To me the climax of the movie was when the third T-Rex showed up. 
Haha, yeah that was pretty great. It took me by surprise. I remember leaning over to my girlfriend at the time and going, "Sweet, he upped the number of T-Rex's by tw--holy shit!"

Well, I should emphasize that I was bothered by the length, not the love story. The movie could have been an hour shorter and much better for it.
As much as I enjoy the movie, I couldn't agree more. I watched it recently with my current girlfriend (she had never seen it before) and it started dragging when they got back to New York, despite that being my favorite part of the film. They should have been
on the island within 15-20 minutes of the film starting. Instead it took almost 35 min. for them to get
to the island.
What's your definition of par? I don't think they're average or below by any means, but simply lacking something. They've either slightly underachieved or greatly overachieved depending on how you look at it.
I would put Christopher Nolan into that category, too. As much as I love Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception, they never get me emotionally. Technically, they're extremely solid films, but they just feel cold to me. It's like he's going through the motions, but not getting anything out of it. The plots of all three films I very much enjoyed, but instead of, for example, feeling devastated for both Bruce and Harvey when Rachel was killed, I didn't feel a thing. The actors gave it their all, no doubt, but the way her part was written left me feeling next to nothing. The same with Inception; I should have felt nothing but empathy for Dom losing his wife and being haunted by her, but I just didn't.
Oddly enough, I feel the same way about Raimi. Just look at the scene between Mary Jane and Peter Parker in Aunt May's hospital room in the first Spider-Man; I'm supposed to care that she's admitting her love for him, but the dialogue is so bad that I get taken completely out of the moment.
BTW, strange coincidence, but in my brief time as a movie reviewer for the school paper my two big reviews were of Spider-Man and Lord of the Rings, only these two directors biggest films (I must of had the nerd beat). It was great, I got out of school so I could go watch LOTR and submit my review before the deadline, and even still I wrote a template of the review the night before and literally phoned in the rest on a pay phone at the theater. REPORTING! Good times. =)
Nice! That must have been a lot of fun.
