You’d have to be some kind of idiot not to concede that Steven Spielberg has made a few awesomely good films. Too bad, then, that the man who made Schindler’s List still feels the need to compete with George Lucas for the title of World’s Oldest Fourth-Grader. A case in point is Spielberg’s Jurassic Park franchise, which started out with a fairly enjoyable Indiana Jones-style no-brainer, and got relentlessly stupider with every sequel. Jurassic Park IV is about to go into production in Hawaii, and the limited details of the plot that have been leaked suggest that it’s going to make Jurassic Park III: The Raptoring look like one of the Godfather movies by comparison.

Fairly reliable sources say that the fourth installment in the series is going to feature dinosaurs that have been trained to carry guns and grenade launchers, turning them into reptilian mechanized soldiers. This is the sort of bold trope we’ve come to expect from the director of Saving Private Ryan, a trenchant symbol of the dehumanization suffered by souls hammered on the forge of war…. Oh, bullshit. Back when I was eight years old, I filled up most of a Big Chief sketchpad with pictures like this, a point Bill Watterson understood perfectly well. Spielberg probably won’t direct this paleo-turkey, but he took the time to personally convince Laura Dern to return in the role of Ellie Sattler, so he must have a good feeling about the premise. Over at film.com, C. Robert Cargill suggests a few other premises that might appeal to this manchild. They’d be funnier if I didn’t have a sneaking suspicion that scripts resembling about half these ideas have already been greenlighted.