Dippyploddyokishly (Jurassic Park 3 (DVD))

Member Name: x_elff_x

Product:	Jurassic Park 3 (DVD)
Date:	15/02/02 (149 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dinosaurs

Disadvantages: Tea Leoni's squealing

The Film

By now you know the score. Improbable opening plot gambit - this time involving dodgy parasending over dinopolis itself Isla Sorna (that's where the second dodgy dino lab lurks for those still keeping count) - results in cute moppet (Trevor Morgan as Eric) being stranded alone and having to be rescued. Curiously enough, he seems to be coping marvellously in the staying-alive stakes until his estranged mom and pop (Tea Leoni and William H Macy) con Sam Neill's Dr Alan Grant into returning to the island to search for their son.

Once the adults arrive, all hell breaks loose and they face a race to try to get off the island. Basically, an excuse for the technical types at ILM to throw every dinosaur imaginable at us and for the scriptwriters to rehash the previous films while adding a dash of Peter Pan into the mix.

The acting is fine, but nothing particularly special, if it weren't for Neill's prescence it would barely raise a blip on the interest scanner and Tea Leoni's seemingly constant shrieking is enough to create more chills than the sight of the dinosaurs, no matter how well-rendered they are.

DVDetails

Region: 2

Ratio: 1:85:1 Widescreen anamorphic

Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 English
DTS 5.1 English

Extras: Interactive Menus
Scene Access
The Making Of Jurassic Park III
The New Dinosaurs of Jurassic Park III
Tour of Stan Winston Studio
A Visit To ILM
Theatrical Trailers
Montana: Finding New Dinosaurs
Behind The Scenes
Storyboards To Final Feature Comparison
Photo Gallery
DVD-Rom Features
Dinosaur Turntables
Feature Commentary with Special Effects Team

Rating: 4 stars

Comments:

This is a crisp, clear print, as you would expect of such a recent film, there is no graininess and the picture remains sharp throughout, although you can 'see the join' with some of the special effec
ts in the opening sequence. The sound stands up well to being put through its paces, with much in the way of crashes and roars to test its mettle.

The packaging of the film is also excellent, with nice opening menus, although the scene selection clips are static, which comes as something of a surprise.

When it comes to extras, the list seems lengthy. When you come to watch them, however, it becomes evident that you aren't getting as much as it would appear at first, with many of the interviews with technical staff being snipped up and added to more than one of the extras on the disk, so that by the time you have watched all of them some of the comments begin to have an all too familiar ring.

That aside, some of the extras are absorbing. The making of featurette, which is around 20 minutes in length is in some regards more interesting than the film itself although it does seem to be a bit of a love-in between cast and crew at points. The New Dinosaurs of JP3 is largely a different intercutting of the self-same interviews, placed over slightly different footage.

The Finding New Dinosaurs featurette, is the only other extra with any real meat on its bones, featuring Jack Horner, the paleontologist consultant on the film, talking about his new and exciting(?) work excavating dino bones in Montana, sadly, rather like the bones, it is just a bit too dry.

The Storyboards To Final Feature comparison, do exactly what they say on the tin, although it is nice to see, for a change, the story boards running in one action window while the film footage runs against it in a neighbouring one.

The remaining extras have a very bitty feel to them and, again, seem to be largely only a slight expansion of what was contained in the Making Of segment. You certainly start to wish they had run each extra segment together rather than collecting them in a stop-start montage. Unless you are about ten years of age and/or absolutely hooke
d on dinosaurs, you will also quickly discover that if you've seen one dinosaur on a turntable, you have seen them all!

The only commentary track on offer is one by the special effects team. While this is interesting to a point, there are large segments, particularly before the film gets into the crash-bang-wallop stuff, where they don't talk about what is happening onscreen at all, preferring to wallow in the technicalities of monster making. This disk would have been greatly improved if they had included an actor and or the director on the commentary track to break up the techno-talk.

Overall this is a fine DVD, but the extras aren't quite the monster package they first appear to be. much like the film itself.

I think I'd give it three and a half over all, four if you are an dino-action junkie or small person under the age of 12.


PS The DVD review segment of this detail is taken from my own review on insideoutfilm.co.uk

Summary: