Charmless

Rating: 6/10 (8 May 2017)

If you want to see a bunch of humans eaten and mauled by Dinosaurs than this is the movie for you.
Steven Spielberg and Dinosaurs so what could go wrong. A lot it seems. When we watch a movie like this, the first thing we demand from the film is people behaving logically. Movies like this go off the rails when people start to do dumb things in deadly serious situations. Hitchcock knew this, his characters are put into similarly intense situations and always act accordingly. They get frightened when the moment calls for it and they immediately try to save their own skin when things get really tough.
The second thing we want from a movie like this is the good guys have a fighting chance and even the misguided guys have a fighting chance, This movie in delights in killing off people it deems deserve to die, and even a few who don't, as if to show the Dinosaurs like storms or natural disasters do not care who is good or who is bad. And the humans just have no chance to fight back, we wait for the moment when they do, but it doesn't happen because its not suppose to happen.
The worst aspect of this film is that humans always seem to be stopped from fighting back against the Dinosaurs, it's OK for the Dinosaurs to kill the humans because -hey they shouldn't mess with them. But Spielberg seems to be adamant that there should be no pleasure taken in humans killing Dinosaurs no matter how many people they kill. So the movie basically turns into a rather unpleasant kill fest.
As for Spielberg; The master seems a little off form here, i would say he is uninspired by the lousy script, but he does give the cinematic world two great scenes. One where our 3 heroes must escape a trailer that us being pushed off a cliff by the dinosaurs in the middle of a rain storm. One of the best things he has ever done. And the spectacle of T-Rex running wild through modern day San Diego.
There is a weird cruelty that runs through this movie, which is strange for a Spielberg movie and strange just for any movie that hopes to be popular entertainment. Which is best observed by the death of one of the few likable and pragmatic characters in the movie: Eddie Carr. Who dies while he is heroically trying to rescue the three people in the trailer. His death casts a pall over the movie. This is the problem with this film, its lack of heart and the human touch. Watching people murdered by Dinosaurs isn't really as much fun as it sounds. humans fighting back against dinosaurs and winning would have been more interesting but somebody took the bullets out of the guns, and fun out of this movie.