Jurassic World: Dominion  ★★★

THE Jurassic franchise can almost do no wrong.

I mean who doesn’t like dinosaurs and the studio behind these films has always been prepared to stump up enough cash for decent special effects.

The best instalment remains the 1993 original, based on a Michael Crichton novel and directed by Steven Spielberg.

While the popular stars of the original – Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum – didn’t stick around for the two sequels they were still watchable films.

The reboot, Jurassic World, was good fun and spurned Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and now Jurassic World: Dominion.

Dominion is being touted as the final instalment and brings together the three original cast members with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard from the reboot.

It certainly has plenty of dinosaurs, including some not seen in the series before, and the scenarios of human-dinosaur interaction and clever and entertaining for the most part.

Set four years since the events of the last film, dinosaurs are now part of the societal landscape and humans are still trying to learn how to live with and around them.

Chris Pratt’s character, Owen Grady, is now a dinosaur wrangler while Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing, the former operations manager of Jurassic World, now works to protect dinosaurs from poachers.

They live in a remote cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains where they are hiding Maisie Lockwood, grand-daughter of Jurassic Park dinosaurs creator Sir Benjamin.

Maisie is herself a product of cloning and therefore important to anyone trying to replicate Lockwood’s feat. Cue corrupt biogenetics corporation boss Lewis Dodgson who organises Maisie’s abduction.

The rest of the plot gets a little too dense with a number of threads being followed and stretching the over-arching narrative and audience attention.

It’s all in service of the franchise’s familiar themes of accepting the need to live together with our environment and not meddling in the science of nature.

All the key actors are individually charismatic but how they are all pulled together in service of the plot is less successful.

The dinosaurs themselves are interesting creations with a lot of use of animatronics. But the depiction of their size and scale isn’t as good as the recent Godzilla franchise, for example.

All that being said, we get back to the basic question and if you love your dinosaurs this instalment is again worth the watch on a big screen with strong sound.

The best sequence is the one set in Malta which occurs around the half-way mark. It’s thrilling, varied and expertly constructed, but unfortunately means the rest of the film doesn’t reach the same level.