This movie is dumb. But it has Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are great. If you like Dinosaurs you should probably see it. It’s the best of the Jurassic Park sequels I think.
Warning: I’m going to talk about Jurassic Park 3 a bunch.
At its core this is just another Jurassic Park movie. Which is to say it’s just Jurassic Park again, because all the sequels have just been retreads of the original plot.
Jurassic Park 2 removed the Park, was full of annoying unlikeable characters, and then turned out to be a bizarre remake of the original Lost World; T-Rex takes suburbia. It’s also just too long. The movie wastes too much time to get to that crazy end sequence. But it also isn’t actually good, just weird and different enough to at least be memorable in what would otherwise be a completely forgettable movie.
Godzilla (1998) is also worth mentioning because it’s actually just a Jurassic Park movie. It’s dumb. More Jurassic Park than Godzilla for sure. It’s fine.
Jurassic Park 3 is a hateful pile of Dino poop. Sam Neill’s return is welcome, but Laura Dern’s place in the movie is baffling. Having the characters no longer together, even though they clearly still have on screen chemistry within the movie is just a middle finger to everyone who loved the original, which is fitting because that’s what the whole movie is. The movie works incredibly hard to make you hate it. It has to overcome the presence of Dinosaurs in order to become terrible. But it’s only a breezy hour and a half. Gets its work done and gets out of there.
Plotwise the primary antagonist is a bigger badder Dinosaur that’s tougher than the T-Rex, it spends time humanizing the Velociraptors, and has a sequence where the Pterodactyls are freed from the aviary.
The crazy thing about Jurassic World is that it’s mostly the plot of Jurassic Park 3 again, except it doesn’t hate fuck the audience. All those plot points from 3 are repeated, except they all play out differently. You could call it pandering to the audience, but really the movie’s job is deliver Dinosaurs being awesome. Three had to work pretty hard to fuck that up.
The movie does suffer from leaning so heavily into nostalgia. It takes too long to get to the high points of the final act, and a sequence wandering through the original Jurassic Park set goes too far, and just wastes time. So there’s a part of me that wants to say fuck this movie, because of its cheap attempts to manipulate me emotionally.
But Chris Pratt is great, Vincent D’Onofrio is ridiculous, and Bryce Dallas Howard is um… a compelling screen presence (Yeah… I’ll go with that). The kids are pretty worthless; I didn’t care about them and they didn’t add anything. They’re not too annoying, but we spend a lot of time with them and they feel pretty token.
And the Dinosaurs are great. I love Dinosaurs, I wanted to see Dinosaurs, and the movie satisfied me on that front for sure. It’s still a dumb movie that lives in the shadow of the original. And it takes too long to get to the payoff. But it’s never annoying or hateful in the ways the previous sequels are. It is kind of a cynical cash grab, but um… I just wanted a Dinosaur movie guys. Dinosaurs are cool. The Dinosaurs in this movie are cool. I like Dinosaurs.
…
Yeah…
I like Dinosaurs.
