Reviews

I watched this film again, 10 years after its launch, and I must admit it turned out to be not boring, but annoying instead.

Ill skip the CGI achievements of the film, as they were already fairly commented here on IMDb, and on my opinion they are quite ahead of its time.

The idea of the film is very good and original, and also got some credible scientific reasoning to explain it (although not true, it is a plausible explanation to get DNA from a mosquito trapped by amber).

Iam Malcom is clearly my favourite character, although I can see an explanation on why would a chaos-theorist be there..

However, here is the list of what really annoyed me:

• The amount of highly predictable scenes.

• The lack of adequate caution on things that even with regular wild animals is done much more safely, such as the first velociraptor scene, when some men are about to transfer a raptor out of a cage, which is neither properly attached to the outer fence, neither has an electric door.

• The irritating hysteric girl (sorry, I had to mention it), which not only was completely misinformed about dinosaurs (despite being a self-proclaimed hacker) and insisted on using words such as veggie-saur, instead of herbivore and carnivore.

• The complete lack of common-sense shown by some characters, such as their cumbersome ability to get out of the trail, and split themselves.

• The fact that although a big storm was about to reach the island, the tour was not interrupted, even when the safety of the passengers (not only Hammond's grandchildren, but the ingen's inspector as well) could be on risk.

• The cars are constraint to a rail, although they run on batteries, which run out. It would be more plausible to just make the rail electrified. If the writer wanted the cars to stop throughout the story, just damage such rail or cut the power (as happened).

• When the four main characters are trapped, and are required to electrically seal a door which is being rammed by a raptor, there are two major flaws. First, there is no switch on the door, as would be expected, and secondly, when the girl gets on the computer, she still had to search how to lock the door, when she could just ask Sattler, which was "busy" pushing exactly on the least effective part of the door.. And after her brilliant quote "Oh, its an UNIX system!", we are presented by a security interface looking like a flight simulator - why not use the more geek-looking, "advanced" and typically used command-line interface commonly used throughout the film? And BTW, the way she grabs the mouse is absolutely delightful.

• The main characters are too-obviously protected by an invisible force-field...

In a general viewpoint, I think it is a nice family/kids film, but highly unrecommended film for an older (and more critic) audience, as it will surely trigger some "LOL, what is he doing??!!", "don't go there!" and "omg...not even a scratch!" exclamations.

This film is all about a man who starts to spend his days in a park next to his daughter's school. He found, in that park, some sort of peace sanctuary, and people he knew for years started to meet him there, exposing their problems to him, just to be listened, because he was doing something most of them dared to even try...

I guess the film achieved that point pretty well, but missed a few aspects from the book, like it has already been mentioned by other reviewers..

He tripped with his brother in the opium scene. They were supposed to have a conversation by telepathy...very fraternal, indeed...

The sex scene, I think, is disposable. In the book too... at least, I could not figure it out why is it there... Maybe he is trying to convince himself that he fully supplanted Lara's death...

Another miss, is the final phone call, where he, finally, reaches madness...