If You See A T-Rex - DON'T MOVE!!!

Rating: 5/10 (1 October 2011)

There are a lot of good things about "Jurassic Park." The effects on the dinosaurs are excellent. The dinosaurs look, sound and move like real animals. They are completely and totally believable. There's a good reflection on the dangers involved when humanity insists on interfering with the natural world - dinosaurs went extinct without any help from human beings; maybe - even if we could bring them back - human beings should leave them that way is the most direct theme of the movie, although one can easily see the application of that theme about the dangers of human interference in the natural scheme of things going far beyond dinosaurs. And when "Jurassic Park" is exciting - it's very exciting and when it's suspenseful it's very suspenseful. I think of the t-rex chasing the car and trying to get at the children, or the children desperately hiding and trying to escape from the velociraptors. That's all well done, and the children were actually pretty good in their parts, very believably terrified. This is one of the better performances I've ever seen from children. But, to be honest, it wasn't very consistent.
The action was good when there was action. There were, however, sustained moments when there really wasn't very much action and when not much interesting was happening. Actually, that sums up much of the first half of the movie. In addition to that, we were given a collection of characters that I for one at least didn't really care about - at least two of whom (Dr. Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, and Dennis, played by Wayne Knight) seemed totally extraneous to the story. Neither part was necessary to move this along. Dr. Malcolm's "chaos theory" really didn't interest me, and Dennis added a "conspiracy" element to the story that really went nowhere. Everything that happened could have been explained by natural causes - like the big storm approaching! Even the children, as well acted as the parts were, seemed like a rather forced addition. It's almost as if someone realized that having no characters to really care about (as I mentioned above) was a problem, and so a decision was made to add a couple of kids for that purpose. Even the leads (Sam Neill and Laura Dern) didn't come across to me as giving much spark to their characters.
For all the strengths of this movie - and they were many - there were also more than a few weaknesses. (5/10)