Is Camp Cretaceous the Best Jurassic Park Sequel?

[Winter]

Yes, I would even go as far to say that it's just as good as the first Jurassic Park film and even better in some areas.

Let's start with what this show does best and arguably better then any other JP/W sequel and, again, the original and that's the human characters. Full disclosure I was really unsure about this show when it was first announced as I thought a JP story that focused on kids (with some rather unimpressive CGI) wasn't going to work. But the show won me over with how engaging the characters were, all of them had unique personalities, engaging arcs and believable relationships with one another.

My personal favorites character was Yaz and I felt she had the most overall development going from a quite, shy girl to a badass who will cross an island full of killer dinosaurs just to save her best friend/girlfriend Sammy. And yet the events of the show clearly get to her as she develops PTSD due to all the times she's nearly been killed and yet her friends help her through her issues. While I think all the characters are great Yaz just feels the most fleshed out to me.

I was also surprise at just how Violent this show turned out. Like this show has some really intense deaths and while they're all off-screen they all manage to be rather unsettling. I haven't seen a show, aimed at kids, with such a high body count. I'm honestly amazed that Dead Meat hasn't gotten around to doing a kill count for this show. Sure, the kills aren't creative as they are in the films but this is more focused on character and the fact that this is clearly meant more for a general audience so I think it would be more forgiven the all the Off-Screen carnage.

However, the show is not without it's flaws and most of those occur during season 4 where the series kinda goes off the rails. While JP has always had a little Sci-Fi due to this being about cloned dinosaurs Season 4 and bits of Season 5 takes things WAAAY to far. Before the show was dealing with the standard Cloned Dinos but in season 4 they have to contend with... (sigh) Robots. Like real robots that can scan things, speak and shot lasers and there's also another island with Dinosaurs which includes a completely wasted cameo from the infamous Spinosaurus and then in season 5 we also get Remote controlled Dinosaurs vs. video game controller.

Now, the show continues to focus on the characters but this season annoyed a LOT of fans with this and I can't say I blame them but, in all honestly, this is STILL better then what we got in The Lost World, JP3, Fallen Kingdom and Dominion. I mean, the characters don't make that many stupid choices and at least when they make dumb discussions it's more justifiable because, their kids who are in a stressful situation and mistakes happen.

So, on the whole, yeah I think this is a great show. It has its flaws but what makes this show work is that it keeps focus on the characters and I was honestly more invested in the Campers then I was in most of the films. I would rather watch silly teen romance then listen to Eddie talk about how much people suck while getting hundreds of innocent people killed. I would rather see Kenji being an idiot who learns how to be a better person then see Sarah go on about how much she understands Animals while nearly getting herself killed by doing stupid things she should know NOT to do.

I will watch the WORST of this show over most of the JP films because I care about the Campers. I don't care about most of the characters in most of the JP films and the few I do care about are usually pretty badly written in the sequels.

[McAvoy]

Never heard of Camp Cretaceous. Maybe post a YouTube link in the future for those of who don't know?

[stryke]

In terms of films Jurrasic Park 3 is the only one worth mentioning as far as I'm concerned. Sure it's not a patch on the first film, but at least there's some fun to be had, the bit with the pterodactyls is impressively tense, and the unexpected riff on Peter Pan's crocodile really amused me at the time.