I guess Spielberg is still involved?

I’m wondering how they’re gonna depict the dinosaurs now that we know that they’re overgrown chickens: Are they still gonna go with the reptile look, or update it to a more feathery look?

I’m kinda surprised that they continue with the “people go to an island with dinosaurs” plot yet another time: I had kinda expected that they were going to go with a “the dinosaurs escaped and they’re now living in the sewers in New York” or somthing.

I mean — Dinosaur Island for the fourth time?

OK, but this time around they’re more professional, and have a real functioning dinosaur theme park.

This movie looks a bit odd. I mean, it looks like an early digital movie — everything is overly sharp and contrastey — but this is from 2015, so movies looked smother by then… perhaps it’s the 4K transfer that’s been overly sharpened?

Heh heh, this guy wants to use the dinosaurs for the military. Yeah, that’s… er… genius! We should be using lions and tigers now!

Hey! I’ve seen a meme of this!

Grr

Aww.

Some of the performances are just downright weird. I was waiting for this character to be revealed as a genetically modified android or something, but I guess not? She just plays the character this way?

I know, I know — it’s a Jurassic movie; it’s not supposed to make sense. But like — why did they breed like 200 pteranosauruses and keep them all in a glass bowl? That seems really expensive (they must eat a lot of meat), doesn’t add a lot of spectacle to the theme park (you can’t pet them), and it catastrophic when the glass bowl fails?

I KNOW I KNOW

What I’m trying to say that I’m pretty bored.

What is that thing anyway?

Plot twist!

And I love how when they finally decide to start shooting, they start off with some put-puts that doesn’t hurt the dinosaur at all, but makes it run away into the forest. Only after doing that, you shoot off the grenade launcher that can actually do some damage. (But you’ll miss because it’s run off already.)

Oh, I thought there was going to be a twist in the Big Dino Fight — that they’d mate or something instead.

OK, I don’t know why I just couldn’t get into this at all. I mean, it looks pretty good? And it’s got some nice dinosaurs. And Chris Whatsisname does a pretty good job. And I guess it’s not any more stupid than the previous outings.

But I just found the entire thing pretty boring? It may just be me, though.

Jurassic World. Colin Trevorrow. 2015. ⚂

Now that’s a classy title screen.

Oh really?

That’s more like it!

Oh yeah, this is the Elm Street movie that really establishes the “mythos” — the first movie was just a smart movie about nightmares and stuff, and the second movie was… nothing… but then this movie takes a hard look at the first movie and creates this whole… thing… using that as a basis.

If I remember correctly.

Hey! She’s back!

It’s Cowboy Curtis!

It’s really 80s — I like that.

IT”S GOOGEL

This movie, like, distills what made the first movie work: If you fall asleep, you’re in a really scary world where you’re powerless, and that really resonates.

But then this movie is about banding together and vanquishing the evil, which is a really smart move, too — for a final movie in a series, but then again, this isn’t.

Is that the talk show guy…? I guess not.

The scares are pretty inventive. They don’t really seem like actual nightmares, though.

Oh yeah, in this movie Krueger is the result of a gruesome rape. I think they backed off from that in later movies? It’s perhaps not the best origin story for a gruesome villain?

It’s not very scary, but it’s kinda inventive? And while there are large portions of this movie that drag, there’s some parts that are pretty entertaining.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Chuck Russell. 1987. ⚃

Hey! Laura Dern is back!

But what are they gonna do in this movie? Send some people to an island with dinosaurs, and then they’re gonna run around a lot until they get off the island again?

Even in the second movie, the premise seemed really… tenuous.

They’ve invented the 3D printer!

This is directed by a Spielberg-adjacent director (I think?). He’d done Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Jumanji, so this seems like a natural movie for him to do — it’s very 80s.

It’s just hard to get excited about this, and you feel like the people involved think the same thing.

This looks kinda cheap… what was the budget on this thing?

Oh, OK, it was a pretty expensive movie — this scene just looks oddly cheap:
They shake the cam around a lot to avoid showing the dinosaur in focus.

It made money, but less than the previous films. So I guess they decided to pause the franchise for a while after this: The next movie didn’t appear until 14 years later.

OK, we get to see the dinosaurs a lot more as the movie goes along. And they look pretty good, although a bit stiff.

OK, that’s a reasonable plot — these rich people brought the rest of the people to the island because they wanted to find their son.

But… it’s also not a very interesting plot? That is, why should we care?

Right:

Johnston thought about quitting the project on a few occasions because of uncertainty about how the film would turn out, considering that it did not have a finished script.

It does feel like a sketch towards a movie in many ways… it’s got a lot of elements, but it doesn’t really cohere?

The dinosaurs look pretty good? I guess it’s a mix of CGI and rubber? They look pretty stiff, but pretty good…

This is the nerdiest quibble ever — but I’ve always felt that these scenes are just kinda stupid, even if they look great? I mean, all these animals are plant eaters — but there’s basically nothing on these fields to eat? The grass looks like a lawn, and there are no juicy trees or bushes to nibble — so why are they all standing around here anyway? These animals need to eat! A lot! Get noshin’!

Now this is just stupid.

It’s a pretty bad movie. I mean, there’s some fun scenes, but it’s incredibly hard to care about what happens — there are no stakes beyond “oh no, they’re trapped (?) on an island with some dinosaurs” yet again.

Jurassic Park III. Joe Johnston. 2001. ⚁