Jurassic World: Dominion - fun enough and certainly spectacular despite the failings

Jurassic Park, back in 1993, was genuine gob-smacking event cinema. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime experience and left you positively gawping: just how on earth did they make all those long-dead beasties charge around all over the place with such awesome lifelikeness? After that, inevitably it was always going to feel like diminishing returns with sequel after sequel.

Jurassic World: Dominion is now the third film in the second series nearly three decades after the first, and the thought is inescapable: the very best films really ought, out of sheer respect, to be left to stand alone. Far better to seek to break new ground elsewhere than re-tread ground already trodden.

And yet, and yet…

For all its failings, its sheer repetition, its endlessly diminishing peril, its convoluted, rather silly plot, its far-too-long running time and its overabundance of characters, Jurassic World: Dominion really isn’t too bad at all.

Hardly great cinema, but it manages to reach the level of enjoyable enough.

One of the problems is that it needs us to remember bits and pieces from the previous films which were similarly fun at the time but equally forgettable.

Jurassic World: Dominion leaves you feeling you have never quite caught up with all the over-intricacies of the plot. But the gist is clear enough. We have reached the point where dinosaurs and humans need to live in co-existence. The dinos are back to stay and they aren’t going away.

The angle this time is that it’s a situation which opens up dastardly opportunities for the thoroughly unscrupulous, such as super-villian Lewis Dodgson, played by Campbell Scott, who has built a massive lair where, under the pretence of being nice to dinosaurs, he is breeding super-locusts which will devastate anything anywhere which isn’t protected by his own biochemicals.

The swine.

And it is going to take not just the most recent Jurassic heroes to defeat him (Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard) but also the Jurassic veterans from first time round, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill, a little bunch of neo-dinosaurs in their own right.

The plot depends overly on keeping them all separate, and it’s absolutely ages before they all manage to get to together to present a united front. Every time they solve one problem, a new one besets them. Each successive danger is replaced by a new one. There’s a “Here we go again” feeling which doesn’t actually ratchet up the tension; but you can at least admire the effects and the scale of the whole thing. There is plenty of time to.

After all the build-up, the solution to the super-locust problem is delivered in a couple of sentences which feels the oddest of anti-climaxes; and given none of the goodies are ever going to get splatted or gobbled, it’s never edge-of-the-seat stuff; but it certainly at the upper end of effects cinema –the kind where effects dwarf the plot.