Jurassic World

The fourth film in the series and the first in 14 years, 'Jurassic World' serves up another theme park and another bunch of knuckleheaded scientists cloned from the same strand of foresight-impaired DNA. It has absolutely no reason for being – except for the obvious – but at least it chomps through your time painlessly.

A fully functioning tourist attraction has flourished on Isla Nublar, complete with a Starbucks, a baby-dino petting zoo, crammed gift shops and huge crowds. You wait (not very long) for something to go wrong – for some fat American kid to get eaten – but apart from a scary 'The Birds'-like aerial raid of pterodactyls picking off folks on Main Street, there's little payback rained down on mallrat culture.

Instead, sequel director Colin Trevorrow ('Safety Not Guaranteed') is content to execute a poor man's 'Aliens': he's got his Ripley figure in Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), a brittle park manager who blooms into a protective Amazonian mom; generically staged action sequences involving flares and bared shoulders; and an evil military motive represented by an extra-wide Vincent D'Onofrio.

Slickly enjoyable, the biggest misstep comes with puncturing original director Steven Spielberg's grandeur: 'Guardians of the Galaxy' star Chris Pratt, playing some kind of jokey animal trainer who lives in a trailer, turns velociraptors into docile dogs (a crime against classic cinema). Meanwhile, John Williams's trumpet fanfare is redeployed not at the sight of a towering brontosaurus, but at the park itself, packed to the gills. Subtly, the movie celebrates not science but money, and its own stubborn refusal to succumb to extinction.