I am really ambivalent about Jurassic World: Dominion, now that I’ve finally seen it[1]. If you are unaware, it’s the follow on to Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in which dinosaurs are now a worldwide phenomenon after the events of that movie saw them rescued from Isla Nublar and then let loose. My ambivalence is as follows: on the one hand, it was a perfectly serviceable dinosaur action movie, with thrilling set pieces and characters that we have collectively cared about for decades, all getting a deserved swan song.

But on the other hand, after 24 hours to think about it… it was obligatory without being hardly anything else. Here’s the thrilling velociraptor chase through the streets of Malta, because there was a bad guy with tech from the last movie! But really all it does is make it harder for our heroes to board a plane out of town. Here’s the ice lake dinosaur in the southern Alps keeping our heroes from reaching a door on the far side of the lake. And it’s like, obviously I want thrilling dinosaur chases and dangerous stalking dinosaurs, but… I guess it’s that for most of these set pieces, there were no believable stakes or sense of danger. And Chekov’s knife fight remains, as of this writing, unfought on the mantel, about which I am personally offended.

In the end, I’m not saying it was bad. I had legitimate fun, and it was nice catching up with old friends and seeing a vision of a fundamentally altered world. But I am saying that I’m glad this story is over. It seems like they’re moving on to a new story next year, and I’m good with that, because I like the world they’ve made. But yeah. It’s good to let stories end.

[1] Full disclosure: the only reason this movie bubbled to the top of the list is that we both want to see the new season of Camp Cretaceous on Netflix, which is set near or after the events of this movie, and certainly was released years after. (That said, it was pretty cool seeing technology from the original show referenced in Dominion, as though it really is all one giant continuity. I like those, and am annoyed when it’s not a two-way street between movies and streaming.)