FINALLY! An extremely worthy successor to the amazing original

Rating: 9/10 (13 June 2015)

I went into this movie after reading the the reviews on this site (that at the time of reading this mostly seemed to be 4-6 star reviews). The movie's overall rating currently stands at a 7.8/10 which seemed a little on the low side to me. I don't tend to write movie reviews, but it seemed like this movies reviews were all from people that thought that this movie was okay, and probably half appeared to have been written weeks before the movie came out. Let me just say that this movie was an extremely pleasant surprise! I grew up being a huge fan of both of Michael Crichton's genius books, Jurassic Park, and The Lost World. The first movie stuck to the first book pretty well, and like all movies based on the book, the movie was excellent, however did not quite live up to the book. However, for a 2 hour movie, it did do a fantastic job of keeping the tone of the first book. I can not even come close to saying that about the first 2 sequels to Jurassic Park. Both sequels included several elements from the second book, (the third movie included the most subject matter of the second book) it was just a terrible (understatement) execution. I am saddened that Michael Crichton passed before having had a chance to view this movie, because it took a few of the elements from the second book, and created it's very own very different story line. It succeeded in taking some elements of Michael Crichton's genius ideas, and expanded on that creating their very own story line, and they did that WELL. It was an excellent attempt at retaining the tone of the first movie, and successfully paid homage to that movie several times. Without giving away any spoilers, I am seriously happy that they used cool elements from the Lost World book and incorporated them into the main dinosaur in this movie. The CGI was beyond awesome, the story was way better than any movie Michael Bay has ever written, the pacing was excellent, the music was great, the setting/atmosphere was extremely beautiful, and I loved the fact that the dinosaurs were in 3D! The only thing that they possibly could have done a little bit better was character development. As for the actors, I thought the stand out performances were delivered by first and foremost, Chris Pratt as he was amazing (did not expect anything less), Vincent D'Onofrio played a believable antagonist, and Bryce Dallas Howard did well with her role, and was extremely pleasing to look at also. The fact that there was even a bit of comic relief made this movie all the better, as the laughs had were not belly laughs by any stretch, but they also were not cheap or forced. I will say that there was a bit of unexpected on screen chemistry that took place between two of the actors (nothing too substantial) and it did not detract from my enjoyment of the movie. And, if this had been a 3 or 4 hour long movie with uneven pacing, I do believe that they may have been able to do better with character development, however I believe that this would have been at the expense of making a significantly less exciting movie. I will say, especially for a summer blockbuster, I thought that this was an absolutely amazing sequel. I would go and see it again if the opportunity presented itself! All in all, this movie had a little bit of something for everyone, and of course if you have a 7-12 year old child that loves dinosaurs, they will absolutely adore this movie. There is a bit if blood that is shown, and people do get eaten, but the director does a fine job of hiding the super gory stuff by placing objects in the scenes that shielded most of the gore from being shown. To sum up: Storyline/Plot: 8/10 Acting: 8/10 Special Effects: 10/10 Soundtrack: 8/10 Photography/Location: 9/10 Overall Rating: 8.6/10 Highly recommend this movie to anyone that enjoyed the original Jurassic Park movie.