Ju-gotta-be-kidding-me World: Dominion

I finally had a chance to see the year's blockbuster. I give it four stars for fun, one for plausibility.  

Thirty years after the original film,  dinosaurs have been scattered all over the world thanks to poachers and ... well, something else must have happened.  The only thing the dinos have in common is that they're inaccurate to varying degrees and that apparently all of them have some genetic memory of Chris Pratt's raptor-calming hand gesture. There are of course new dinosaurs, and some of them are fun.  The titanic Dreadnoughtus gets an appearance, as does the astonishing scissor-handed Therizinosaurus (scaled up to T. rex size, of course) and the scary Giganotosaurus, which Alan Grant tells us (wrongly) was the biggest predator of all time.  (It IS the biggest dinosaur audio-animatronic ever built, and the filmmmakers deserve kudos for that.) 

Oh, how did Alan Grant get into this? Well, his old girlfriend Dr. Sattler is the first  person on Earth to have figured out that giant prehistoric locusts are being bred by an evil genetics firm in Italy whose pesticide is the only one that stops them. Thank, you, Dr. Obvious.  Owen Grady and Claire Dearing show up trying to rescue a cloned girl from genetic experiments or something (it doesn't make any more sense in context.) Transportation and entire facilities just seem to be wherever the heroes need them, and any dinosaur can apparently pop up anywhere in the world.  Ian Malcom and Henry Wu are along to say supposedly important things and issue dire warnings. There are new characters, like pilot Kayla Watts, but they don't make much of an impression.

This is basically a kaiju  film, and the mindless fun (a LOT of it) comes from the action sequences. Some of these are wonderful: they don't have to make sense. The series has gone on too long to make us think any major character will die, but the film almost kills them in endlessly entertaining ways.  (Did you know a Quetzalcoatlus could effortlessly down a twin-engine plane without harm to itself? You still don't, but it's entertaining to watch.) There's no real reason for Owen to be hunting and lassoing dinosaurs on horseback, but it's FUN.  So is being chased through city streets by big snarling carnivores and throwing a torch into a predator's mouth, where it inexplicably blazes up much brighter. My favorite pre-dinosaur synapsid, Dimetrodon, shows up (only, um, what is a sail-backed animal doing in a cave?). At the closing credits, everyone more or less gets what they deserve, including a satisfying"it was really you along" thing with Grant and Sattler.

So go for the dinosaurs. Enjoy their antics and fights, and chases, and be nice to them: after all, they didn't write the plot holes.