Classic Sci-Fi film!

Rating: Null/10 (1 August 2002)

SPOILERS!
Like Topgun was a movie about jet fighters, with a plot casually tossed in, this is a movie about CGI and robotic dinosaur parts, with a heist film stitched to a chase casually tossed in.
It's a good movie. In fact, it's a classic sci-fi film. It's the classic big budget summer movie from Hollywood. It's the 50s monster movie that looks all the more convincing for better effects. The 'serious' overlay is no different than that of Them or The Thing, as the scientists or survivors discuss the 'bigger picture'. There's just a little too much, with not enough humor, of that, in this. Dern and Grandpa shout over the dinette table, but carry on too long, and cry about it all. Goldblum pounds the conference table in a 50s-looking soundstage with lots of projector screens oddly surrounding it. Serious issue, man made the atom bomb, or man created dinosaurs from the DNA of bullfrogs. Issue made. Now let Mothra rage - or whatever is let loose.
The special effects are an improvement over the pure model and stop motion of the past. Harryhausen's work is still watchable, and believable (his crab in Mysterious Island). But here, for the first time, you see dinosaurs done right. Maybe the full size models of T-Rex bobbing and weaving around the jeep, and poking its head into the glass, is a little stiff, and Harryhausen did better, or would have. But splice in the CGI T-Rex ripping off the tires, or chasing Goldblum, and its entirely different, and very believable. A shame they wind up with a smaller Rex in the indoor lobby. The Rex on the grassy field was more in keeping to scale with the one that injured Goldblum - and killed the annoying lawyer.
Won't mention all the plot holes and continuity errors, even just in that one scene in the jeep fleeing the T-Rex at night. And the kids and the electrified fence. Kids go through the holes - oh, wait - big noise in background, up you go, hurry! That bothered me even when I first saw it in the theatre. Dern and Neil holding the raptor at bay outside the control room - TIMMY! get the darned gun. The kid's just pounding the back of Lex's chair as she says - this is UNIX system. And then the gun jams when the raptor does break the glass. How convenient. Game hunter in the woods - run Laura, run, no, you can't, they're watching us, run, run now, wait, you'll never make it, go, GO! (reminded me, vaguely, of the Kirk/Spock comedy routine with Mrs. Camden in movie 4) But it's just a movie. It could have been much better. I don't remember those kind of holes in something like Them or even Mysterious Island (which really was a hodge-podge).
But it's a good film, still. The cliches and cliched camera movements work. The CGI were excellent, if inconsistent. It still holds up in 2002. If The Thing, by Hawkes, is a classic film, and with a far better script and dialog than JP, and obviously less graphic where the horror and gore are only related second person, then even so JP is still, without question, a classic along the same lines as those old sci-fi films.