After I wrote down my thoughts, I checked out rotten tomatoes and found I agreed with several critics who said it was slight, but worth the 90 minute run time.

Don’t expect deep lore or, frankly, a scenario that really makes all that much sense. The setting is there to allow for interesting tools and obstacles, not to thematically explore a 65 million year old civilization or consider human impact on nature or anything like that.

As you said, the sci-fi element is just dressing - it could easily have been set in any other sort of world.

Yup. Any setting that was isolated and dangerous, with rescue that is possible but delayed. Old west, desert island in the age of sail, remote modern wilderness, even a war zone if you deemphasized the human element. Scifi was literally just so it could have dinosaurs and an escape pod.

it wasn’t really for me.

I’m not entirely sure it was for me either, LOL, though I liked the two leads and overall it has its moments. I think knowing the meta situation, that a dinosaur movie starring Kylo freakin’ Ren had made absolutely zero impact on the cultural conversation, meant something would be off somehow. I was pleasantly surprised that it was at least partly a question of ambitions and wasn’t simply awful from end to end, but I was also glad it was a tight 90 minutes.

It’s like if Terrence Malick made a B-movie over a three day weekend.