Movie Review: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

The first PG-13 movie I ever saw was the original Jurassic Park back in 1993. I've been a fan of the franchise ever since--I saw the first sequel Lost World in middle school, Jurassic Park III in high school, and Jurassic World when it came out. I reviewed it and even participated in a podcast dedicated to the film. So even though the advance buzz wasn't so hot, I definitely made plans to see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

The Plot

In the aftermath of the events of Jurassic World and the massive payouts the company had to make to those harmed, Isla Nublar has been abandoned again. However, it's not a paradise where once-extinct beasts can roam around freely--at least not for much longer. The island's dormant volcano has came to life and the US government, which based on Jurassic Park III seems to have been doing the lion's share of keeping the islands quarantined, has been listening to Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and is inclined to let the volcano destroy the dinosaurs.

This doesn't sit well with Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who is now running the Dinosaur Protection Group dedicated to protecting the dinosaurs like they're an ordinary endangered species. She allies with the late John Hammond's former partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell) to transport the dinosaurs to a new sanctuary, with her former boyfriend Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) along for the ride to help find his velociraptor pet/surrogate child Blue.

Unfortunately they--and the timid computer geek Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) and the take-no-shit "paleo-veterinarian" Dr. Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) from Claire's organization--find that the sinister plots to weaponize the dinosaurs (one of Jurassic World's weaker points) are still in play and drastic action might need to be taken to save them...

The Good

*I will give the film credit for taking creative risks. The island gets blown up halfway through the movie and the rest of it takes place in California, with the climax occurring at Lockwood's mansion way out in the woods. No more formulaic "how can we get people to these quarantined dangerous islands" films now. The film also gets pretty dark--there's deliberate murder (or attempted) murder of humans by other humans. Even when Malcolm and his crew sabotage InGen's attempt to capture Isla Sorna's dinosaurs in The Lost World, InGen's mercenaries rescue them from the falling trailers and include them in their attempts to get off the island rather than abandoning them to die or deliberately killing them.

*The visuals are stunning, including the dinosaur effects.

*The last quarter of the film, however ridiculous it often seems, comes off like a Gothic haunted-house horror movie, just with dinosaurs.

*Like before, Howard and Pratt are quite amusing together. And Claire has become quite the bad-ass since then. No more running around the jungle in heels for her. :)

*In general there's a lot of nice laugh-out-loud moments.

*There's a scene with a brachiosaurus that's legitimately sad, just like in the last movie. I think the last movie did it better in terms of eliciting an emotional reaction from me, but a whole lot of people found what happened poignant.

*A new type of dinosaur actually seems to have a personality and almost demonic cleverness.

The Bad

*How is the mosasaurus (really a kronosaurus due to its size) still alive if the park has been abandoned for three years? It doesn't seem like it's capable of climbing out of its pool. It would have long since starved to death trapped in its enclosure unless the pool was already stocked with fish, animals keep conveniently getting close enough for it to snag, or somebody's been feeding it.

*Apparently a tie-in in-world website of the Dinosaur Protection Group that provides a lot of the back-story, but I didn't know it existed. Consequently, I was wondering for much of the movie about Isla Sorna, which should be unaffected by the impending destruction of Isla Nublar. This is a problem--if it's that much of a plot hole, it should be explained in the movie. All they'd need is a throwaway line about how after "the spinosaurus incident" Isla Sorna's ecology collapsed and the surviving dinosaurs had to be relocated to Isla Nublar for the new park.

*There's some needless political commentary, like one of the mercenaries (a villain, unlike the awesome Roland Tembo from the second film) referring to Dr. Rodriguez as a "nasty woman." Where have I heard that before?

*There's a scene involving transfusing blood from one species of dinosaur to another. That's...not going to work. You can't transfuse from one human to another if the blood types are different and humans are all one species. The almighty TVTropes said this was like using rabbit blood in humans.

*Ian Malcolm is even more of an annoying pantheist than he was before. It's my understanding that his worries about chaos theory from the first movie had to do with the overconfidence of Hammond and his entourage that they could control these wild and dangerous animals so easily, but there was still the "nature SELECTED them for extinction" stuff. He's still on that kick in this one, even though he explicitly tells the Congressional committee that God isn't involved here. News-flash: In a purely naturalistic world (Malcolm is not a religious man, something made quite clear in the novel The Lost World), there is no "meant to be" or "wrong side of history. Things happen and people have to deal with them.

*It would have been better if the "rescue the dinosaurs" plot had taken up the entire movie--one last return to the park, rounding up the dinosaurs, some close encounters of the worst kind with big carnivores, etc. could have taken up quite a lot of time. One of the more creative features of The Lost World was the depiction of the carnotaurs as having chameleon-like camouflage, which they could have included in this one. The betrayals that take place halfway through could be a cliffhanger ending to set up the events of a third Jurassic World film, which would cover the events of the second half of the film and the consequences of those.

*Things got kind of draggy after they get off the island all the way to the dinosaur auction going badly.

*They hype up the possibilities of the dinosaurs getting loose as some kind of apocalyptic event when they're really not. Most if not all of the dinosaurs are female and there are so few dinosaurs period they wouldn't be able to create a viable breeding population even if they became established somewhere. And if the lysine contingency is still in the genes of the new batch (it's certainly still there with old-school dinosaurs like the T-Rex), many of them will die unless they can find the proper foods. The only ones I anticipate being a real problem are the kronosaurus, since it has the whole ocean to hide in, or the pterodactyls due to their ability to fly and the fact enough of them escaped Isla Nublar (and Isla Sorna earlier) that they could establish a viable breeding pool. The big carnosaurs in particular will be in zoos or trophy racks within a month or two.

*Weaponizing the dinosaurs is still a dumb idea. Unless they could teach raptors to use guns (or engineer them into creatures similar to the wolf-baboon-human chimera ghouloons from S.M. Stirling's Draka novels), it seems pretty pointless. They need too much food, the fixed costs of creating them are huge, etc. A "war raptor" might be able to do more damage on the battlefield than a "war dog" (more physically destructive, more intimidating) but it doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.

The Verdict

Worth seeing once. It's not a bad movie, but it could have been done better. 7.5 out of 10.

Movie Review: Jurassic World (2015)

Last Friday for the podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood's special month-long Jurassic Park series, we watched Jurassic World. Now that the podcast is up for you to listen, here's my usual review...

The Plot

Twenty-two years after the events of Jurassic Park, Hammond's dream has come true. There's a functioning dinosaur park on Isla Nublar where children can ride baby dinosaurs in a petting zoo (there's a particularly cute bit where a child hugs an infant sauropod), people can kayak down rivers where stegosaurs and hadrosaurs drink, massive enclosures where herds of giant herbivores like the triceratops roam, and feeding the mosasaurus a la a bloodier Sea World is always a big crowd-pleaser.

However, as park manager Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) points out to some visiting dignitaries, the park, though profitable, is not profitable enough, and focus groups suggest the people want something bigger, scarier, and with more teeth. So Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) and his staff have played mix-and-match the dinosaur to create a creature they call Indominus Rex. As you can imagine things get difficult--with Claire's visiting nephews caught in the mix no less--and it's up to trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his pack of semi-trained raptors to save the day...

The Good

*Once we actually get to the island with the dinosaurs, the movie is never boring. I had some issues with what they did with the plot, characters, etc., but the film was really entertaining.

*I liked how Owen pointed out that the Indominus is so dangerous because it never interacted with any other creature (other than a sibling that it ate). The book The Lost World depicts the raptors of Isla Sorna being particularly brutal and anti-social with one another because they were born in a lab without socialization from parents, other members of the pack, etc. The Indominus was basically raised alone and fed meat from a crane, so we might be dealing with a creature that has the dinosaur equivalent of Reactive Attachment Disorder. After all, when dealing with aggressive and dangerous animals (I'm thinking primarily of dogs), bad animals are generally the fault of bad training or upbringing.

(Granted, we are talking about a customized tyrannosaur here, unlike dogs that have been bred for generations to be human-friendly...)

*There's a bit of social commentary about how people grow bored with what were once marvels and constantly want more and more interesting things. I thought it ridiculous that people would be so spoiled they'd get bored with living freaking dinosaurs, but perhaps I'm being unduly optimistic. There'd be a whole generation (the park has been open for ten years, with the events of the first two films happening before that) to whom this isn't new. There's also commentary on focus groups and the focus on short-term profitability. I agreed with this message far more than the pantheistic nonsense Malcolm spouted in the earlier films (or Grant's implication in Jurassic Park III that the people who created the park were outright evil). See director Colin Trevorrow's quote here.

*The scene where Owen and Claire find a mutilated, dying sauropod was legitimately sad.

*I liked how they brought back Dr. Wu from the first film. Although I don't like what they did with his character, it provides a nice bit of continuity. Furthermore, as one of the senior (surviving) InGen personnel from the original park and the one with the most technical knowledge of the cloning process, that the company would bring him on-board makes a lot of sense.

*And Wu provides a great explanation for new park owner Simon Mizrani (Irrfan Khan) about why the dinosaurs, among other things, don't have feathers. The lack of feathered dinosaurs in the original film is a product of the lack of knowledge at the time, but the writers managed to explain this understandable oversight in a really clever way.

*I liked Mizrani as a character. He's the inheritor of Hammond's dream (Hammond seems to have passed the torch onto him personally) who has brought his vision to reality. Furthermore, he's learned from Hammond's mistakes in regards to the velociraptors at least--when ambitious InGen security chief Vic Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio) wants to use them to hunt the Indominus, he flat-out says there will never be free-roaming velociraptors on Isla Nublar, ever. He's also eager, brave, and confident, which comes back to bite him in the end but still reflects well on him.

*Of all the cast, Owen is the most purely fun character. He's strong-willed enough to tame the raptors and his interactions with Claire are a really funny bit of odd-couple. Like a a good trainer of big predators, he knows damn well how dangerous these creatures are and unlike many other characters, he actually respects them. This works out for him later on, when things all go to hell.

*The writers do a good job of showing, not telling, how distant Claire has become from her family. She can't remember how long it's been since she's seen her nephews, she doesn't know how old they are, and falls back on treating them like the little-little kids she remembers later on.

*There are a lot of humor. The interactions between the laid-back and irreverent Owen and the anal-retentive, hyper-organized Claire are funny and in one scene, there's actually a cameo by Jimmy Buffett. Yes, the god of beach music has come to his people.

*I liked the greater variety of prehistoric critters. For example, in the pterosaur aviary, not only is there the classic Pterandon (which we know from the end of The Lost World and from Jurassic Park III that InGen had cloned too), but also the Dimorphodon. My dinosaur knowledge has clearly decayed since elementary school--in the podcast I refer to it as a Rhamphorhyncus. The Mosasaurus (which due to its sheer size would probably be a Kronosaurus actually) was also cool.

*There are a lot of good callbacks to the original film, including a scene involving the T-Rex and flares. The T-Rex also still has the scars she got fighting the raptors at the end--yes, that's the original T-Rex, 22 years older and still kicking. And as one of my fellow podcasters pointed out, the way the blood drips onto an InGen security guy's wrist is just like how Malcolm dripped water on Ellie's wrist in the original film. Go to the TVTropes page to see them all, but beware of spoilers...

*They don't retcon the middle two films. They just don't mention them at all (with the minor exception of Ian Malcolm's book, mentioned in JP III, that some characters are reading). Those of us who enjoyed LW and JP III (I liked LW, but I doubt JP III held up) can believe that Isla Sorna is still out there under military quarantine as a neo-Mesozoic nature preserve (with Malcolm's book as proof the middle films are canon) and those who didn't can believe that the book is something completely unrelated and the middle films never happened.

The Bad

*The beginning is a little slow in a way that the original film never was.

*The Indominus is far too capable. In the scene where Owen and Claire come across a dying sauropod, they soon find the Indominus has wiped out several more. This isn't a spoiler, since this is from the commercials/trailers--the "she's killing for sport" line. The Indominus is as big if not bigger than a tyrannosaurus rex, but you don't see single lions killing one adult elephant, let alone four or five. A group of sauropods with their sheer bulk and whipping tails should have been able to absolutely destroy the Indominus. After all, an Ankylosaurus puts up a pretty good fight against it, and it's significantly smaller and alone.

And then there's the initial interaction between the Indominus and Owen's raptor mafia. Seriously, we're getting to Villain Sue territory here. Plus since the Indominus is an unsocialized, isolated monster, how does it know pack behavior?

*The Indominus could have been much more simple. Instead of a chimera of multiple animals, have the park find the DNA of a Giganatosaurus, a carnosaur that's bigger than the T-Rex. This would let them keep the whole "people want bigger creatures" plot and do it more simply. They could simply depict it as being more monstrous and aggressive (killing its sibling, needing to be contained more strictly) rather than some kind of less-sympathetic Frankenstein monster.

*There's this whole subplot involving Hoskins wanting to train the raptors for war that could be eliminated completely. Hoskins is obnoxious (and some people on TVTropes are convinced he caused the whole catastrophe to happen), Wu's participation (which leads into an obvious Sequel Hook) makes him into a semi-villain when in the original film he seemed like a pleasant and chipper young man, etc. They could have just simply had "Indominus escapes and evades or destroys attempts at capturing or killing it and the only thing standing between it and 20,000 tourists is Owen and his trained raptor pack" as the plot. No need for Hoskins, his conflict with Owen, and making Dr. Wu into a (mildly) Fiendish Dr. Wu at all.

*To that end, they could have referenced the Isla Sorna quarantine from the middle two films. Owen and his raptors have to stop the Indominus before military units from Isla Sorna (which is part of the same island chain) invade the park to protect the tourists--something that would definitively prove InGen too incompetent to run the park ever and likely lead to its closure. Owen and his raptors represent the park's chance to deal with the problem on its own and keep Hammond's vision alive.

*Claire's nephews get lost in the park and come across the ruins of the original Visitors' Center and a lot of leftover gear from the original film, including Tim's night-vision goggles and the original gas-powered Jeeps. It seems really foolish and wasteful that InGen would allow the nearly completed park to just rot while they built a completely new park elsewhere on the island.

(Apparently some extra materials suggest it was years between the failure of the original park and the building of the new one, but even if the original buildings were too far gone, they could have tried to salvage stuff. Maybe they helped finance the new park by selling all the metal and what not from the original to China?)

I like the callbacks to the original generally, but not this one.

*There's CGI blood. That never ends well. If you ever make a movie, dear readers, please use real fake blood.

The Verdict

A generally entertaining movie, but with some issues. See it once, preferably at a matinee price. 8.5 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

For the special Jurassic Park series leading up to the release of Jurassic World, my friend Nick's podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood has just done the film The Lost World, the sequel to Jurassic Park loosely based on the novel of the same name. Here's a link to the podcast. And now my review...

The Plot

After a vacationing family stumbles upon InGen's Site B on Isla Sorna, where most of Jurassic Park's dinosaurs were manufactured prior to being shipped to Isla Nublar to be displayed, John Hammond (Richard Attenborough)'s "unscrupulous" nephew Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard) uses this as a pretext to take control of InGen. In order to foil his bid to capture the dinosaurs (who have been roaming free after a hurricane for years), Hammond contacts the disgraced Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and persuades him to join an expedition to Site B to document the dinosaurs in their habitats. Malcolm agrees once he learns his girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore), who studies African predators, has already gone to the island. Off they go, to an island with dangerous predators and an InGen team ready to take the dinosaurs to their planned new zoo in San Diego...

The Good

*The opening scene where the little British girl Cathy Bowman (played by Camilla Belle, who is still an active actress) encounters and feeds a compsognathus, only to attract the attention of a swarm of them, is very well-done. The writers did a good job of showing rather than telling the disagreements between her parents (the mother is overly protective and the father objects), depicting Cathy's kindness (she tries to befriend the first dinosaur by feeding it), and her innocence and fear (when the swarm appears and starts behaving aggressively, she tries to tell them there's not enough food to go around, not knowing, she's the food).

*The hunter Roland Tembo (Peter Postlethwaite), one of Ludlow's minions, is more sympathetic than many of the ostensible heroes. He's a lot more competent in wilderness survival than Ludlow (I liked his "base camp or buffet" line when Ludlow ignorantly wants to set up camp on a game trail) and chivalrous toward Sarah Harding, whom he helps up the cliff after the trailers are destroyed (along with her male compatriots too, I might add) and later expresses his concerns about her when he thinks she's injured. There's a deleted scene (which I thought was in a prequel comic) where he gives a slimy customer harassing a waitress a violent lesson in manners. Here's the scene if you want to watch it, which also builds on his relationship with his friend Ajay. He's also the only character in the film I'm aware of who has an arc--he initially wants to kill the male T-Rex like it's another trophy animal and after another character is killed, instead opts to tranquilize it so it can be captured for Ludlow's proposed zoo. He then rejects Ludlow's offer of employment, stating he no longer wishes to be "in the company of death."

I'm not familiar with most of Postlethwaite's career, but I do remember seeing him in some bits of the 1980s television series Sharpe on YouTube. He played the vile Obadiah Hakeswill, a Napoleonic sergeant who abuses his soldiers, sucks up to the officers over him, rapes and steals, and is generally a depraved scumbag. Hell, his introduction to the television series features him attacking Sharpe's girlfriend immediately upon seeing her (and then trying to kill her with a pitchfork when she fends him off), so we know he's bad news. The fact he plays a much more honorable and non-misogynist character shows his range.

*There's a good match cut juxtaposing the screaming Mrs. Bowman with the yawning Ian Malcolm--who has been reduced to borderline hobo status--on the subway early in the film.

*I liked the scene where Malcolm senses the approaching T-Rexes and the water ripples in the puddles on the ground. That's a nice call-back to the original film.

*I liked how the scene where we first meet the raptors is shot. We see them start to stalk a group of InGen employees and then there's an overhead shot showing them closing in from all angles, with the InGen team completely unaware they're there. It's very well-done. Don't go into the long grass indeed.

*I liked the shot where we first meet Sarah. It's very well-done and funny.

*There are some good shots where a character's death is revealed by blood in the water rather than an on-screen gnawing that would get the film rated R.

*The producers of the film clearly remembered the "lysine contingency" (the animals were made deliberately deficient in this enzyme so they'd die within days if not fed properly) from the first film. The herbivores have learned to eat certain foods rich to lysine and the carnivores eat them.

*The film does build on Malcolm's family life, referenced in the first film when he talks about how he has three kids and he's always on the lookout for "the next ex-Mrs. Malcolm." Here we actually meet his daughter Kelly, adapted from another character from the novel. The film shows how he's not the most attentive father, but does give him a really good line about his daughter being (or not being) on the school gymnastics team.

*Kelly is black, but nobody seems to really care other than one person who makes a comment about there not being much of a family resemblance between her and Malcolm. It's not done in a mean way or even in earshot of the characters (where it might offend them), but it does honestly show that somebody might be curious.

*We see an older Lex and Tim at Hammond's home in a brief scene. Good callback to the original movie.

The Bad

*There is a major plot hole when the InGen ship the SS Venture (a nice King Kong allusion there) arrives in San Diego with the crew dead, Dracula-style. There's nothing aboard the ship that could have done it--the dinosaur they're carrying is too big and contained in the hold. I remember reading somewhere that there was this deleted plot (TVTropes claims it was cut from the shooting script) involving a group of stowaway velociraptors, but they either cut it out or never filmed it at all! Seriously, either reshoot the ship's arrival completely or don't cut out the second batch of dinosaurs that killed the crew and made said arrival possible!

*The film starts to drag in the middle. Given how the film is supposed to be entertaining--and quite often is--this is a bit of a problem.

*The problem with the beginning--which as I said was great--is that the dinosaur attack on the little girl would probably be a much bigger deal than a pretext for Hammond's nephew to take control of the company. Seriously, a cute little girl was attacked and injured by dinosaurs. InGen might not find out about it until it's too late, and the family seems wealthy enough that bribes or legal threats wouldn't stop them from making a stink. I imagine it would be a major news story, there'd be media swarming about, etc. Perhaps Costa Rica (which doesn't have a standing military but does have a small security force for border policing, etc.) quarantines the island and Hammond's unauthorized expedition has to sneak onto Isla Sorna in a suspenseful scene? The larger InGen force then comes as a nasty surprise, as they didn't expect the Costa Ricans to let them in. Upon seeing the helicopters and vehicles coming in, Malcolm could then make some nasty comment about money making the world go round, which would answer any audience questions about how they got in.

Instead of trying to pre-empt his nephew, Hammond could send the scientists in as part of a plan to document the dinosaurs in their natural habitat and pre-empt any attempt to exterminate them that might result from the attack on the girl? We can see Ludlow and Hammond arguing (foreshadowing InGen's attempt to capture the dinosaurs), but Hammond never explains what they're arguing about, to make their arrival a surprise. The first film depicts Hammond as being close with his family and the second film continues this by having Lex and Tim visiting him. He might not want to tell Malcolm there's trouble at home, especially if he and Ludlow had once been close (they work together and Ludlow seems to have the same dreams and ambition Hammond once did) and had become estranged. Furthermore, making the arrival of the InGen team a surprise could be suspenseful--the scientists hear the sound of the helicopters and assume it's the military coming to kill off the dinosaurs.

*The movie depicts Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughan)--an eco-terrorist--in a far too sympathetic light. Heck, this movie, like the first, goes out of its way to vindicate Malcolm's insistence that displaying dinosaurs as a tourist attraction will never, ever work (which he has no logical reason to believe--it's all based on his pantheistic version of Chaos Theory) and Nick's Greenpeace shenanigans. InGen's team, rather than capturing a few smaller dinosaurs and leaving the island immediately, instead goes whole-hog trying to capture all of them (or at least most of the major herbivores), which would cause most of the carnivores to starve and destroy the neo-Mesozoic ecosystem completely.

Seriously, Nick and Sarah freeing all of the dinosaurs wrecks InGen's camp and nearly kills Tembo and Ajay. Nick later steals Tembo's ammunition, which would have come in handy when they're attacked by the T-Rex. TVTropes points out that Nick is indirectly responsible for all of the (human) deaths in the film. Honestly, to make Van Owen sympathetic, the filmmakers made Ludlow and InGen (once he takes over) into massive straw-men, even though the film does give him a chance to defend his position (the dinosaurs are InGen property) and gives Tembo a scene where he calls out Nick as "an Earth First bastard." See here for the whole dialogue. TVTropes points out that although he's condescending and unpleasant, Ludlow isn't truly bad and nothing he's doing is illegal.

Another problem with the film is that Van Owen disappears for the last act. Maybe they could depict him getting arrested for what happened on the island? There's a lot of destruction of property, reckless endangerment, and possibly even multiple counts of negligent homicide. If the producers want to gin up audience sympathy, perhaps he claims sole responsibility and takes the fall for Sarah, who was also involved in sabotaging the InGen team. In the event any InGen survivors claim she was there too, he could claim that she followed him into the camp to try to stop him or that even that he somehow coerced her. Given how he claimed to have joined Greenpeace for the women, falling on his sword to protect a woman from jail would be a good arc for him.

*The film does not explain any possible relationship between Sarah Harding and Jurassic Park's original veterinarian Gerry Harding. Hammond references Harding traveling to Costa Rica to meet the hospitalized Malcolm for years before, but how would she know what happened? Some of the games and other material do establish that she's Gerry's daughter, but the movie doesn't. I've theorized on the blog somewhere that perhaps Harding kept the non-disclosure agreement in public but told her what happened on Isla Nublar privately, which would explain her interest.

*Speaking of Sarah, she's incredibly hypocritical. At one point she straight up interacts with (even touching) an infant stegosaur, but then tells the other members of the expedition they're not there to interact with the dinosaurs and to not to bend even a single blade of grass (!).

Also, for someone Hammond thinks is an expert in surviving predators, she doesn't abandon the jacket covered in blood from the baby T-Rex, which is probably what brought Mom and Dad Dinosaur down on them later in the film. Hypocrisy is a character trait, true, and the bloody jacket explains why the T-Rexes found them, but the stupidity of the latter bit in particular undermines her character.

*The fate of most of the InGen team. Yes, they're panicked, but they're still armed. I would have expected them to put up a better fight than they did.

*When Malcolm's crew arrives on the island, finds Sarah's damaged backpack, and assume she's been attacked, Goldblum doesn't sound too terribly upset when he's shouting "Sarah!" His delivery in that scene wasn't very good.

*Some of Kelly's dialogue when she's arguing with Malcolm is too spot-on and verbally advanced for someone who is, at most, in her early teens. Yes, she has Malcolm for a father (and presumably anybody Malcolm would be interested in dating would have to be smart herself), but still.

The Verdict

See it once, especially if you want to get the complete film series in before seeing Jurassic World. 7.5 out of 10.