So this is a movie that I’d heard was terrible, back in the day — it’s where Steven Spielberg and John Williams left the franchise, giving it to some jobbers to churn out a soulless installment that had no point other than the money.

All of this is true, and yet… I can’t bring myself to hate it entirely, probably just because of my low expectations. Because yeah, it’s entirely derivative of previous installments, it adds literally nothing to the franchise and has nothing to say, and the script is obvious enough that I could have written it myself. It reuses Williams’ score relentlessly, and where it has original music, it’s entirely forgettable; the visual language of the movie is lifted wholesale from previous installments, to the point that if they filmed it fast enough after the previous one, they could maybe have reused the sets. There is nothing original here, and nothing that rises above the level of “craftsmanlike.”

But… the movie kinda knows it? It’s 90 minutes, and it doesn’t fuck around. There’s a prologue where a couple of people get stranded on Dinosaur Island, then we’re back in the regular world to watch an OG cast member (Sam Neill this time) get railroaded into going back to the island, and now we’re like 10-15 minutes in, and we’re ready to get down to the main event of being menaced by a combination of 1) gigantic tyrannosaur-like things, and 2) velociraptors.

The gang (which of course includes a sciency kid, because see above re derivative) darts from peril to peril, they get in just a bit of that “omg dinosaurs” sightseeing with brontosaurus herds, and after some luck and derring-do, the surviving people all get off the island again, and a bunch of people we dgaf about are dead. Absolutely predictable, but also not overstaying its welcome. At two hours, I would be much less kind to this movie.

I can’t say I’d recommend this movie — there’s almost no affirmative reason to watch it other than completism — but it’s not appreciably worse than the Spielberg-directed The Lost World, so I think at least some of its bad reviews were unearned.

Also, there is one part of the movie which cracked me up, which is when some of the characters shit on Ian Malcolm for being too self-serious and “chaos”y — given that the “rockstar mathematician” thing and obsession with chaos theory is probably the most dated part of the original movie, it’s fun to watch the characters be catty about it.