Have to agree with MF. Being an enormous JP buff, I spent months hyping up the movie. After the release, I couldn't look anybody in the eye for months. It was just plain awful...
See I love ethology, which is the study of animal behavior, and TLW was an excellent film study of what dinosaur behavior may well have been like - whether in family groups, in packs, how they hunted, how they defended their young, it was all magnificent in its portrayal of how the dinosaurs weren't mindless brutes, but simply animals. The only reason it was maligned was because of the ending, which I will defend to my grave. Yes, it was Spielberg's homage to Godzilla films, but there was also another point to it. We've all seen the footage of when a rampaging elephant breaks free from a circus; well, now imagine if it were a bit larger, carnivorous, angry, and hungry... that's a palpable threat to let loose in an urban community, and I loved it. Only part that I find gut-wrenching is when Kelly boots the Velociraptor out the window.
JPIII... where do we begin with how it tore down the foundations of everything JP and TLW created. The Spinosaurus seems like a good place to start. I do think it looked menacing, but it was just a poor way to reboot the franchise. No Spinosaurus that every lived was that heavily-built; yes, it was that long, not quite as tall, but it should have been considerably more light and nowhere near as brawny. They turned it into a brawler instead of an animal that would have preyed on large fish and young dinosaurs. T.rex, on the other hand, is a prehistoric pugilist. It's meant to deal and take heavy blows. Slightly smaller in length than Spinosaurus, a little taller at the hip, but Tyrannosaurids are VASTLY more massive in terms of bulk. The fight should have ended with the T.rex biting the neck of the Spinosaurus. That's a bite force of 3300 psi; if it latches onto any animal, the dino is cancelled.
Then there were the Velociraptors hunting the humans for a lost egg for the entire movie. Know why animals like that would lay a large clutch of eggs? Expected loss to predation, meaning their reaction would have been more akin to, " Damn, looks like there's one less than this morning. Well that sucks." Not, "Let's go kill those mother ^^^^^ers and get our baby back!" Oh, and why did they just kill the humans and leave them there? Why? When Udesky was killed and used as bait his body was just left there, not dragged away and stored in a food cache as should have been the case. AND I would have preferred he were eviscerated, not just had his neck broken. Lame. Movie was bedlam with necks just snapping all over the place. Give me variety. At least have him pinned down then dragged away screaming.
The dinos all looking so vastly different from how they were already established in TLW, the Pteranodons with teeth... I could go, and have gone, on and on... but I think I've digressed enough.
I'm with MF here, though. Science aside, you don't have the fan favorite lose in the fight. You just don't. I understand you want to establish the "new sheriff in town," but it was a blow below the belt for most JP fans. Also, to show the T.rex winning for the entire fight only to lose at the last second was cheap, and so was the acknowledgement by the director and team that it was a subadult - the maturing infant from TLW. That's rough. Poor little guy gets axed after all the trouble his parents went through to raise him well. I want a real fight, have that Spino fight that subadult's mom, or the big bull T.rex with all of the battle scars which raged across San Diego and tore Eddie Carr out of the Mercedes. That's what I want.
Oh, and I have to echo the ingenious design of the hidden jaw hinge in the JP T.rex figures. Awesome work. Too bad Hasbro has gone so far downhill since then.
