dern and Sam Neill (the dinosaur experts) both give respectable performances.
I found that the cast wasn't made up of especially well known names, but the faces of quite a few were recognizable. Sam Neill Dr. Alan Grant Laura Dern Dr. Ellie Sattler Jeff Goldblum Dr. Ian Malcolm Richard Attenborough John Hammond Bob Peck Robert Muldoon Martin Ferrero Donald Gennaro Joseph Mazzello Tim Murphy Ariana Richards Lex Murphy A relatively young looking Samuel L Jackson also has a small role.
°°°Special Features on disk 1°°° ~~~The Making of Jurassic Park - hosted by James Earl Jones A 50-minute documentary about the making of Jurassic Park. JEJ explains how Spielberg wanted to create a movie that wasn't full of movie monsters, but instead realistic, credible, dinosaurs. The show also tries to justify the technique used in the movie to create the dinosaurs from blood in mosquitoes.
There is a long segment about the making of full size dinosaur models, and it's just 'wow', firstly because the models are so intricately designed, down to the smallest flaw in the skin, and watching them built, from a small clay model, a bigger model, a robotic model, and then the skin added. There is a lot of footage of the full size t-rex, effectively 'between takes' and it looks just like another actor wandering around the set, its head moves back and forth as it looks around, the tail moves for balance - it's perfect!
One of the themes in the movie is that birds, not reptiles, are today's closest living relatives. The Making Of uses experts to endorse this theory, and claim that everything in the movie is accurately how we think dinosaurs lived, hunted, socialized, died, etc.
After all the pre-production models, there is another long segment about the post-production computer animation. Personally I don't find this is as impressive or interesting as the physical models.
~~~Early pre-production Meetings 10 minutes of very rude footage of Spielberg playing with early models of dinosaurs and discussing possibilities for the film, including how to get the dinosaurs to move correctly.
~~~Storyboards Just scans of the original storyboards, fairly boring really.
~~~Location Scouring My of the movie was filmed in Hawaii, and this is footage of them looking for places that could house dinosaurs, and look like Costa Rica (cos that's where the movie is meant to be set)
~~~Animatics: Raptors in the Kitchen Quite primate looking footage of the raptor looking through the window, opening the door and investigating the kitchen. There is no sound during this segment, which made me think my TV was broken for a second!
I would say that Jurassic Park is the best film out of the three, and on it's own I'd give it 8 out of 10 because it is a good movie, and looks real. I believe if this movie was made today, it wouldn't be so good, because all of the animatronics would be digital, and wouldn't look as real. I'm not a fan of digitalized effects that could have realistically been done - such as in Spiderman 2; it just isn't as good when it's all from a computer.
Available from Amazon for around £7, this is definitely a great DVD to buy, if dinosaurs are your thing.
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Production Year: 2002 - Action/Adventure - Director: Vincenzo Natali - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over - Starring:Lucy Liu, David Hewlett, Anne Marie Scheffler, Joseph Scoren, Matthew Sharp, Jeremy Northam
Production Year: 2003 - Action/Adventure - Original Language: English - Classification: 12 years and over - Starring:Tom Welling, Kristin Kreuk, Michael Rosenbaum, Sam Jones III, Allison Mack, Eric Johnson, Annette O'Toole, John Glover, John Schneider
Production Year: 1964 - Action/Adventure - Director: Cyril Endfield - Original Language: English - Classification: Parental Guidance - Starring:Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins, Ulla Jacobsson, James Booth, Michael Caine, Nigel Green
Production Year: 1977 - Action/Adventure - Director: Clint Eastwood - Original Language: English - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring:Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke, Pat Hingle, William Prince, Bill McKinney
On remote Isla Nuba entrepreneur John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) has built the ... more
ultimate theme-park, populated by genetically engineered dinosaurs painstakingly reconstructed from DNA extracted from prehistoric amber... and, of course, frogs! Adapte...
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Nov 2nd, 2006
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