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With my mom being gone last night, I took advantage of the situation to
commandeer my television back and watch a few movies. After watching
Death Race (2008), I decided to get back to a more ordinary and actually
more tasteful form of violence — humans killing dinosaurs.

Rise of the Dinosaurs (2013) is of course yet another Jurassic Park
ripoff movie, and the typical B-movie effort that we have all come to
know and love from the SyFy channel. In this one, a team of commandos
from some unspecified country goes in to save woman who is being held
hostage from some Latin-American revolutionary leader type. The woman
is a "chemical biologist" (which must be something like a biochemist,
except where the biochemist studies the chemistry of life the chemical
biologist studies the biology of — chemicals?). Anyway, the woman
scientist had fallen in love with the revolutionary because of his high
ideals, but when the revolutionary starts acting like revolutionaries
usually do and turns into a bad guy it seems they had a falling out and
the revolutionary started holding her against her will — thus the
necessity of the commandos to free her. And there is also some vague
mention of chemical weapons and the involvement of some shady NSA
type person thrown in there as well.

The commandos get the scientist out okay, as well as grabbing the
revolutionary, but they then proceed to get lost in an area of the Amazon
that has somehow been isolated even from Google Maps for the last 50
million years or so. There had been an earlier party of scientists who
had been lost in the region, but who were assumed dead, but no —
one of the scientists survived it seems in this 'lost world' (which
the unit does give due credit to Arthur Conan Doyle for, saying that
somebody should "make a movie out of it" — a good joke and perhaps
the highlight of the movie). This lost world contains dinosaurs, and
an environment which the tree-hugging or perhaps dinosaur-hugging
lost scientist wants to protect at all cost. The scientist fears that if
word of the lost world gets out that the ecosystem and dinosaurs will
be destroyed. To which the revolutionary agrees, saying that the
capitalists would exploit the area for profit. Which of course is exactly
what would happen, and you know that when a revolutionary starts giving
you good advice that the whole situation is pretty pathetic.

Now the problem with the dinosaurs is that they tend to view humans as
a food source. Which the soldiers are not too keen on, so they have to
kill the dinosaurs in order to protect themselves. Finally, the commandos
manage to get to higher ground where their cell phone will work and the
military helicopter is sent in to pick them up and arrives in this lost
world in about 10 minutes or so. And then there is the gratuitous killing
of a T. Rex with an RPG from the safe distance of the helicopter — I guess
the unit commander was looking for some payback or whatever for his men
who had been eaten.

Well. The movie is just bad enough that it is good. An enjoyable use of
2 hours.