Three years after our heroes released a horde of rampaging dinosaurs, the prehistoric pests have ballooned into a problem only King Kong could solve. They’ve come back 65million years after their extinction, and at this rate they’ll still be here 65million year after ours.

Having managed a dinosaur park where hundreds of people got killed before releasing the dinosaurs on the world, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is still not in prison. Since then she’s added child abduction to the list, having taken up residence with Chris Pratt (who looks sick of dinosaurs) and the half-dinosaur girl from the last film (Isabella Sermon) in a dinosaur-infested woods.

In the spirit of resurrecting old fossils, Laura Dern and Sam Neil return as the original Claire and Chris Pratt, this time taking on the menace of GM wheat. They’re joined by a whole crop of new and old supporting characters who are modified to become whatever they need to be to fit in (Jeff Goldblum’s doom-monger is now a leading employee at genetic engineering company BioSyn – yes, really). But it’s quantity over quality, as the constantly yakking crew deliver endless exposition but no substance in a film which feels about an hour too long.

At the start of Aliens, Ripley has to be dragged kicking and screaming back to the alien homeworld which was host to the most traumatic experience of her life. If Aliens were part of the Jurassic World franchise, Ripley would start off living among the xenomorphs. And instead of the marines getting picked off they’d spend the film gathering superflous supporting characters until there were a dozen of them running around.

In the original film a fence breach on a largely uninhabited island was considered a major crisis. Here giant predators roam the lands, while a debate apparently rages about our responsibility to them, like they’re planning to reintroduce the beaver. But this is mere window dressing, and the moral question is casually side-stepped in favour of a threat involving giant locusts, who are surprisingly short on advocates.

The original Jurassic Park was 50% marvel at seeing realistic dinosaurs on screen and 50% suspense thriller. Dominion is nothing but a dumb action film, less Jurassic Park than Mission: Implausible, with John Williams’ glorious theme deployed only to remind us that we’ve seen these actors before. While it tries hard it doesn’t quite plumb the depths of stupidity of Fallen Kingdom, but is less fun, resulting in a pile of cretacious crap that deserves to go extinct for real this time.