Return to Jurassic Park (2011)

Return to Jurassic Park arrives as a six-part documentary assembled for the 2011 Blu-ray release of the Jurassic Park trilogy, and it conducts its business with the tidy, unpretentious efficiency of a studio bonus feature. Laurent Bouzereau gathers Steven Spielberg, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, the effects crews, the child actors, and Peter Stormare to recount how the films were made. We learn about the hurricane that interrupted the first shoot. We learn how the CGI work of 1993 rewired the entire industry. We learn, at length, about animatronics. The material is archival, affectionate, and entirely preoccupied with the mechanics of putting dinosaurs on screen.

This is a documentary about craft, and craft is not a political position. Dern appears here as a working actress describing her time on set, not as a spokesperson for anything. The dinosaurs are not standing in for climate collapse. The hurricane is weather. The greedy park owner is a plot device borrowed from a novel, and the documentary treats him as such, with fondness for the storytelling rather than any indictment of capital. There is no lecturing, no sermonizing, no moment in which the filmmakers turn to camera and explain what we are meant to feel about the world beyond the soundstage.

The ledger comes back empty, and it comes back empty without strain or evasion. This is a documentary that wants nothing more than to show us how a T. rex was built and to let the people who built it remember the rain. In an era when even the DVD extras have learned to have opinions, there is something almost restful about a film so thoroughly uninterested in our current cultural arguments. The classification is unambiguous.