Love the original Jurassic Park. A childhood dream fulfilled--it felt like the entire movie had been made just for me.
I also quite like the Lost World, apart from the fact that the third act is entirely disjointed to the rest of the film. The trailer scene remains one of my all-time favourite action sequences.
The third? Ugh. While I jumped at the opportunity to see these animals onscreen again, I hate the movie for what it did to a beloved franchise, turning it into a half-assed, short, plotless, thoughtless, cynical exercise in generic sequel-churning. Amongst the things I hated: the first two films are careful to show the dinosaurs as animals, but the third's 'plot'--basically a never ending chase sequence--is driven by wildly illogical behaviour on the Spinosaurus' behalf, chasing these morsel-sized humans all over the island when it just killed a T-Rex (plus could chow on the carrion the Rex was eating). They don't even bother with a throwaway explanation (seriously, how hard would it be to just throw in a line about the Spinosaurus not being on InGen's list because its line was defective, as shown by its behaviour now?); instead, it seems some brainless s'wit decided that dinosaurs look like monsters and therefore should act like them. Never mind San Diego, the third film was a lot more Godzilla than the second in that respect. And the characters are aggressively bland. One of the great things about the first two films--the first particularly--is that you have a cast of characters who are experts in their fields, theorizing even in the midst of catastrophe. In the third, I would gladly have seen that entire group of schlubs they dropped into the island (save Dr. Grant) wind up in something's gullet. There's no point in writing a survival thriller unless you make the audience care about the characters' survival, and these pathetic specimens cried out for extinction.
Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
