Look on That Ending, Ye Mighty, and Despair!: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Now that I'm finally the last person in America -- apart from my mother and my youngest sibling -- to have seen last year's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom:

It didn't seem all that bad. Predictable, yes, but I have seen worse -- including the third movie in this series.

It did seem to go all over the place for a dinosaur movie: here's a scene for The Purge fans, here's a scene for people who like old horror films, here's some characters for Millennials and nonwhite fans to identify with, here's a scene for disaster movie buffs...

Granted, Steven Spielberg used to do the same a-little-something-for-everybody routine in his movies but the director of this movie ain't Spielberg. (Of course, after seeing a small glimpse of Ready Player One on cable recently -- a movie I ultimately found to be unwatchable -- I'm not sure that even Spielberg is still Spielberg nowadays.)

I must admit that I would have liked to have seen more of Zia Rodriguez the Latina dinovet (played by actress Daniella Pineda). (Yay, representation!) For that matter, I would have liked to have seen Bryce Dallas Howard's "first time I saw a dinosaur" speech delivered by someone like Laura Dern or Julianne Moore. And I still rather not see Chris Pratt in anything that doesn't have Aubrey Plaza in it. (Apparently having two Latina actresses in a movie like this would have broken the universe or something.)

However, in the end, I liked what I saw better than what I didn't see -- although I must admit that I don't know what to make of the -- ahem -- pro-life ending. Seriously, was that supposed to be a happy ending? Or else the director's subtle metaphor for global climate change?