One of the weird things about rewatching late-twencen movies now is that some of the distinctions that seemed big back in the day are flattened out by time — the movies that seemed amazing often don’t quite hold up that well, and the ones that seemed really stupid now don’t seem quite so bad.

In this case, that works to this movie’s benefit. Back in the day, when I saw it in the theatre in college, I thought it was absolutely terrible. And I know why I thought that: Because everyone in the movie does abjectly stupid things all the friggin’ time. Sometimes they’re in-character stupid things (like trying to rescue a T-rex babby), and sometimes they’re just plain stupid things (like trying to escape velociraptors by… running in a circle?).

But watching it now, I’m watching it as a Spielberg action movie period piece, and I can appreciate the way that it has that vintage Spielberg look to it, how it’s so of a piece with Indiana Jones and E.T. and all those other movies. And I can see all these baby actors who I didn’t even know were in it back in the day (Vince Vaughn! A shockingly young Toby Ziegler from The West Wing!). And I can see how it’s shaped almost explicitly like King Kong (although tbh probably it’s actually inspired by the 1925 The Lost World, which I never saw).

So you take all that, and you put Spielberg’s mastery of craft into the equation and…

… okay, it’s still not that good, because it’s got some problems. Despite my rolling with it better now, the idiot characters really are a flaw in the movie. And the plot is a sloppy mess that sprawls all over without ever clearly getting at anything: It feels like it was trying to be too faithful to a book that was throwing in complications to hit page count, when it should have probably pared back the story to something more straightforward.

But the biggest problem is that it’s trying to make Jeff Goldblum an action star outright. That’s not really his wheelhouse. In the first Jurassic Park, he lounged around and made sarcastic bon mots while the other characters did the action. In ID4, Will Smith punched aliens in the face while Goldblum did his science shit. But here, he’s doing all the stuff, and it doesn’t really work.

So it’s not a great movie, but it’s also not as bad as I remember. Put it down as one of those definition-of-mediocre three star things, like a Chili’s burger.