Leading up to the release of the sixth and supposedly final entry in the Jurassic Park franchise, I decided to revisit all of the previous films. While the first film is damn near a masterpiece the sequels become a series of diminishing returns that cumulate in the dismal one-two punch of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World: Dominion. While Kingdom was considered the worst of the series Dominion sure wants to give it a run for its money.
The newest film wants to be a great saga capper like the final Harry Potter film, full of emotion and great moments that serve as an homage to the series but also wrap it up, instead, it’s worse than The Rise of Skywalker (which ironically Dominion director Colin Trevorrow was supposed to direct.) Trevorrow sucks all the life out of this once fun franchise and pushes it into tedium. Even the return of the “big three,” Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum can’t save this film from itself.
What was once a story about the ethics of playing god while trying to survive on an island full of dinosaurs has become a convoluted mess. Subplots about human cloning and tech billionaires go nowhere and you’re left wondering what the message of this film is. Even the subpar The Lost World had a little to say about big game poaching and greed before dialing up to ten on the dinosaur action. Here is a film that forgets it’s supposed to be scary, thrilling, and fun, and instead becomes boring, cliched, and tiresome.
Dominion opens with an internet newscast (always great) to catch us up on what happened before. Setting the stage for the events of Fallen Kingdom to play out. The biggest development of that film was that dinosaurs were set loose and now run rampant in the world. An interesting premise that the new film decides to explore for a good ten minutes before shrugging it off for another big-corporation-doing-bad-things-with-dinosaurs plot.
Our Jurassic World heroes Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are now surrogate parents to cloned human Maisie (Isabella Sermon) and hiding out in the Sierra Nevada. And they are not very good parents at that. Maisie wants to see more of the world but she has to stay in hiding. That is until, predictably, she is kidnapped. Once again another set-up to something that would pay off, perhaps Owen and Claire learning how to be better parents but instead Trevorrow shrugs this off too and switches gears.
In what feels like a different movie, Ellie Sattler (Dern) enlists the help of Alan Grant (Neill) and Ian Malcolm (Goldblum) to understand why a mysterious group of prehistoric locus is decimating crops across the mid-west. (Yes, seriously.) This leads the group to another evil corporation headed by Lewis Dogson played by Campbell Scott, who is doing a poor man’s imitation of Mark Rylance’s character from Don’t Look Up.
What follows is a globe-trotting “adventure” that feels like a rip-off of Mission: Impossible, and features plot points that are so complicated and confoundingly stupid that I won’t mention them here. All I have to say is that if the mind-numbing and overly long dinosaur fights and the ludicrous dinosaur auction of the previous World films are your favorite parts of this franchise then you’re in luck. If you enjoy films with actual characters, stakes, or you know a soul, look elsewhere.
Trevorrow (who co-wrote all three Jurassic World films) is a set-up man. He loves to set up really cool ideas and themes, and then never follow through on any of them. Do characters learn lessons? How does the world cope with dinosaurs now in the wild? Do these dinosaurs deserve to be saved? What did the original characters think of the fully-functioning Jurassic World theme park? We don’t know, because Trevorrow refuses to explore any of these ideas. He puts them on the screen for a moment and then brushes past them, in a hasty attempt to get to the next boring dinosaur fight. He doesn’t even want to make the dinosaur scenes any different, just more of the same. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Say what you want about the overly long t-rex cliff scene in The Lost World at least it was exciting.
To not acknowledge the effects and production design would be a disservice to the men and women who worked hard on them. The dinosaurs look great, and the use of practical effects with CGI is a welcome return. Overall it’s a mostly well-crafted film, it’s just too bad their hard work fell into this overly long slog.
To me, the failure of this film lands on Trevorrow. Even his directing leaves something to be desired. There is no sense of space in the action and it becomes difficult to follow, his camera movements shaky, sporadic, and disjointed. There are moments when characters see dinosaurs off-screen and react, but it’s not scary, it’s disorientating because you don’t even know where the character is or what they are reacting to.
I really wanted to like this film, I wanted this to be better than it is but beyond the first ten minutes or so this film just falls apart. Poor pacing, convoluted plotting, and groan-worthy callbacks plague the film and just keep beating it down. If you’re looking for your nostalgia fix and want to see an actual movie, just see Top Gun: Maverick. To use a cliche, it’s best this franchise just goes extinct at this point and is put out of its misery.
1/5
Jurassic World: Dominion
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Written by Emily Carmichael & Colin Trevorrow
Starring Chirs Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum & Sam Neill
In Theaters Everywhere June 10th