Brief review:
There's not much to this movie, but it, finally, in the fifth film of the series, has a sequel hook that looks promising. The good thing about the movie is that it's finally figuring out the appeal of the franchise, but I'm not teenager who saw the first one when that would have been enough. I've seen lots of good CGI monster action since, and I was not all that impressed by the big mechanical Tyrannosaur head bumping into things in which Goldblum or Neil are hiding. Smaug & Drogon would make these things their bitches. So I kind of expect a story to go with the sequence of creature action vignettes and there really isn't one.

Also, someone decided that of everything from the last movie, what this one needed to bring back was Claire. The movies might be trying to teach that human greed is worse than dinosaurs (which is pretty ironic since it's the only reason these creative types keep getting paid to make stuff with the Jurassic [place] logo), but what I took away from Lost World & Jurassic World is that gingers are worse than dinosaurs. No one liked Claire, not even her nephews. Only maybe Owen likes Claire and he also likes velociraptors, so take that for what it's worth.

Anyway, Claire is now a dinosaur expert (before she was just an administrator who was in conflict with the dinosaur experts & enthusiasts) and has become a lobbyist for the protection of the dinosaurs running around in the ruins of the last iteration of the dino-zoo. And she is the worst, still. She's almost as bad as Julianne Moore's Sara Harding from Lost World, but at least she saves her preaching for only one or two occasions and doesn't constantly do the opposite of what she yells at everyone else to do. She does all the wrong stuff, just like Sara, but at least Claire didn't shriek at someone else not to do it five minutes before.

So the island where Jurassic Park & World were, is now threatened by a volcanic eruption and John Hammond's partner & collaborator in dinosaur making, whom the other movies forgot to mention, has set up a protected refuge for the dinosaurs, and his people need Claire's admin access to turn on the island's dinosaur tracking system to find the giant lizards stopping around the ruins of the zoo where they were born, raised & lived. And they are especially concerned with getting Blue, Owen's favorite raptor from the last movie, so she needs to recruit Owen for the mission. And they are way too white to be the entirety of the good guys in a movie in 2018, so they also drag along a couple of sidekicks, Zia and Franklin. Franklin is the black computer expert who will turn on the dinosaur tracking system and Zia is the oriental or hispanic dinosaur veterinarian because that's a thing we need, as if a sick or injured dinosaur (Latin for Terrible Lizard) is not a self-correcting problem. Neither Zia nor Franklin have ever set foot on Jurassic island or encountered a dinosaur in person (her practical studies in vet school must have been interesting) rather they work for Claire at her dinosaur right lobbying group, where Zia is really bad at her job of persuading people to take an interest in dinosaurs not going extinct (again. For like, the third time in 25 years), because she's incredibly abrasive & obnoxiousa strong, confident, powerful woman in the STEM fields who isn't having any of your misogynistic bullshit. Unfortunately, there is no misogynistic bullshit in this movie for her to rail against, so she is forced to take it out on people who actually have reasonable positions. Beyond that, she doesn't do very much. Whether or not the movie would have been appreciably different without her in it depends largely on your investment in the survival of the one dinosaur she treats. Franklin is also the worst. He is the Jar Jar Binks of this movie, except he doesn't serve any useful purpose, like introducing important characters to one another, and there is no indication that the other characters find him as annoying as the grownups in Phantom Menace found Jar Jar. Franklin is a physical coward and a weakling whose entire function in the movie is to turn on a single computer and give the functional human beings someone to worry about. I'd rather have had along Lex & Tim and I have generally had a very Alan-Grant-esque approach to dealing with children (terrorize when possible, ignore and avoid otherwise). At least Kelly, the Raptor Mesmerizing Gymnast, had an excuse for being childish, and was more butch than Franklin.

But there were dinosaurs fighting, "our" "favorite" scar-faced camera whore of a T-Rex makes an appearance, and there's some Jeff Goldblum lines. That stuff was not bad. The human plot line was an utter mess, but this one relied the least on humans, so if you're just in it for dinosaur action & peril, you should be fine. And they don't defeat dinosaurs with gymnastics and dinosaurs don't sneak up on people so well that you need them to have swallowed a phone in order to hear them coming.

Spoiler discussion:
They have to stop trying to make these movies about humanity's hubris in messing with nature, because they keep failing to show that. Whatever Ian Malcolm has to say on the subject, humanity does just fine. The problem in these movies is not the implacable advance & resilience of nature, the problem is that people keep opening dinosaur cages! And it's the good guys as often as not!

Claire & Own are utterly irrelevant to the plot of this movie. They don't stop anything. They are Egwene in the Seanchan attack on the White Tower - all they do is get a couple of bad guys killed. The intended thing that the bad guys want to happen, still happens, and the good guys kind of exacerbated it. Malcolm's recommendation to a government committee is to let the dinosaurs on the island die off, because they are dangerous and we don't know what we're doing. Claire's whole plot in the story is about trying to stop that, until an industrial accident makes is possible to happen, and she can hit a button to save the dinosaurs, and she doesn't, except someone else does. She ALMOST has a character arc, because at the end, her climatic choice is different from what she would have done at the beginning of the movie, but the movie doesn't really show how she got to that place. Killing dinosaurs is such a no-brainer that you shouldn't need a character arc to get to that place.

And the movie is really weird on the topic. On the one hand, from a Doylist standpoint, they want dinosaurs around so they can make movies about them, and their screenwriters don't have to think up a whole new reason why someone revived the cloning project, but they have Ian Malcolm, who is something of a moral barometer for the series, insisting at the beginning of the movie that they should be allowed to die out both as a correction of the mistake of making them in the first place and in view of the menace they represent. And despite being in near-constant danger from the dinosaurs, the protagonists are constantly concerned with protecting them.

I'm not even sure that they were really all that concerned with the bad guys' plan, which was to auction off the dinosaurs they rescued from the island as weapons, while Dr Wu pops up again in their employ ready to keep making more dinosaurs for them to sell, including the latest evil hybrid, a raptor version of the Indomitus Rex from the last film, called Indo-raptor. It doesn't seem to have the camouflage ability of its predecessor, and really is just more of a bigger, pointier raptor, that goes out of its way to hunt down the "cute" little kid. Honestly, once everything goes to hell, via the good guys randomly chucking a pachycephalosaurus into the auction, the Indo-raptor is chasing the little girl, the granddaughter of Hammond's heretofore unknown partner, played by James Cromwell in the dinosaur part of the house, she gets away and runs back up to her bedroom, and the Indo raptor takes a different path, precluding some sort of scent trail, outside the house, over the roof and then down into her window, like it REALLY has a grudge against this kid, and the knowledge and reasoning skills to act on it. They set up the peril of the scene so well, that in order to bust out of the corner the filmmakers have written themselves into, they have to have THREE different rescuers show up at the exact right moment to save the day.

It's a very weird thing (from a Watsonian point of view, the Doylist reasons are obvious) in that the man-made Indo-raptor, while killing its share of bad guys, is the only dinosaur to really go after the good guys. Every person killed or even menaced by a "natural" dinosaur is a participant in some manner in the evil dino-napping & auction scheme, or a good guy forced by circumstances to get in the dinosaur's way. The obvious reason for this is so the audience is amenable to sympathizing with the characters' desire to save and protect the dinosaurs, but they do so by turning them loose on a world that Ian Malcolm is yet again warning us is not prepared to adjust to their existence. Even though they only kill bad guys, the dinosaurs largely do so in circumstances that don't indicate they are capable of making a distinction, often just randomly grabbing a red shirt who happens to be standing there. So the scene of a water-dinosaur swimming through the surf of a recreational beach is meant to mean what? Aren't the dinosaurs good? But those surfers and swimmers aren't complicit in dino-slavery, and they are potentially threatened by the dinosaur, who, it is suggested, is the same dinosaur seen eating Claire's inoffensive assistant, on whom she fobbed off her nephews, in the last movie.

When "Jurassic World" came out, I was initially disappointed, as I thought the title suggested the dinosaurs were out of the park, and now running around the world threatening people like "Kah-thay", the child on the beach in "Lost World", only for the movie to start and we learn they don't LITERALLY mean Jurassic World, they just mean it in the sense of "Disney World" though that might be eerily close to meaning the same thing these days. So all subsequent JW sequels will deal with the new park in the way the 3 JP movies dealt with the first park... except the finale of the dinosaurs all escaping into the wilds of North America and Ian Malcolm's closing speech suggest that from here on out we're getting the literal Jurassic world.

Of course, I have the same logistical reservations I had after watching "Rise of the Planet of the Apes", namely, a very low breeding population running around in a limited region of North America hardly comprises a "world" or "planet" and people still have way too many weapons available to hunt down or at least hold off a small group of non-sapient animals. I guess we're also supposed to overlook the whole all-female thing. Yes, the first movie established the work-around for that, but all that does is highlight the ineptitude of the people who are supposed to be handling this stuff. The Indomitus Rex did not get out and wreck the zoo because careless geneticists made a dinosaur that's too powerful, it got out because the morons supervising it left the doors to its cage open. They did this by OVER-estimating its capabilities, and assuming it had escaped, when in fact it was just hiding REALLY well. Which they knew it could do. And they are doing something similar by winking along and encouraging the audience to assume the dinosaurs who escaped the volcano are capable of reproduction. Yeah, single-sex is one way to do that. Another is by scraping out their genitals when they are babies in your damn lab!

But even stipulating their contraceptive ineptitude, it's still a tiny number. Are we supposed to believe the one tyrannosaurus and the one raptor we see escape are going to create a wild population that menaces the world? Also, this persistent notion in the J-World movies that there is a fortune to be made in dinosaur soldiers seems highly unlikely. Having a character point out the historical military use of animals in warfare only highlights to the history buff, much less expert, that we more or less stopped doing that once we had guns and engines. The last army that really relied heavily on animals was the German Wehrmacht, which got curb-stomped so hard that the country completely reversed their historical position on having testiclesmilitarism and developed something of a national obsession with building cars, presumably so that they will never again need horses in a time of national emergency. Adding pointy things to animals, and making them more logistically challenging to maintain and get into a fight does not change the fact that guns win fights, and animals can't use them.

Also, the politically correct stuff HAS to stop. The new indicator of whether a character is going to be good or bad, or his chances of surviving to the end credits now seems to be how deferential that character behaves toward a shrill British waif. You know the bad guy is actually a bad guy when he snaps at the little girl. At that point in the movie, all we know about this kid is that she is a privileged spoiled brat, who makes a game out of terrorizing her elderly caregiver, and is interrupting the "bad" guy during an important and stressful call with people on an exploding island. But because he snapped at her for a moment, before calmly asking her to go to her room so he can talk to her later, I knew he was actually evil.

There is a similar scene with the token strong female, Zia. Before we know the bad guys are bad (it's a team of soldiers, in a movie associated with Stephen Spielberg & not Michael Bay, played entirely by white men - shoulda known they were bad), they are accompanying Owen to track down Blue, his raptor buddy, to save her. First the lead bad guy questions her desire to go into the jungle (she's an academic who has evinced no indications of outdoors qualifications, abilities or interests and came in the company of two coworkers with similar inclinations), and she takes a tranquilizer dart off his person, makes a threatening gesture with it, and snaps at the leader of a team that has successfully captured several dinosaurs already, that they are going to need her expertise to make sure they don't overdose the raptor. So that should have been my first clue, that they ran afoul of Zia and her Aunt Flo a smart, strong woman. Then, they find the raptor, Owen does his little dance, and Blue doesn't seem to be buying it, so the soldiers surround them with tranq guns. Blue jumps on one soldier, takes a couple of tranq darts, is still trying to kill the human being who is trying to rescue her from a volcanic eruption, so the near-victim pulls out his sidearm and wounds her, despite the leader clearly upset that he is endangering the animal they came to save. Owen is furious that this man had the temerity to protect himself from a larger carnivore that was actively biting him, and is confronting the leader, in spite of the leader having objected to the gun shot in the first place. So the leader shoots Owen with a tranq dart. At that point, Zia picks up the injured soldier's dropped pistol and points it at the leader, before they make her put it down, because they have more & bigger guns. We are, by now, clearly supposed to view these soldiers as having shown their true, evil, colors, except everything they have done to this point has been perfectly reasonable! Zia drew a gun on men who had done nothing wrong, aside from being traditionally masculine white males in a movie in 2018, who had even used non-lethal means to protect themselves from a man who was more willing to see a human redshirt die than a velociraptor! Zia does nothing from the rest of the movie except snark and treat the injury to a raptor that tried to kill her rescuer.

Also, if Blue is smart enough to be worthy of respecting her right to life, her attacking a human is something akin to blasphemy, since she should be able to recognize & appreciate her creators.