Nice dinos, but what about the people?

Rating: 5/10 (31 July 2000)

After watching Disney's "Dinosaur", I simply had to come back and watch this movie to see why I had liked it more in the first place.
Well, it might have been because Jurassic Park is, unabashedly, a grown-up film, while Dinosaur walks the thin line between a kiddie flick and an all-out adult assault on the senses. And I couldn't stop noticing the fact that 7 years of advance in CGI haven't been all that wonderful. I still somehow think that JP's creatures are more realistic than Dinosaurs'. Maybe the fact that the Disney flick had to make the creatures talk and have facial expressions were the reasons I give the nod to JP's beastly creatures any day, any time.
But then, I focused on the characters. Excluding Ian Malcolm and John Hammond (Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough), I reached the conclusion that I hated the rest of the cast almost as much as I hated Jar Jar Binks (and that's saying I really hated them). The best example I can think of is the one where the child is playing with the computer saying she is a computer wiz. Or when Laura Dern and Sam Neill stare in desbelief at the first dinosaur in the movie. One can see in their eyes they are trying to be impressed by something they are trying to visualize, without much success. Talk about bad acting!
I guess the day when someone decides to make an epic with CGI dinosaurs *without* facial expressions and voice, and where no humans are present, that will be the day a dino-flick will earn my "10" rating. As it is, JP earns a solid 8 on the basis of acting from the dinos.