Jurassic World

Essential as the start of the modern trilogy, and the single most useful thing it does is deliver the premise the first film withheld: the park opens, it works, and it has been running for years. Twenty thousand visitors a day, a monorail, a Jimmy Buffett restaurant and a petting enclosure for baby triceratops, all shot with the scale of a functioning resort.

The film's idea is that this is no longer enough for anyone. Attendance plateaus, the board demands a new attraction, and the park's scientists build a larger animal to order because focus groups asked for more teeth. That is a joke about the audience watching it, made explicitly in dialogue, and the film is smarter about its own commercial position than it usually gets credit for.

It is much weaker on people. Claire is written as a corporate woman who must be taught to care about children and is given an arc that consists of becoming less composed, Owen is a collection of competences, and the two nephews exist to be endangered. The dialogue is functional at best.

What it delivers is scale and a genuinely good last ten minutes, in which the solution to the problem involves letting two existing attractions handle it. It made over one and a half billion dollars, which is why there are three more of these. Watch it before Fallen Kingdom, which follows directly.