Movie Review: Jurassic World Dominion
What We Liked
What We Didn't Like
Like a meteor smashing into the Earth to wipe out the dinosaurs, Jurassic World Dominion crashes into movie theaters to extinguish the last vestiges of life in the wheezing Jurassic Park saga. Just weeks after Top Gun: Maverick reminded audiences of the joys of big-screen entertainment, Colin Trevorrow delivers what is possibly the dumbest, most insufferable blockbusters in years.
Nearly 30 years after Steven Spielberg brought dinosaurs back to life on the big screen, there are now six movies in the Jurassic Park franchise, and still only one of them is good. But Jurassic World Dominion is easily the bottom of the barrel, a film so bloated, dull and inept that it risks tarnishing the existence of Spielberg’s 1993 classic.
Which is a shame, because Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) suggested things might be improving from Jurassic World (2015). While Trevorrow’s first at-bat in the franchise was a brainless bit of nostalgia-pandering, J.A. Bayona’s sequel kept the stupidity but brought a bit of visual style, climaxing with a fun monster rampage. Most intriguingly, it set up a sequel that would seemingly go where no Jurassic film had gone before: a world where dinosaurs roamed free, and humans had to learn to coexist with them.
Dominion opens several years after raptor-whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his girlfriend, CEO turned dino-rights activist Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), set loose the dinosaurs and headed off to the Nevada wilderness, alongside Maisie (Isabella Sermon), a girl they just met who was revealed to be a clone (these are weird movies). Owen comes back to the ranch after a day of dino-wrangling, but has led a team of kidnappers straight to his door. They work for BioSyn, another evil genetics company, and they want to study Maisie; they also make off with a baby raptor, whose mother is Owen’s favorite dinosaur, Blue. Owen and Claire head off around the world to get Maisie and the baby raptor back.
But that’s not all. Jurassic World Dominion also brings back Jurassic Park’s core ensemble. Paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is called to investigate mysterious crop deaths, which have been caused by abnormally large locusts. Ellie quickly pieces together that the locusts were engineered by BioSyn to destroy any crops that don’t use their seeds. She enlists former colleague Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to help her infiltrate BioSyn’s headquarters/dinosaur sanctuary in the mountains of Italy. They are able to gain access because their old Jurassic Park buddy Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is on staff there, apparently paid to do TED Talks.
From moment to moment, Jurassic World Dominion has no clue what type of movie it is. It follows its two character groups into separate genres, never meshing the two organically. The older cohort stumbles through a corporate conspiracy thriller, trading dinosaurs for big bugs and monster mayhem for tales of corporate malfeasance. On the other side of the world, Pratt and Howard blunder their way through a tale of international intrigue, in which every former Jurassic World animal wrangler has suddenly obtained a job with the CIA or become black market dinosaur smugglers. This leads to an extended sequence in Malta, where Owen and Claire engage in a high-speed chase punctuated by random dinosaur attacks; if the movie revealed it was merging with the Fast and the Furious saga, it would not be surprising in the least.
There’s a certain bonkers charm to the idea of a spy thriller set in a world with dinosaurs. But Trevorrow’s script is so plodding and convoluted that any bursts of creativity and energy are stifled when the film stops to lecture about genetic ethics or let its elder characters bumble through a sub-Michael Crichton scientific conspiracy. For entire stretches, the movie seems to forget entire plot points exist, and there are even longer stretches where the movie seems uninterested in delivering the basic, primal adventure thrills that a Jurassic Park movie should supply. To reiterate: This is a movie set in a world where dinosaurs roam freely, and they instead plop half the characters in a lab to chase bugs. For a film that features a raptor/motorcycle chase, this movie exhibits a tremendous lack of imagination.
“Jurassic World Dominion.” Image credit: Universal.
Fallen Kingdom was able to overcome its brain dead plot by having sequences of visual inventiveness and atmospheric suspense. But Trevorrow seems unwilling, or unable, to pace a sequence properly, robbing the movie of any tension. Set pieces are edited to shreds, utterly incoherent on top of being preposterous. Occasionally, a clever shot may sneak in, such as one in which Claire escapes a dinosaur by heading underwater. But the film never seems interested in truly delivering any scares, terror, or excitement; it’s too eager to move on to the next sequence. The dinosaurs, even in gloriously detailed CGI, lack any wonder, awe or terror, and Trevorrow has somehow accomplished the remarkable feat of robbing velociraptors and T-rexes of all menace.
The film falls into the legacy/sequel trap of once again being too in love with the original movie, constantly calling back to lines and shots made famous 30 years ago. Trevorrow’s franchise pandering is even more egregious now that he has access to the original cast. There are gags about Goldblum’s open shirt, Grant’s technophobia, and Sattler’s slack-jawed looks of awe; and for those worried that Trevorrow would actually allow the trilogy to finish without bringing back the Barbasol can from the original, rest assured that it’s there, too. But nothing interesting is done with these callbacks; they simply exist to have audiences nudge each other in recognition and serve as constant reminders that this was once done well.
It is good to see Neill, Dern, and Goldblum together again, and despite the pointless plots they’re given, they still manage to charm. Goldblum, as most would predict, walks away with the film’s best quips, and there’s a sweet little romance that rekindles between Neill and Dern. They’re practically Bogart and Bacall next to Pratt and Howard, two traditionally likable actors who have had all charm drained from them over the course of the franchise. Howard acquits herself slightly better; at least Claire has had an arc in the franchise. Pratt, who’s at his best as a lovable doofus, continues to be a drag as Grady, whose stone-faced manly man is one of the most boring blockbuster leads ever created.
But even Pratt seems Oscar-worthy next to Campbell Scott as sinister BioSyn CEO Lewis Dodgson, whose line readings are constantly bizarre and at right angles to the film’s tone. And the film can’t decide what sort of adventure it wants to be; DeWanda Wise is fun as a badass pilot who decides to help the heroes, but she feels like she’s flown in from a more fantastical movie than everyone else. And B.D. Wong is utterly wasted as Henry Wu, a franchise mainstay beginning with his minor role in the first film and here reduced to a troubled, regretful villain seeking redemption (but still capitalizing on someone else’s work).
After two and a half hours of numerous mind-numbing dinosaur rumbles and lectures about bioethics, Jurassic World Dominion finally collapses across the finish line. By that point, a franchise that started with one of Steven Spielberg’s most successful crowd pleasers has long lost any joy, thrills, or fun. Universal has been marketing Dominion as the end of the saga, and hopefully they’re serious as it is time for this series to go extinct.
