I need to talk about Jurassic Park because it’s been living in my head for over thirty years and I think that earns it a blog post.

The original Jurassic Park is a perfect movie. I don’t say that lightly. I say it with the full understanding that “perfect” is a big word and I am using it correctly. Spielberg took Michael Crichton’s novel about the hubris of genetic engineering and turned it into two hours of dinosaurs eating people and it is magnificent. The science is just plausible enough that your brain goes “yeah okay maybe” and then a T-Rex flips a car and you stop thinking about the science entirely because you are too busy having the best time of your life.

And the T-Rex breakout scene. Good lord. The water rippling in the cup. The goat disappearing. The fence. That roar. I was a kid when I first saw it and I’m pretty sure a part of my personality was permanently formed in that moment. The T-Rex is the star of that franchise and I will accept no arguments. Not the raptors — though the kitchen scene is elite — not Jeff Goldblum — though he is a national treasure — the T-Rex. She carried that series on her tiny, glorious arms.

Now. The Lost World.

I read Crichton’s The Lost World right before the movie came out. I was excited. I was ready. I had opinions about Ian Malcolm’s philosophical monologues and the implications of Site B and the different dinosaur behaviors Crichton explored. And then I watched the movie and Spielberg was like “what if a T-Rex walked through San Diego” and I was like “that… that is not what the book was about at all.”

Was I disappointed? Yes. Was the San Diego sequence kind of awesome anyway? Also yes. The Lost World movie is not the book. It’s barely even in the same zip code as the book. But it’s a solid “dinosaurs are loose and people are making terrible decisions” movie and honestly that’s all I really need from this franchise. Science plus monsters eating people. That’s the formula. It’s not complicated.

Jurassic Park III is the one where Sam Neill comes back and there’s a spinosaurus and a kid survived alone on a dinosaur island for weeks and honestly it’s fine. It’s fine! It’s not great. It’s not trying to be great. It’s trying to be “dinosaurs chase people for ninety minutes” and it accomplishes that goal with workmanlike efficiency. I respect the hustle.

And then we get to the Jurassic World era and this is where things get… complicated.

The first Jurassic World was fun. Chris Pratt training raptors was silly but it worked. The Indominus Rex was a cool concept — what if the hubris wasn’t just “we made dinosaurs” but “we made dinosaurs and then got bored of them so we made a worse one.” That’s a solid premise. The execution was popcorn entertainment and I had a good time.

Fallen Kingdom had the volcano sequence and then turned into a haunted house movie with a dinosaur in it, which is a sentence I just typed with my real hands. And Dominion — Jurassic World Dominion — tried to do so many things that it ended up doing none of them well. Giant locusts? The original cast back but with nothing meaningful to do? Dinosaurs just… living among us now? They jumped the mosasaur. They absolutely jumped the mosasaur.

Here’s the thing though. Even the bad ones? I watched them. Opening weekend. In the (home)theater. With popcorn. Because at the end of the day, a movie where a dinosaur eats someone is still a movie where a dinosaur eats someone and my brain has not evolved past finding that deeply entertaining.

The original is a masterpiece. The Lost World is a good time that disrespects its source material. III is fine. Jurassic World is fun. And the last two are what happens when you keep cloning something long past the point where nature intended it to exist — which, if you think about it, is exactly what the first movie warned us about.

Life, uh, finds a way. Quality control does not.