We can all safely agree that the best Jurassic Park movie is Jurassic Park. (If we can’t safely agree about that, I think we’re probably done here.)

But which Jurassic Park is the worst? Now that is a matter of some debate. Each sequel has something going for it; good performances, incredible special effects, ferocious dinosaurs. And most have problems too; recycled storylines, dumb villains, subplots about clones. In 30 years of trying, there hasn’t been a great Jurassic Park sequel. Arguably, there hasn’t even been a good one.

You can find more of the good and the bad this series always seems to offer in Jurassic World: Dominion, which combines the casts of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World in a story about a race to save humanity from total extinction. It features highlights like Jeff Goldblum’s swaggering chaos theorist Ian Malcolm and a wild motorcycle raptor chase in Malta, but it also contains yet another trip to a faraway nature preserve filled with dinosaurs that goes terrible wrong. (Plus, you guessed it: More nonsense with clones.)

Now that the whole saga is complete, we’ve tried to decide how these movies compare once and for all. Again, there’s no point in including Jurassic Park among the rankings; it’s the obvious and only choice for the best. But the rest? After a rewatch of the entire franchise, here’s where we landed, starting from the Jurassic sequel that’s maybe a little underrated to the one that is closest in experience to getting eaten by a dinosaur..

The Jurassic Park Sequels Ranked From Kind of Watchable to Horrible

Jurassic Park has produced five sequels, none of them wildly spectacular. Here they are, ranked from best (or okay-est) to worst.

5. The Lost World: Jurassic Park

Give me Jeff Goldblum’s lanky, awkward physicality over Chris Pratt’s macho, I-can-do-anything heroism any day. This is the closest Jurassic Park ever got to a really good sequel; all it’s missing is a better story, and especially some interesting (and not stupid) villains. Maybe that’s why you can feel Steven Spielberg’s disinterest in pretty much any scene that doesn’t involve frenetic dino action. At least the two big T. rex sequences — the one with the dangling trailer and then the rampage through San Diego — are showstoppers. While this movie garnered some of the worst reviews of Spielberg’s career, it looks a little better with the benefit of hindsight — especially since the subsequent 25 years showed just how difficult it is to make a great Jurassic follow-up.

4. Jurassic Park III

Jurassic Park III isn’t necessarily awful, but it does feel pretty low rent. To some folks, that’s its charm: It’s the lean-and-mean B-movie version of Jurassic Park, with Sam Neill’s Alan Grant getting duped into a trip to Isla Sorna by a couple (William H. Macy and Tea Leoni) whose son went missing parasailing off the coast of Jurassic Park. Parasailing in the vicinity of a dino wasteland is only the fifth or sixth dumbest-thing that happens in this movie, which tries to overcompensate for a simplistic script with a breathless pace that rarely lets up for 95 minutes. If all you care about are lots of dinosaur attacks and effects, Jurassic Park III will deliver. But in a world where Jurassic Park has all that and interesting characters and interesting ideas about technology and science and nature, it just doesn’t measure up.

3. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

By 2018, Jurassic Park/World had settled into a really predictable formula: People (including at least one or two kids) go to an island full of dinosaurs, spend 45 seconds marveling at the majesty of these amazing creatures, then run for their lives until the end credits roll. So at least Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom made a few compsognathus-size steps toward doing something (anything) different with the material. The first act is basically another Jurassic formula rehash, but then the whole story relocates to a mansion, and the movie becomes a sort of haunted house picture with raptors filling the role of ghosts. There are other elements that don’t work, like a silly clone subplot, but you can’t say Fallen Kingdom was the same old Jurassic Park.

2. Jurassic World

As Jurassic World’s resident raptor trainer, Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady is the de facto Alan Grant figure in the plot; the man called upon to admire and explain the power and beautiful of dinosaurs, while also cautioning the villains who want to exploit them against it. But Grant was a scientist with limited survival skills. He was always just kind of muddling through with his brain and some luck. Grady, in addition to knowing raptors, is also a former soldier, and he seems to be good at everything; he’s handy with a rifle, he can track animals and people, he knows how to get himself out of any situation. He never gets hurt, he never gets nervous, and he never seems to be in serious danger. Even worse, he knows how awesome he is, and he struts around Jurassic World, striking tough guy poses and acting like the King of Dino Island. That’s a really unappealing character to build an action movie around! Couple him with a beat-for-beat rehash of the original Jurassic Park’s story and you wind up with a boring movie, albeit one with very impressive production design and special effects.

1. Jurassic World: Dominion

Oof. On paper, combining the Jurassic Park and World casts sounded like a fun idea, especially in a movie that Fallen Kingdom set up to be about Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs invading the human world. And when the two casts meet, there are a few fun moments. (It’s hard to make something totally unwatchable with that many charismatic movie stars all onscreen together.) But why in the world is this movie about crop-eating locusts instead of the fact that dinosaurs have taken over the planet? It’s an incredible whiff on a potentially interesting premise — and even worse, it turns what should have been the most epic and unique Jurassic Park into yet another recycling of the original’s premise, with a bunch of scientists at a remote dino sanctuary that suddenly falls apart. Sure, part of this franchise’s key message is that those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. But should audiences suffer because the filmmakers refuse to heed their own advice?