Jurassic Galaxy |
USA • 2018 • 74m •
  • Directed by: James Kondelik. • Starring: Eric Paul Erickson, Madison West, Jonathan Nation, Tamara Stayer. • Music by: Christopher Cano.   In the near future, a ship of space explorers crash land on an unknown planet. They're soon met with some of their worst fears as they discover the planet is inhabited by monstrous dinosaurs.
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Review:
You're going to make that outer space epic you've always dreamed of making.
But when you break open your piggy bank, reality rears its ugly head. $8.47. And you KNOW the thrilling space opera you wanna make, you NEED to make, is gonna cost at least $10 or $12 to do it justice.
So yeah, it's wrong, but it's for the greater good. You hide in the bushes along the main approach to the local elementary school and roll a few third-graders for their milk money. Not a proud moment, but hell, this is for your art!
Being forced to make your outer space pot-boiler on a shoestring is a forgivable sin. But if you ain't got the scratch to do it right it's a rule of the cineverse that you gotta make up for it in other ways. You gotta give it your heart, give it the love it needs to fight its way out of the ground and into the sky! You have to sweat the details and craft a shimmering star for the ages!
Of course, NONE of those things happened with JURASSIC GALAXY. JURASSIC GALAXY is such a moldering pile of cow flop you have to stand upwind just to watch it. And the thing that makes JURASSIC GALAXY truly vomit inspiring is that it is excruciatingly obvious, from frame one, that NOBODY gave a crap about this poor thing. It looks like a transporter accident from beginning to end. How MUCH nobody cared about this movie to make even a half-baked effort is the real sin here.
Examples:
The movie opens with the most appallingly rendered space crash you've ever seen with the various pieces of wreckage being spread over a large area, a primary plot point for the movie. A girl struggles out of her piece of the wreckage and lands on a large tree branch wrapped in some spaceship wiring. As you watch the scene play out, you can't help but notice that what she's actually wrapped in is a 4 conductor trailer wiring harness. There's the connector front and center. Nobody cared.
In another scene a few characters are hanging around a bit of "wreckage". By the simple expedient of just leaving your eyes open it's utterly obvious that the piece of "wreckage" is an upside down derelict truck that they found somewhere in the desert. You can see the rusted chassis in most of the scene and the entire thing is riddled with de rigueur bullet holes from the local yokels using it for target practice. Nobody cared.
Our intrepid spacemen (Sorry. Sorry. Space people...) arm themselves with ad hoc ax- and spear-like weapons from wreckage parts because they have no guns. And because this would preclude having to make any space-weapon special-effects. Of course. The space-jock "leader" security officer character apparently broke HIS "weapon" at one point because in one scene we can see that the blade of HIS weapon is flopping around so badly as he walks that it threatens to fall off of the shaft. Nobody cared.
"Atmospheric" scenes of dinosaurs are played repeatedly, verbatim. You just see the same scene repeatedly.
The entire menu of dinosaurs consists of, I believe, 3 flavors. Tyrannosaurus Rex, velociraptor and pterodactyl. Because, you know, those are the popular ones. Throwing in a plant eater to suggest an actual functioning ecosystem would just be wasted effort. The population density of just predators depicted would be unsupportable ANYWHERE in, yes, the galaxy.
While the animation of the dinosaurs themselves isn't too bad, which from the looks of it can apparently be bought off-the-shelf, the compositing of the dinosaurs into the context is so badly done that the dinosaurs have auras.
And it just goes on and on and on. Stampedes of velociraptors that's badly looped like a Fred-Flintstone-running sequence. 3 victims of cannibalism all reclining next to each other as perfectly articulated, complete skeletons. Algorithmically rendered depictions of rock rubble that literally could not BE anything other than algorithmically rendered piles of rock rubble. Etc. Every scene, every frame a crime against humanity. Nobody cared.
There is but one somewhat-redeemable element in this movie. There's this little, flying sphere-thing that's a sort of digital assistant. It's poorly made and badly animated (I think it sits at the end of a green-screen stick), but at least it was somewhat original and a little inventive and the little "special-effect" to conceal the connection point between the mounting stick and the sphere was actually intriguing. So of course the little sphere-thing got smashed early on. From my perspective, it was the only good thing in the whole movie.
I've seen scads of low-to-no budget movies, and many of them are some of the best movies, budget notwithstanding. Making a movie is a monumentally difficult task, never mind making a good one, but budgetary constraints are just another problem in an endeavor that is composed mostly of problems to be overcome. It is the crime of making a movie while not giving even a tiny damn about it that renders a movie unwatchable, not the lack of budget. The clever tricks that moviemakers sometimes employ to overcome their budgetary obstacles are often so inspired it can make you actually cheer the movie on.
The people who made JURASSIC GALAXY should be prosecuted, their equipment confiscated, and the movie made into a college level course on how NOT to make a movie. If JURASSIC GALAXY was intended to be some sort of a humorous send-up of cheap and cheesy sci-fi movies, then it failed that way too.
Review by S_Soma from the Internet Movie Database.
Movie Database