Needless to say, most people, critics and civilians alike, disagreed with my negative take on Incredibles 2. Biggest opening of all time for an animated film, 94% fresh rating at RottenTomatoes.com, A+ Cinemascore — plus a few disappointed comments on the Reader’s website. Like this one:

“Let’s can all the pretentiousness and the complaining of people who just finished watching the first movie so they could either attend ‘knowingly’ or write a seeming authoritative review. Watch 2 in a row... you, there will be some sameness. Wait 14 years, hmmm.....maybe that’s enough time between takes to riff on the same themes.”

On the one hand, yeah…14 years does seem long enough to justify revisiting the themes of the original. On the other hand, it’s probably good to have something new to say, and it’s probably really good to say it well if you’re going to follow up such a fine original effort. Contra the commenter’s supposition, I didn’t just finish watching the first movie; it’s been years since I saw it. But it did what it set out to do so well, and it inspired enough conversations with my children, that no refresher was required to make a detailed and somewhat damning comparison to the sequel.

Ditto Sicario: Day of the Soldado, reviewed this week. As an action movie set amid the horrific brutality of the Mexican cartels, it’s not terrible. As a followup to 2015’s Sicario, it’s a disaster, in part because it does violence to the original’s vision and characters. If you didn’t want to inspire comparison, maybe you shouldn’t have made a sequel.

Patrick Lyon, a cinephile I know who shared my disappointment with Incredibles 2 wrote to say that the film “left me considering again something I have held for a while, which is that a movie has to stand on its own merits. I have always hated the argument of “you need to see this [other] movie and read these books in order to really understand,” when it comes to a film. Some Star Wars films are particular offenders here. If a movie is a good movie, it does not require you to have seen and read a thousand other things. Great movies stand on their own.

“However, that [notion] has recently been put to the test for me, particularly by the most recent Avengers movie. I thought it was particularly well executed, at least given the massive restraints and expectations it had.” [Pause for spoiler alert about Avengers: Infinity War.] Lyon writes that the big stunner at the end, “when the heroes are turning to dust, did not land with me. And it was precisely because of external factors. I knew that 90% of those characters would not stay dead, because they are tied in to other movies and franchises, and so their ‘deaths’ rang hollow.

“However, that sort of violates my rule that a movie should be judged on its own merits. Within the movie itself, it should be effective, and yet I didn’t find it effective, for external reasons. Quite frankly, I would have had a great deal of respect if that movie had been the end of the MCU. But it is not. I have been considering this more and more: Is the ‘stand alone’ philosophy a good principle, or should it be more nuanced than that?”

Lyon’s experience echoed my own. During that big scene in Avengers, my thoughts ran something like this: Oh my gosh. They just killed… Holy crow, him too? And her? And him? But they’ve already announced all those sequels. Was that all a ruse? Could they be that gutsy? The scene wasn’t even over, and I was wondering about Marvel’s marketing strategy. I could admire the movie’s ending, but those “external reasons” kept me from entering into it.

Happily, this sort of external conditioning isn’t always deleterious. I probably wouldn’t think as much as I do of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom if I hadn’t thought so little of both its predecessor Jurassic World and director J.A. Bayona’s previous feature, A Monster Calls. Starting with the latter: A Monster Calls deals with a little boy who is facing the loss of his sick mother, and who is visited by a monster who helps him to understand himself and his fear. Bayona weaves a remarkably similar storyline into a franchise film about dinosaurs, and even more remarkably, he makes it work to genuine emotional effect. The film asks the question, “Having created monsters, do we have the right — perhaps even the obligation — to destroy them?” And the little girl who spends so much of the film screaming, running, and hiding from the monsters in her house provides an answer.

And the dinos are monsters, make no mistake. The biological definition of “monster” is “a grossly anomalous fetus or infant,” and the word is taken from the Latin monstrum, which may be translated “unnatural event.” Like Victor Frankenstein’s monster, these critters were cooked up in a lab, and the deviation from the natural order — expounded upon so delightfully by Jeff Goldblum at the film’s beginning and end — has very real, concrete consequences. (Short version: babies need a mother.)

Skipping back to the former: Fallen Kingdom does a much better job of catching the spirit of Spielberg’s original than Jurassic World, and it does so by giving us characters akin to Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond, the Man Who Resurrected Dinosaurs. Someone we’re inclined to like. Someone who wants to do something wonderful. But someone who, it turns out, has made a terrible mistake. The obvious candidate here is James Cromwell’s Benjamin Lockwood, who just wants to gather up the endangered dinos and give them sanctuary. But the film goes further, and puts some of the responsibility on our handsome leads, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. It’s a gutsy move, one that works as well as it does because we’ve spent a previous movie learning to like them. Fallen Kingdom isn’t a great movie, but then, it doesn’t have to stand on its own.