Great pieces of cinema will always have their imitators, as they say, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Without Halloween we wouldn’t have Friday the 13th, which started off as an imitation but then took on a life of its own. It is never just enough though to copy something that is popular, it has to have something that makes it unique or it just becomes one of the thousands of movies that The Asylum releases. Hatched could have had some promise as a Jurassic Park adjacent film but it just turns into a miserable copycat movie that finds a way to make dinosaurs stalking people boring.

It was that time of the year for the family get together and it’s up to Jocelyn to keep everyone civil. With her grumpy father, sickly mother, and sister there for support they head up to their uncle’s isolated home. As if the abandon car wasn’t enough of a warning, the pool of blood outside the driver’s door let them know that something is wrong. While searching for their aunt and uncle they find their nephew, who has been dead for over a year, who tells them that the monsters got mommy and daddy.

The biggest criticism that most people are going to point at when they watch Hatched is going to be the poor CGI, but the problems do far beyond that. Not every dinosaur film can be Jurassic Park but when the special effects budget is limited there are creative ways to hide that and make the reveals more interesting. Instead the directors let you see the dinosaurs well lit and in the open in the introduction that not only leaves nothing to the imagination but shows the small budget in a way that will lose the audience.

Where the serious problems begin to set in is when the family arrives at the house. Having watched the uncle and aunt die in the introduction makes the family wander through the house pointless because there is no mystery. The film becomes boring and tedious until the the surprise appearance the a special forces team, they readily loses the intrigue  when they just add to the body count. The dinosaurs just show up, kill, people run away, rinse and repeat. Hatched blatantly takes from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom whether it is the isolated home full of dinosaurs, the secret cloning experiment, raptors opening doors, and still makes all that influence boring.

There is nothing worse than seeing wasted potential and promise in a film. A lot of work goes into making movies, making a script, choosing actors, picking locations, and even the CGI regardless of how it looks. There are moments though when it feels like the production’s heart is not in a project and it is instead a job for pay, putting out a product regardless of the quality. Hatched feels like a movie that was a throwaway job, which is disappointing especially when you see all the ways this film could have worked and not become completely forgettable.

4 out of 10