Spoilers follow…
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I watched it on a plane, so I won’t comment on it as a spectacle, but it’s an odd, very small movie. It’s basically using sci-fi (and NOT time travel, oddly enough) as set dressing to tell an intimate story (four speaking parts not including the computer) about grief and connection, as well as letting Adam Driver do a cut-rate Revenant imitation.
The acting is solid (I’m no John Oliver, but I’ve never seen Driver turn in a a bad performance), and Greenblatt does really, really well with a limited part, stealing several scenes, to the extent you can do when only sharing it with one other actor.
Then, the storytelling is lean, but almost to a fault. There’s just not a lot of there there, and in particular there’s nothing about the story that has to be sci-fi. It’s not mindless like the latest JP entries, but it’s not really a dinosaur movie either.
It’s a sweet little meditation that also happens to involve blowing up a velociraptor with half a dozen thermal detonators.
I will give it credit for being the first time I’ve needed to type the phrase, “Checkov’s poison-berry dinosaur bone.”
For the reasons you mentioned about the quietness of it it wasn’t really for me. I went into the movie hoping not necessarily for action but for a little more sciencey stuff and it didn’t really have that or explain anything. As you said, the sci-fi element is just dressing - it could easily have been set in any other sort of world.
Yup. Any setting that was isolated and dangerous, with rescue that is possible but delayed. Old west, desert island in the age of sail, remote modern wilderness, even a war zone if you deemphasized the human element. Scifi was literally just so it could have dinosaurs and an escape pod.
I’m not entirely sure it was for me either, LOL, though I liked the two leads and overall it has its moments. I think knowing the meta situation, that a dinosaur movie starring Kylo freakin’ Ren had made absolutely zero impact on the cultural conversation, meant something would be off somehow. I was pleasantly surprised that it was at least partly a question of ambitions and wasn’t simply awful from end to end, but I was also glad it was a tight 90 minutes.
It’s like if Terrence Malick made a B-movie over a three day weekend.