Not even the hilarious Jeff Goldblum can save Jurassic World: Dominion

Enlarge / Jurassic World: Dominion, out this week exclusively in theaters, brings the gang back together—but that's maybe not a good thing. (credit: Universal)

How low can you set your expectations for Jurassic World: Dominion?

If you can burrow those expectations deep into the earth, perhaps so far that researchers don't discover them for thousands of years, you may have a good time. That goes double for parents who are looking for a movie to watch with amped-up, pre-teen dinosaur aficionados. The film's ideal audience agrees with its filmmakers about what matters here: the dinosaurs, not the humans.

This is the kind of film in which a Quetzalcoatlus appears on the horizon, and a character responds by saying its name briskly yet accurately, just before the majestic flying dino emerges in terrifying and detailed fashion. This creature gets better and fuller justification for its actions than pretty much any actor in the film—which might have been fine, had Dominion's writers not spent so much time trying, and failing, to stitch its characters' motivations together.