Look, the cast here are great. Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, Ian Malcolm, they're childhood heroes and it was fun to see them back together. Chris Pratt and Bruce Dallas Howard are just highly enjoyable to watch, and they have their characters some fun moments. Omar Sy is always a delight, the kid was solid, and I really liked the good genius. For a Jurassic World film, the plot also wasn't complete idiocy, and they did at least try to make more realistic dinosaurs.

That said, even the hand-waved "pure genome" dinosaurs were weird looking, and all of the new species were ugly as sin. Our new apex predator was a literal abomination; the feathered raptor looked like it had been attacked with prop fluff and some hot glue; and I am never going to forgive what they did to my boy Therizinosaurus 😬 Honestly, the dinosaurs just looked bad. Blue and the T-Rex were well animated (although hot damn could they give the invincible Rex motif a skip for once, please 🤦‍♀️), but a lot of the other sequences were janky!

Though I will give them props for coming up with some fun action and decently interesting ideas. The Raptor vs Bike sequence was just dumb fun, and whilst the Raptor diving into the ice cold water was stupid, it did look kinda cool. I also enjoyed the thinly veiled Elon Musk references – I'm definitely on board with this whole "tech bro is a bit of an arrogant douche and a villain" phase Hollywood is going through 😉

And I liked that we're finally getting to explore some of the non-dinosaur ramifications of this level of gene editing. Do I need their to be a quasi-virgin-birth human clone running around? No, but the lost kid/estranged family motif is the franchise's greatest running gimmick. Does the idea that dinosaurs are not just part of the world's ecosystems make any kind of sense? Not at all, this remains dumb on every level, not least of all is that they only released a few dozen and now they're on every continent? How did the big ones get to Africa, swim the Atlantic?

But this is still the best entry in the modern trilogy... just about. It's definitely better than the last outing.