The first Jurassic Park movie is all time one of the greatest films ever made with the special effects still holding up to this day. The 2nd film was still very enjoyable in my opinion but it was just a cookie cutter sequel not bad, not good. The 3rd film wasnโt great at all. But compared to the rest of the series the 3rd film is basically the godfather.
As another personal pick the 1st blade movie is a hood classic good. The other 2 not so much.
I would argue that Blade II is the better movie. Guillermo del Toro is a much more interesting director, and the Reapers are basically a dry run for his take on Vampires in The Strain.
Apparently he's got sketches of them in his notebooks going back decades.
That makes sense. I know he didn't write the movie, but I assumed that he had a lot of input on the monster design. He always has a lot of input on the monster design.
I was gonna say, how is this entire thread skipping over the take that Blade 2 is a step down from the first? It's not the craziest movie take I've read on here, but it definitely flies in the face of what I understood to be popular opinion.
It's got motherfuckin I Against I by Mos Def in it.
Yeah, I thought that was the general consensus too, but I couldn't be sure that wasn't just an echo chamber I'd created with my friend group.
In OP's defense, I checked out both movies' Letterboxd ratings, and Blade 1 is rated at 3.5 out of 5, and Blade 2 is sitting at 3.3, so maybe it is just an echo chamber thing. That being said, I really believe this was not the case 10, 15 years ago.
Having sat with it for awhile now, I'm kind of coming around on the notion. I'd have to do a back to back viewing to confirm, but my current hypothesis is that Blade 1 is an excellent urban action-horror picture. It does everything you'd expect it to do pretty well. Blade 2, being a product of Guillermo's interests, has this weird, quasi-Shakespearian family drama between Nomac, lady vampire, and the patriarch serving as the emotional spine of the picture. It's fine, but I remember a lot more about their dynamics than I remember about Blade's arc, which is maybe not what you want from a Blade movie. Plus, all the extra vampire lore and whatnot makes the picture feel less like urban action-horror and more like a fantasy film, which just so happens to have guns and the occasional unwitting human. Not bad, but it does feel like a dry run for ideas Guillermo would do better in other movies.
Honestly, I remember similar vamp lore dragging down the first one. There some interesting stuff with Frost being lower class because he was turned Vamp instead of born Vamp, but the third-act vampire-god thing was kinda meh, ending with some horribly dated CGI.
Also, while the world building was cool, it's not as though Blade is a super interesting character. He's a super cool bad-ass, but I find myself checking out when they get into his emotional backstory. Whistler id mich more of the emotional core of fhat movie, which is probably why they had to bring him back in the second (which ie something in fhe second movie that I thought was a cheap cop-out).