I watched JP on cable last night. Probably the first time I've seen it in ten years. Boy, the effects have aged beautifully. But jeez, in my youthful astonishment, I never realized that the movie was a t-rex sized turd.
Not only did I spot most of the things MAF mentioned (this was during a pretty idle, non-critical viewing, too), but jesus christ does the movie take forever to get going. And then the aforementioned cool scene happens, and then the movie gets boring. Aside from the t-rex sequence, the kitchen sequence, and the generator sequence, the whole movie is pretty boring shit. Aside from the inclusion of kids, this hardly even feels like a Spielberg movie. Any hack these days could've knocked this out, substandard script and all. I guess back in 93 it took someone of Spielberg's ability to manage the still awesome effects shots.
And boy, the script is awful, and a LOT of the acting is very poor. What the fuck is Goldblum doing? He plays Malcolm so much like Seth Brundle that I'm half expecting his skin to crack open and reveal a fly underneath. Both children are especially abominable, even by Spielberg standards. Richard Attenborough aside, there are no GOOD memorable performances in this movie, and even Attenborough's character gets some serious groaners. The things Malcolm says in relation to chaos theory are so off base as to be completely laughable. Sam Neill shows the charisma of a wad of soggy cardboard. Laura Dern is so misused that I find it hard to believe that it's Lula from Wild at Heart.
The movie sucks. I'm embarassed I ever liked it. It's not even good as camp. As I said before, it's not that it aged poorly; quite the contrary, I think it's aged very well - I just don't think it was ever a good movie. I think we were just easily wowed by the eye candy 13 years ago.
