Picture: Sound: Extras: 
Movie: Picture: Sound: Extras:
Movie: 
Picture: Sound: Extras:
Movie: 
Picture: Sound: Extras:
The most obvious innovation was the full CGI rendition of the dinosaurs, something which is now done routinely -- for example, in the current TV show 'Terra Nova'. But unlike the softly focused glimpses we see in this TV show, made nearly twenty years later, the care lavished on Jurassic Park's dinosaurs was extraordinary. Looking at them today on Blu-ray, they still stand up. There is the odd moment when their range of contrast doesn't quite match that of their surroundings, but that's it for any potential weakness.
This was vital, too, for the wonder is enjoyed by seeing the response of Sam Neill and Laura Dern to their first glimpse of the creatures. If they didn't stand up to our eyes as well, this whole moment would have been lost.
The screenplay for this movie was of course based on Michael Crichton's novel, and he co-write the screenplay with David Koepp. It manages to seem plausible, in part by delivering a brief education on the underlying 'science' via a cartoon (reminiscent of the Woody Woodpecker cartoon used to explain space science way back in Destination Moon in 1951).
Koepp also did the screenplay for the sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which is included in this three movie pack. Somewhere in the intervening four years, plausibility was well and truly lost. Why people do stuff in this one is a mystery. How Jeff Goldblum turns out to have an African American daughter isn't explained, nor (excuse the spoiler) how she managed to stowaway in their high tech RV without anyone noticing.
I won't go on. Just enjoy this one for the spectacle and some truly impressive scenes. Likewise for the third movie: Jurassic Park III. This one adds flying dinosaurs for an additional dimension.
Another innovation of Jurassic Park was that it was the first movie with DTS sound. Dolby Digital had come in a year earlier, but the bitrate in the cinema for 5.1 sound was just 320kbps (compared to 384 or 448 on DVD, and often 640kbps on Blu-ray). DTS, while lossy when required, actually permitted much of the content to be losslessly compressed.
The sound of all these movies is about as you'd expect: first class. There is plenty of surround, and good location of specific sounds on all sides. All three are delivered in a full 7.1 channels of DTS-HD Master Audio with 24 bits of resolution, consuming between 5.3 and 6.0Mbps. Anything on the sound track is there.
I watched most of the trilogy with my full speaker system, and finished off with a much lower cost one. The important difference was the subwoofer. Mine does 16 hertz, while the cheaper one managed 30 to 35 hertz. The difference was enormous. These movies like that near-infrasonic audio underpinning. It wasn't just dinosaur footsteps, but a general ambience of low level unease.
There is a good range of featurettes and deleted scenes for all three movies, some in HD and some legacy content from the DVD releases, provided in 480i.
The discs are BD-Live enabled, but what's provided isn't additional content, just access to Universal's trailers and standard BD-Live fare. Nonetheless, your Blu-ray player's network connection is used imaginatively with the Pocket BLU app, available for iOS and Android, BlackBerry and computer platforms. This allows you to use, say, your iPhone to remote control playback of the disc. It loads thumbnails for each chapter and a time line so you can quickly navigate to anywhere in the movie.
On some movies there is a 'second screen' function to allow you to watch the movie at the same time on, say, your iPad at the same time, but not on these ones.
Each movie is also accompanied by a DVD with a so-called 'Digital Copy' of the movie. Of course, the Blu-ray disc is a digital copy of the movie, so ignore the literal meaning. 'Digital Copy' means a lower resolution, highly compressed version that will work on portable devices (iTunes and WMV formats are provided). The iTunes version of Jurassic Park is about 1.8GB, so it chews up a chunk of your device's memory, but it looked very nice on my iPad. I could see this being an alternative to a portable DVD player.
(Australian rating); Region Free
The following video bitrate graphs were generated by BDInfo 0.5.7:
(Australian rating); Region Free
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(Australian rating); Region Free
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