Despite the awful characterizations and plot twists of Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow’s screenplay, it appears that Bayona made an effort to mine great set pieces from the material.
Look for a nifty long take in the confines of a flooded capsule, a genuinely eerie bedroom showdown, and another one that finds humans battling a giant carnivore while dangling from a roof made of glass.
It often seems like he’s trying to stuff elements of his three previous features into a single blockbuster jolt: There’s the creaky house of his masterful horror movie “The Orphanage,” the child-versus-beast dynamic of “A Monster Calls,” and the apocalyptic natural chaos of his tsunami survival story “The Impossible,” all packed with all the organizing principles of a sandbag.