David Robert Mitchell is back with his first film in eight years, this time produced by JJ Abrams. It is initially amusing but oddly inert; contrived, derivative, commercially driven and weirdly inconsequential, a Spielbergian mashup about dinosaurs running amok in suburbia that doesn’t feel like homage so much as a pastiche produced by an AI Spielbergbot – except, I admit, for the moment we see two dinosaurs enjoy the full, physical flowering of romantic intimacy. That is not something Spielberg would feel comfortable showing – for dinosaurs nor, indeed, humans.
I was one of the frowning naysayers unconvinced by Mitchell’s madly indulgent LA fantasy-noir Under the Silver Lake, a giant disappointment compared with his breakthrough, the scary masterpiece It Follows. But at least Silver Lake had ambition and chutzpah. This feels as if Mitchell is going through the motions – someone else’s motions. We are in late-1980s small-town America; at one point, a character sits in a car listening to Steve Winwood’s Valerie. Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway are Greg and Denise Platt, an unhappy couple who live on Oak Street with their two kids, Brian (Christian Convery) and Audrey (Maisy Stella). Greg is ashamed of his failure as a breadwinner, having a humiliating side-job delivering pizzas. Denise is secretly writing an autobiographical novel about a woman planning to abandon her family.
