Jurassic Park III

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 effects 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.

The extras list is lengthy. When you come to check it out, 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 other extras, so that by the time you have watched the lot some of the comments begin to have an all too familiar ring.

That aside, much of what's on offer is absorbing. The Making Of featurette, which comes in at around 20 minutes, 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. 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 remains, this is just a bit too dry.

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

The remaining extras have a bitty feel to them, a slight expansion of what was contained in the Making Of segment. You 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 hooked on dinosaurs, you will also quickly discover that if you've seen one dino 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 stage, 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. If the extras aren't quite the monster package they appear to be at first sight, they have their moments.