'Jurassic World' is a dumb movie. The storytelling is messy, the human characters behave inconsistently and without logic, and there isn't a five-minute stretch of the film that withstands even casual scrutiny.

I had an absolute blast watching it.

The original "Jurassic Park" is a childhood favorite and a legitimately great movie. Many people of my generation feel this way - probably the biggest contributor to the new film's record-shattering opening weekend. In our nostalgia-obsessed culture, "Jurassic World" only needs a few notes of classic John Williams score to justify its existence.

"Jurassic World" leans hard on this nostalgia. It ignores the previous two sequels (because most people would rather forget them) and uses music/imagery/characters from the original to distract us from its own clunky storytelling. "Jurassic World" is a ruse, but a well-calibrated one.

The new film cast a spell on me, even when I knew it was pandering to my impenetrable nostalgia. Whereas "The Lost World" and "Jurassic Park III" steered away from the first film's theme-park setting, "Jurassic World" shows us the "ooohs" and "aaahhs" of a fully-functional dinosaur attraction. It's exactly what the kid version of myself wanted to see in a sequel to "Jurassic Park" back in 1993. Look through some of my old journals as a kid and you'll probably find several set pieces of this movie. More theme park! More dinosaur fights! More Dr. Wu!

"Jurassic World" seems to know its place in the world. A control room technician played by "New Girl" star Jake Johnson appears in the movie to explicitly comment on how "Jurassic World" will never be as good as "Jurassic Park." He even wears a certain iconic T-shirt to prove his allegiance.

Other characters in the film chastise the theme park visitors as bored skeptics who crave something bigger and badder. The movie's chief antagonist, the genetically-modified Indominus Rex, is tirelessly evil and overstocked with numerous superpowers. The I-Rex's absurd villainy makes the military-trained Velociraptors seem like a logical and rational form of retaliation. Everything is so hilariously absurd and thrillingly staged it's easy to forget the movie is often making fun of us for enjoying it.

Couple that with the occasional sprinkling of nostalgic reverence, and you have a sequel the 10-year-old me always wanted - a movie that throws everything at the screen and doesn't care what sticks. It dares any kid with a pile of action figures to dream of something more chaotic.

I've written about the mechanics of filmmaking for years now, and more often than not, I've bemoaned just how nonsensical and overblown Hollywood movies have become. While "Jurassic World" is further evidence of that problem, it has dinosaurs, and I had fun. Some things just don't make sense.

I'm not letting "Jurassic World" completely off the hook. There's a streak of mean-spiritedness here that parallels the ugliest elements of "The Lost World," most noticeably in an extended death scene during the Pteranodon (flying dinosaur) attack.

I also don't understand what Vincent D'Onofrio is trying to accomplish with his performance. Then again, nobody in the film is given much of a character arc. Chris Pratt charms the pants off the screen despite having no real story purpose, and I still can't decide if Bryce Dallas Howard's character is a stock relic from sexist Old Hollywood or a role model for modern female empowerment.

Then the last 30 minutes of the movie gives us dinosaur battles so over-the-top that you can't remember anything else. I wanted to cheer, then smack myself over the head for liking it, then cheer again.

"Jurassic June" concludes next week with something (hopefully) as ridiculous as a Velociraptor Motorcycle Gang. Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.