There is nothing I can say or do, short of killing you, that will keep you from seeing Jurassic World. In fact, you have probably already seen it. If you are 15 years old or younger, you have probably already seen it more than twice.

We’ve been conditioned since babyhood to love dinosaurs – exhibit one: that dreadful purple Barney, who should have been strangled at birth. But the love story goes way further back, at least to 1914, when Winsor McCay introduced his silent cartoon of Gertie the Dinosaur. The transition from lovable dream-creature to terrifying monster began with the piecing together of early fossils that became recognizable as Tyrannosaurus Rex, originally named Dynamosaurus imperiosus, if you can believe it.

(And as the above clunker suggests, screenwriters who don’t know any Latin should steer clear of inventing new words in that language. The new movie’s big new genetic mash-up villain, they have named Indominus Rex, which loosely means King Not-the-master, which is the opposite of what they were trying for. They could have created the un-mastered king with Indominatus Rex, or gone for the much handier Rex Invictus. Anyway, it should be Regina Invicta because the rampaging horror is, of course, female. I guess the Spinosaurus from Movie 3 didn’t score well on audience polls.)

This is about as liberated-female-in-charge as the script is willing to go. Jurassic World, which has come on-line with a vengeance since the first three movies, is run by a prim executive named Ms. Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard, as icy as a frozen mammoth) who is supposed to be taking care of her two adorable nephews but instead hands them off to an assistant (female, natch) who couldn’t keep up with a baby tortoise.

The mischievous boys take off on their own, and do you think they’re going to collide with the fierce Indominus, who has just escaped from her holding cell? You do? Take the next red-eye to Hollywood and let me know how your screenwriting career gets on. The boys end up in a plexiglass Gyrosphere which, wait, THEY ARE PILOTING THEMSELVES. This park sends pairs of kids out among the monsters, and lets them go where they want to at their own speed?

You and I both see the problem here, but apparently the company suits saw no problem with it, nor with hiring feckless teenagers at minimum wage to run the rides.

Ms. Dearing, meanwhile, is busy trying to figure out where her new dinosaur has gone, and how to collar it before it hits the tourist area and costs the company simply billions of dollars by eating the public. She is aided in this effort by a stalwart young “animal expert” (how do you get to be one of those?) named Owen, played by Chris Pratt with one facial expression, and if you’re lucky you might catch it.

For all its hype, this movie comes off as a non-event. We know they can do dinosaurs. Can they deliver a good story? No, but they can do more dinosaurs. And an admittedly stomping good chase scene with Velociraptors that, for a mercy, doesn’t end the way you expect it to.

At my showing I sat with the target audience, eight-year-old Xander, who professed to love the whole movie, and who really couldn’t stop bouncing during that chase scene. Meanwhile his Dad and I admitted to a nostalgic frisson at the appearance of our old friend T Rex.

What the movie does do, and this is no surprise, is deliver on the CGI critter promise, and although the first Jurassic Park’s combination of CGI with animatronics made for some blissfully horrendous moments, the effects here are seamless and impressive. The funny thing about Jurassic World is that it plays coy with its new attraction.

We see hints and glimpses of the Indominus, but instead of seeing her in action we get scenes of the havoc she has already wrought. I say they’ve spent the money, so let us see her slaughtering the brachiosaurs for fun! Oops, there was my inner 12-year-old talking…

An interesting realization about most of these movies is that the bad guys turn out to be the greedy international corporations who run the show. From InGen’s early days, when it supported John Hammond’s sophomoric grasp of science, up to the current offering where the big guys are more concerned with profits than with the safety of their guests, the subtext of these movies is that the dinosaurs are just doing what comes naturally; the real monsters are the grasping, covetous rich guys who want to get richer. We must remember, Hollywood seems to be telling us, the giant corporations are not our friends. And coming from that source, the moral falls somewhere between Useful Lesson and Blazing Hypocrisy.

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