Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

It used to be that dinosaurs belonged in the Jurassic period, humans in the modern era, and if dinosaurs appeared in the modern era, humans needed to get away from them, but like a living breathing example of Darwinian theory itself, the Jurassic Park series is trying to self-perpetuate and has evolved so that now there are unlikely relationships between some of the humans and dinosaurs, like between Chris Pratt's theme park trainer and Blue, the velociraptor in his care, and "dinosaurs-have-rights-too" groups have sprung up, and arguments abound on the money-making value of dinosaurs, their sentience, their feelings, and it is funny because all this effort to give the series some Planet of the Apes meat on its bones ends up just a lot of noise in this movie which hides within it the movie people actually want to see featuring podcars lodged in the jaws of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, second dinosaur attacks at just the right moment, and lots of running and screaming.

★★☆☆☆

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I, Robot (2004)

Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics are used as the philosophically interesting starting point of what you might hope is a Kubrikesque meditation on sentience, but Will Smith's Detective Spooner, investigating what might be murder committed by a robot, is a wise-cracking action hero of a distinctly Schwarzenegger type ("Control, Alt, Delete, A.I. mofo," he doesn't say but very well could as he sends a bullet through yet another metallic skull); although the flimsily plotted action garnered an Academy Award nomination for its special effects, it is hard to work out exactly what is happening in many of the cgi-heavy scenes.

★★☆☆☆

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