It looked cool in the trailer, it has its moments, it has potential, but it’s a kinda-fun, kinda-mediocre action movie when judged only on its own terms, and lamer when you compare it to Steven Spielberg’s classic “Jurassic Park.” After multiple failures trying to run an amusement park with genetically-enhanced dinosaurs in the three previous iterations of this movie franchise, another attempt is made at running a safe theme park with the man-eating prehistoric beasts. The human characters are irrelevant, most of them are downright annoying, and too much time is spent on their foibles; compare, my friends, to Spielberg’s classic, which presented witty and sophisticated characters that we all cared about, thereby increasing the intensity of the drama exponentially. Still, the action scenes in this one are quite exciting in 3D; nothing like seeing dinosaurs rendered with all the glory possible from today’s CGI as these photogenic beasts chomp people and each other. That’s probably why this movie performed so well at the box office. Chomp, chomp, chomp.

Extras:

• This iteration of Jurassic Park introduces a novel concept or two; if they had developed these ideas much further and redone the characters, it could have been a worthy equal to Spielberg’s original. Maybe next time (and for certain, there will be a next time—this movie’s huge box office revenue ensures that).
• I saw this in 3D, which definitely upped the impact of the action. I’m not too sure if I would have enjoyed the movie as much in 2D.