Jurassic Park Trilogy
During a recent excursion to Walmart, I decided to look through the $5 DVDs. I happened to come across all three of the Jurassic Park movies. As a kid I loved these movies (what kid didn’t). This brought back a lot of memories because I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up, and I still have a lot of the action figures and vehicles from the movies. Needless to say I bought them and have been watching them. One huge bonus to the DVDs is that they have bonus features about the movies. After I watched the first one I was still impressed by the graphics from 17 years ago. The Making of Jurassic Park feature is really interesting and had some stuff I really didn’t know.
Throughout the interview Steven Spielberg keeps mentioning that he is doing this movie to show dinosaurs as animals not monsters. If you watch that movie you actually start to see the more animal side and less of the big killing monster. He talks about how they researched all these other animals to recreate the dinosaurs. If you watch it even of the VHS it is amazing to think about how many boundaries this movie pushed. One thing I also liked is how Spielberg presents different scientific theories about the dinosaurs and their behavior.
Now this flows into the second one but for some reason the second one didn’t seem as cool as the first. One reason I think that is, is because the people are the main characters, not the dinosaurs. In the first one you become familiar with almost all of the dinosaurs and their personalities. The second one has the three T-Rexes that are the main dinosaurs, but the people still seem to be the main focus. Also the story revolves more around the people and not the dinosaurs. The first one shows dinosaurs fight for survival but from the human’s point of view. The second one is humans attempt at trying to control nature (as is the first one but now we know they survived).
Now the third one is part of the reason that I believe they stopped making the movies. First off the kids of my generation who seemed to all love dinosaurs were getting older and away from the stuff the liked as kids. Second this one even strays more from the dinosaur focus. This movie could have been done in Africa with lions, hyenas and other creatures and it wouldn’t have changed it much. The graphics in this one are the best out of all three. In this one they slowly turn the dinosaurs back into monsters again and begin to get away from the bird theory. In this one they did do more theory on the Raptors, but seeing the first one it has the parts that they describe in the “new” theory, One reason I see this almost step back is that they had a new director. He also doesn’t allow you to become familiar with the personality of all the creatures, he shows more of the “Im gonna eat you” side of the dinosaurs not more animalistic side from the first one.
In my opinion the first one is still the best one and the worst is the third. So if you saw the second or third one first and didn’t like them, watch the first one because it is so much different from either of the last two. The first one I give two thumbs up, the second one, and the third a flat hand shake.
