Quote from: DoomRulz on Oct 01, 2012, 01:47:10 PM
Quote from: Remonster on Oct 01, 2012, 02:11:43 AM
Yeah, I agree to a certain extent. I was thankful for the return to the island after TLW sucked it up in San Diego. Also Grant being the main focus was amazing for me. While It wasn't as good as I would've liked, it's still a movie that I can sit down and enjoy. It's the same with TLW. I absolutely love that movie, but once they get to the main land It loses my attention.
The mainland sequence was awesome. There was something really fun about seeing a T.Rex in the kid's backyard. Maybe because I had the same fantasy myself as a kid.
I never had a problem with that sequence either, never understood the flak it gets.
What I didn't like was that the film totally lacked the sense of wonder of the first one, portrayed the dinosaurs more as monsters than animals, spent about ten minutes bumping off a bit-character in a ludicrous scenario (Dieter Stark), that both the tyrannosaurs continued to track the scent of their baby
after they'd already gotten it back (and, for that matter, they didn't explain why the rexes returned to destroy the trailers until some time afterwards), that to a large degree they stuck with the same dinosaur species, that they made all that effort to totally rewrite the story yet apparently didn't have time to develop sympathetic characters or to flesh out the baddies, and that practically the only thing they did carry over from the book was Malcolm's newly sombre and comparatively humourless demeanour (which I didn't like in Crichton's novel either).
And probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.
As it was still Spielberg directing, we had plenty of awesome, memorable sequences in a well-made film, but I thought it was badly written.
Also thought they missed an opportunity to emphasise a conservationist theme in there, that stripmining an ecosystem can turn a buck but is ultimately short-sighted, has dangerous ramifications and kills something beautiful. Obviously they touched on these points, but I don't think they drove it home hard enough - the first film wore its grander themes with pride and that helped make it more than just a creature feature.
Could also have drawn a picture of the merits of ecotourism versus stripmining, by portraying the dinosaurs as more natural and peaceful early on while Hammond's team studies them.