It's summer, and I was just attacked by a velociraptor this past weekend, so what better time, really, to re-post this DVD review of Jurassic Park III, originally from 2001? Oh, there's also the fact that it costars Téa Leoni, who's in the just-released You Kill Me, and is also totally hot.



The phrase “non-stop action” is often deployed in reviews, but Jurassic Park III is the first movie in a long while for which I can actually remember it being fully appropriate. After finding themselves stranded on Isla Sorna, the film’s human protagonists are quickly caught up in some hot dino-on-dino action, and the pace doesn’t slow much from there, propelling our motley crew all over the island as they try to fulfill different agendas and make it to the coast alive.

The film opens with a youngster (The Patriot’s Trevor Morgan) and his mother’s new boyfriend getting stranded on said island. Meanwhile, after serving as dinobait for velociraptors several years earlier, Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) has no intentions of returning to face his subjects of study in person. His principles are put to the test, however, when a pair of millionaire thrill-seekers, actually the boy’s awkwardly reconciling parents (William H. Macy and Téa Leoni), contract Grant’s services. Under the impression that he’s merely serving as a well-paid emcee on a low fly-by, Grant awakens to discover he’s back in the one place in the world he least wants to be.

With very few and very minor story qualms aside, Jurassic Park III is structurally sound; it’s an easy story to buy into, and under director Joe Johnston’s solid summer romp guidance, there’s plausible suspension of disbelief. A good deal of credit should also go to the unlikely pinch-hit writing team of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (Election), who stepped in and did such a significant stem-to-stern rewrite that they ended up sharing screenplay credit with Peter Buchman. It would have been very easy for the character of Grant, though necessary as a guide and narrative device, to be an overly cynical and burdensome presence. But he’s not; though often agitated and exasperated, he’s not grumpy, and we get a surprisingly clear sense of what Grant feels and has gone through since the events of the original film. By design, this third installment is a lot more of a straight-up action film than its predecessors — without the wide-eyed, untainted wonder of these creatures being (first) brought to life to capture our attention, the filmmakers rightly realize that the entertainment is in new dinosaurs, new combinations and new situations.

As one would expect, the DVD is chock full of supplemental extras, including storyboards, bios, trailers for all three films in the series and an informative but slightly intrusive feature-length audio commentary from Stan Winston, animated effects director Dan Taylor and several other techies. The best bets, though, are a self-guided virtual tour of Winston’s studio, a 3-D look at the 12 dinosaurs created for the film and a special making-of featurette, which offers viewers insight into the filming of several key set pieces. B+ (Movie) B+ (Disc)