Jurassic World Dominion delivers in terms of dinosaurs and destruction

If your main interest in this franchise is spectacular dinosaur-heavy action, and lots of it, then this movie should make you happy. There's plenty of dinosauric destructiveness, right from the start, and very impressively done it is too. A mixture of CGI and animatronics is used to create all manner of creatures large and small.

Director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow (who also did double duty on Jurassic World in 2015) knows what most members of the audience want and ensures they get it.

In terms of story and characters and ideas, however, Jurassic World: Dominion isn't quite as satisfying as it could be. It might seem unfair, expecting a popcorn movie to grapple with big ideas, but when the script brings them up only to drop them, the filmmakers do bear some of the blame.

The latest instalment in the Jurassic franchise unites the Park and World series - in characters, in references - and shows, yet again, that the whole idea of bringing prehistoric creatures back to life was not a good idea and that people never learn from their mistakes or those of others.

It's set four years after Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). After the destruction of Isla Nubla in the previous film, many species of dinosaurs now roam the Earth - on land, in the air and under the sea, and all over the world (even Australia).

In some places they're a dangerous nuisance, like bears, that people just have to learn to live with and avoid, but when swarms of giant dinolocusts suddenly descend upon crops spread over thousands of kilometres, this obviously poses a major threat to all human life on Earth.

The three major characters from Jurassic World make up the first major storyline. Dinosaur trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his girlfriend Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), Jurassic World's former manager, live an isolated life with their adopted daughter Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), a clone of the prematurely dead daughter of the co-founder of Jurassic Park.

As well as being a teenager with the usual angst, she's got some identity issues.

But she'll soon have more pressing problems, when a group of kidnappers carry her off. Owen and Claire find out who's behind this and are soon in hot pursuit.

Meanwhile, old friends are reunited when paleobotanist Ellie Sadler (Laura Dern) visits paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to seek his help on the locust problem.

They travel to the HQ of Biosyn Genetics, where dinosaurs are kept and research continues and their fellow doctor, chaos specialist Ian Grant (Jeff Goldblum) is employed, still delivering his Cassandra warnings to unheeding ears. And another familiar character, biotechnologist Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), is also working there.

Another character from the past has become the main antagonist. Lewis Dodgson (the name an obvious nod to the real and pen names of the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), the chief executive officer of Biosyn, was played by Cameron Thor in Jurassic Park and is now played by Campbell Scott.

As villains go, he's a little bland, neither a potent threat nor given any meaty characterisation.

Dodgson talks about using the results of the experimentation to discover more about disease and illness, but it's not clear whether this is a bald-faced lie or an intriguing idea that falls by the wayside.

Certainly the possibility of doing more with the recreated dinosaurs than treating them as zoo animals has always been there, but it's not as much fun as letting the critters go crazy.

But given the long running time, surely some more thoughtful material could have been included before, to the surprise of nobody, the storylines come together.

This film - ending the second trilogy - has been described as being the last in the series. But if Jurassic World Dominion does well at the box office, it's hard to see these cinematic dinosaurs becoming extinct any time soon.