Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)

A string of five or six encounters with dinosaurs - one encounter at sea, one on a cliff, another in some sort of tunnel, many involving water - with very little effort made to link these encounters with a sensible story or populate the episodes with characters you care less about and want not to get chomped or stomped.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jurassic Park III (2001)

This is the not so good one with Téa Leoni and William H Macy playing the annoying parents of a boy we little care about who has been lost alone on the Site B island of Jurassic Park - the one good thing the annoying couple do in order to get help locating their boy is trick Dr Alan Grant to return to the park (and so back into the series after an absence from number two).

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jurassic Park (1993)

I won tickets to see this in 2017 with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performing the John Williams score live, and the movie - about a dinosaur breakout in an ill-conceived Jurassic themepark - is so full of thrilling Spielberg setpieces and humour, and special effects still impressive today, that I forgot to stop even for a moment to appreciate the orchestra.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Jurassic World (2015)

There is a violent, undeserved death halfway through this Jurassic Park instalment that is almost torture porn, which is the moment audiences are likely to decide the dinosaurs-wreaking-havoc-on-a-theme-park spectacular, while still replete with the requisite genuinely exciting action set-pieces, is less of a lark this time around.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS