I usually avoid same-packaged movie sets and prefer to buy my individual films as individual DVDs or Blu-rays, but a Christmas gift is a Christmas gift and you can't always be so anal about the way you like your movie packs when you receive a Christmas gift. Plus they don't even sell these three films as individual Blu-rays anyway. Thus, as with that Shrek collection that somehow gets so many page views, I'll now spend some time reviewing each individual film after the jump. But first, a quick background on my history and familiarity with this series heading into this triple feature. I've seen Jurassic Park, or more accurately, parts of Jurassic Park at least a dozen times. I've seen the beginning and the ending and every scene in between, most of them at least twice and some of them as often as five or six times I'm sure. But I'd never seen the entire movie from start to finish in one sitting before doing so with this Blu-ray. I'd seen The Lost World once before, but it was at least a dozen years ago and my grandfather fast-forwarded through all the exposition just to get to the dinosaur attack scenes, leaving me without any real semblance of what the plot was. And I'd never seen Jurassic Park III. That was the situation heading in. Now, here's what I've got on each individual movie.
The thing that probably struck me most as I re-watched the 1993 film that started it all was just how iconic so many of its scenes and moments ended up being. The initial encounter with the brachiosaurus, the sick triceratops, the T-rex attack on the immobile electric cars, Newman getting mauled by the acid-spewing thing, the velociraptors in the kitchen, the T-rex returning as the day-saving deus ex machina in the climax - it seemed like every time a dinosaur was on screen, some emotion or other was being elicited, and chief among them were "wonder" and "excitement." The score certainly helps enhance the spirit of the film. Even the movie's font is instantly recognizable. It's also important to remember just how groundbreaking the movie was. I was five when it came out, and can only imagine what it was like for an adult to see dinosaurs brought to life on screen for the very first time. I've never read the book, but I imagine it gets a bit more philosophical than the blockbuster movie dared to get with regard to concepts like the morality of genetic engineering, or the idea of a Frankenstein complex played out with vicious monsters instead of a man-like beast. The movie at least begins to touch on these themes, but I still want to read the book to get the full (and perhaps more elaborate) experience.
As iconic and enjoyable as the original Jurassic Park was, its sequel never sat right with me. After a second viewing a dozen years later, I think I know why. The whole thing is put together like a cheap thriller movie. "A number of people are on an island with dinosaurs. How many will die before a scant few can make it out alive?" I know that kind of also describes the first movie, but for every consumed person in the first film, there was a moment where people could just marvel at the majesty of some peaceful giant. In The Lost World, even the lone herbivores featured in the movie - a stegosaurus family - manage to attack one of our heroes. If the main message from Jurassic Park was, "do not treat genetic engineering like a toy," the main message from The Lost World seemed to be, "seriously, do not ever fuck with dinosaurs." The characters felt so much flatter this time around, and certain deaths felt undeserved or at the very least unearned by the movie. In the first go-round, the casualties were limited mainly to people who acted selfishly or foolishly. In The Lost World, the noble and the wicked are killed side by side. I'm not suggesting that a movie audience cannot handle non-karmic death and chaos, but there was just no "feel good" vibe in the sequel. It also felt ham-fisted; the plot really boiled down to nothing more than "get from Point A to Point B without getting eaten," and throughout it all, the dinosaurs for the most part acted more as monsters - kill way more people than we can possibly eat - than predators. Also, at one point, a teenage girl kills a 300-pound velociraptor with... gymnastics. Of course, I haven't even begun to discuss the entirely unnecessary and completely implausible climax in which a T-rex runs rampant through the streets of San Diego like it's fucking Godzilla or something. A twenty-foot animal with a top speed of 30 miles an hour has made landfall, and the local police and military forces can't subdue it or even track it? We're talking about what is essentially a bulky carnivorous giraffe. Know what? let's just move along to the third movie before I rip this ending apart for another fifteen sentences.
This, thankfully, felt like a return to form for the franchise. The third installment takes place on "Isla Sorna," the same island the second movie took place on, but the difference in depictions between the two films felt like night and day. Where the Sorna of The Lost World was a place where you couldn't take fifty steps without being chased down and eaten, this movie's version was one in which a teenage boy could survive for eight weeks. Yes, there were still plenty of predators, but they included pterodactyls and a spinosaurus; where Lost World seemed content just to throw the same dinosaurs at us that Jurassic Park did, Jurassic Park III mixed it up a little bit, and I appreciated that. I also appreciated the return to a small group of family members and respectable paleontologists after The Lost World introduced dozens of incompetent and immoral dinosaur hunters just to kill them off en masse during T-rex and raptor attacks. As was the case in the first movie, you felt a sense of loss when the characters in this movie died; they weren't just dino-fodder. Jurassic Park III still had its share of flaws, like when a satellite phone could be heard ringing within the digestive tract of a spinosaurus (who was calling anyway?) or how now the velociraptors were feathered and capable of near-human levels of intelligence and communication. Still, it was easily an improvement over The Lost World. It may have clocked in a bit short at just an hour and a half, but at least it knew not to tack on thirty minutes of a pterodactyl swarm wreaking havoc on New York City.
This was quite an enjoyable trilogy, all things considered, and now I'm looking forward to the hypothetical release of Jurassic Park IV any year now.
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