Jurassic Park II: The Lost World

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bookworm
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Jurassic Park II: The Lost World

Post by bookworm »

This movie is generally held as a disappointment after the first one. Do you agree or think it’s alright?
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Shennifer
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Post by Shennifer »

I remember liking it. It wasn't brilliant but it wasn't bad either
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Till the end of the line.
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LIGHTNING
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Post by LIGHTNING »

An unneeded sequel.
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Post by bookworm »

Like I said before, I don't understand the hate this movie gets. I think it's every bit as good as the first one, I really do. What did people expect it to be that they're so let down by it? It's not going to be as groundbreaking as the original, because the ground has already been broken. All it can be is a solid movie, and I think it is.

This is a good story. Ingen refusing to learn from the previous mistakes because they just want to capitalize on the project in whatever ways they still can. That was a good way to bring in an antagonist. Because Hammond is a good guy, a bit naive, but he thought this all was a great idea and had good intentions. But obviously an undertaking of this magnitude isn't a one man program, and the others in on it manipulated things for their own agenda.

This movie didn't need to set up the park first it just had the dinosaurs out and about from the beginning, so we get some fun adventures around the island. While that was also the plot of the first movie, it's not repetitive here because it's a different situation. Those were contained dinosaurs just breaking out. The humans had some level of control still. Here they were never contained, they've been roaming free for years. They're in control, this is their world. The humans are just trying to stay alive while traversing the area.
Then when the island part is done it doesn't just wrap up, there's a whole new part of the story just beginning. The island bits have been great. Trying to evade the dinosaurs out in nature, it's good stuff. But we can't stay isolated like this forever. We have got to bring the dinosaurs to civilization!

This is the natural progression of the franchise. The first movie managed to take a potentially ridiculous premise and make it a reasonable thing; now we get to play with it. We've got live dinosaurs to make stories with, of course we want to move them off the island! Dinosaurs in the city is what has been waiting to happen since the start of this series. But if they had jumped there right from the start it would have been too gimmicky. 'Yeah, they thought to bring dinosaurs back to life because they just wanted to make a movie of them running through a city.' No, the first movie was kept to the island because that was set up. And it had its own story explaining why the dinosaurs were in fact a reasonable thing. That was perfect. Now that the franchise is established we get to do these fun things in a way that has merit. It's understandable why a T-Rex gets brought to the mainland here in this next part of the story, with Ingen's board calling the shots now. And the scene of the rampage through the city is really cool.

I like that they're wanting to build a new park even after what happened before. It shows they're purely motivated by money, compared to Hammond who wanted to make an attraction just for people to enjoy, and for research opportunities. When he realized it wasn't going to work, he let it go. But these people think they just need to try again because something went wrong that first time, refusing to accept that maybe the whole thing is just a bad idea. Like in the first movie, that corporate angle adds something extra to the story. These movies aren't being made just for the sake of dino rampage scenes, they really flesh out the premise and look at different motivations people might have if this kind of thing became a possibility. They're just as much about the people as the dinosaurs; it's looking at human nature vs mother nature.
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