Re-view review, 3/25/23: Cretaceous good fortune. There sure are a lot of things that go right for these critters, even in the midst of things going horribly wrong. After all, this is a Disney movie. I watched this one feeling all along that I had seen it before, despite the fact that I went in with no recollection of having ever viewed it previously. (Spoiler: upon further review, I did watch it, and review it, 22 years ago.) Perhaps that indicates that there isn’t much surprising or unique in this tale. In fact, so much of the presentation here is so very standard that I found myself considering ancillary aspects of the item throughout. For instance, this story seems clearly to have been inspired by two antecedents, namely Jurassic Park (obviously, considering it came out within 10 years of the original) and (somewhat more obscurely) the "Rite of Spring" sequence in Fantasia. It does justice to the former, at least in technical terms--the animation is, what was then, state of the art--and at the same time somewhat trivializes the latter (the Fantasia sequence was meant for grownups; the comic relief characters here demonstrate that this work is undoubtedly aimed for children; not surprising...again, it is a Disney movie). As that all implies, the overall result is a mixed bag, a movie that holds the attention and presents a rich tableau, but also feels cliched and "less-than" in its scope and accomplishment. There’s also the fact that, 23 years down the road, on wonders if the foundational science has not now been refuted, or at least heavily modified. All in all, no one needs to be ashamed of this flick, but it’s not a leader in the canon either.
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