Gray Anderson

This is Aliens, if Aliens sucked. With one of the original writers from Jurassic Park doing the writing and Spielberg still involved, you'd think this would be a good film. Unfortunately, the first third of the movie features the cast being put through about an hour of plot-induced stupidity (the allegedly ex-MARSOC crew were just plainly inept), overdone character stereotypes (particularly the "stoner boyfriend"), and cardboard villainy (they might as well have just named one of the characters Carter Burke - that's what I was calling him in my mind, and I kept waiting for him to decide to kill off the rest of the party to cover things up or something) alongside didactic dialogue about "what to do with the DNA?" It was so bad that my brother walked out for a refund and I only stayed because I was there with a friend who I didn't want to ditch. Fortunately it was a midnight showing, or we'd probably have ended up at the theater bar together and needed a designated driver. There were some decent sequences - the river raft part was good, but that's probably because it was ripped out of the script from the first film (the sequence was cut from the original - that explains the T-Rex and Dilophosaurus being involved). But a few good sequences can't save this movie from dire writing. By the end of the movie, I couldn't remember a single character's name. I can remember a few of the dinos (though the "Big Bad" dino at the end was really un-memorable), and while I realize that they're the real stars, the rest of the cast shouldn't be THIS unforgettable. Jurassic Park might be up for a full reboot in a decade or two, but for now it is clear that the franchise is very much out of gas.