Jurassic Thunder is the worst movie I’ve seen in a very long time. It has finally beaten out previous joint champions Astro and Climax as my benchmark for the worst things ever, my go to for those “Yeah, but at least it wasn’t as bad as…” conversations.
This is a story about zombies and dinosaurs and military coups and Russians – and it makes next to no sense whatsoever. It’s just a pile of references to other films like Predator, Jurassic Park, Top Gun and even Guardians of the Galaxy. But none of it is funny. None of it is clever. There’s even a President Trump parody, because that won’t get dated super quickly or anything.
READ MORE: VFW – Review
So the plot, such as it is, is that all this is happening within the confines of a comic book called “Jurassic Thunder” and if they’d played it smart, if they’d ended it with the characters going “Wow, that was dreadful! It made no sense at all!” then maybe I’d be willing to cut it a little slack. Maybe. But no, there’s no last minute twist to save it.
In the comic there is a zombie plague. To combat this the US military, in conjunction with the Russians, deploy “biologic” weapons in the form of dinosaurs with gatling guns strapped to their heads. Problem is, oh no, the dinos actually cause the virus… or something? But then how were there zombies before the dinosaurs even got there? Who cares?! The movie certainly doesn’t.
And that’s the biggest issue here, beyond the terrible CGI, the lack of sets, the people staring off at nothing when they should be looking at dinos, the flat acting, the confusing motivations and the scenes that go nowhere. The story is just an incoherent mess. One scene, for example, has the characters discussing the dinos and the zombie plague connection. FIVE MINUTES LATER they have exactly the same discussion again, with everyone acting like this is the first time they’ve heard about it! Later in the film one of the characters suddenly is a zombie. No explanation, never shown on screen, he’s just suddenly a zombie now. Deal with it.
READ MORE: Ravers – Review
This entire review could just be me screaming incoherently about all the things in this film that make no sense. Why does the supposed main character have a nerf gun? What was the deal with the journalist/CIA agent/scientist? Why was everyone suddenly okay with the dinosaur trashing the base at the end of the film? WHY DID YOU FEEL THE NEED TO CGI POOP ONTO SOMEONE’S FACE, MOVIE? WHY?
The more I write, the more I think about it, the more of a disappointment this film is. It’s dreadful. It’s a mess. It’s badly written, directed, acted, shot, told. There is not a single redeeming feature in it anywhere and yet this was by the same folks who did The Jurassic Dead! A terrible movie that I genuinely enjoyed, so I went into this hoping for a repeat, another “so bad it’s good” gem… but this isn’t a gem. This isn’t even a chunk of fools gold. This is a nugget of sh*t. Zero stars.
Jurassic Thunder is out now on Digital.