OnScreen Review: "Jurassic World: Dominion"
Ken Jones, Chief Film Critic
For many people my age, Jurassic Park was a movie event; one of the ultimate summer blockbusters. Personally, I’m fairly high on the movie, but it has never really been in the highest pantheon of summer blockbusters for me, but rather on the next tier down. Sequels in a trilogy followed with diminishing returns, and then, after a long hiatus, a new trilogy began with Jurassic World and a new cast. While it didn’t quite reach the heights of the original, it has enough promise that there might be more than mere nostalgia carrying the franchise along; Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom snuffed out that notion. Of course, a sequel to close the trilogy had to happen, and now we are treated to Jurassic World: Dominion, which should put this franchise to rest.
With the Jurassic World being not just a sequel but a legacyquel, it’s bringing back all of the important cast member not just from previous Jurassic World movies but the original trilogy too. Not only are Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) back, but so are Drs. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). Also along for the ride is Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) as a human clone that Owen and Claire are protecting from a nefarious corporation.
That nefarious corporation is called Biosyn, a name that originates from Michael Crichton himself, but feels like it is right out of the “Unobtainium” central casting. Speaking of central casting, Campbell Scott is Lewis Dodgson, the Steve Jobs stand-in that runs Biosyn, recasting the brief character that met with Nedry in the original movie. Why they decided to mold him after Steve Jobs, a CEO who has been dead for over a decade now and wasn’t that compelling of a villain archetype in movies when he was still alive, is beyond me. Also, BD Wong’s Dr. Wu is toiling away in Biosyn’s labs on a dinosaur sanctuary in Italy trying to atone for his previous sins. Or is it syns?
Anyway, Jurassic World: Dominion is supposed to tackle the debate about who the dominant species in this brave new world is going to be: dinosaurs or humans? The answer, of course, is neither. Instead, director Colin Trevorrow and screenwriters Emily Carmichael and Derek Connolly, ask the question, “What if we made a Jurassic World movie but mashed it together with James Bond and instead of the dinosaurs, the focus was on giant locusts?” Because that it what they did.
Yes, in a movie that is nominally supposed to be about dinosaurs, the dinosaurs arguably take second, third, or possibly even fourth billing behind the giant locusts that are decimating non-Biosyn crops, the human clone that they view as intellectual property and the “deep” ethical questions of human cloning, and the splicing of the original stars of the franchise with the new stars to give the fans the memberberries nostalgia hit. There is obviously time devoted to the dinosaurs and there are the requisite dinosaur interactions with fights and fleeing, and culminating in a typical dino vs. dino showdown, but it’s all been done before and it feels rote.
The James Bond stuff comes in the form of Owen and Claire attempting to track down and rescue Maisie after she is kidnapped by poachers who also steal Blue’s baby raptor, to whom Owen makes a solemn pledge to that he will retrieve her. This takes them to Malta, where there is a car chase sequence involving raptors that only attack targeted people. While Bonding it up in Malta, they cross paths with Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), a mercenary pilot who suddenly grows a conscience and decides to help them find Maisie, flying them to the dinosaur sanctuary in Italy (To her credit, Wise is one of the bright spots of the movie.). This also happens to be where Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler have gone to investigate the giant locusts under the guise of an invitation from Malcolm, who is serving as a kind of lecturing genetic ethicist for Biosyn. Of course, the two groups eventually join forces in the forests when their missions inevitably go sideways.
There are a few moments of levity and entertainment, seeing Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum sharing the screen together again is not without its charm, and seeing them interact with the newer cast elicits a few laughs, but not much of the action is all that compelling or interesting. And more than anything, the movie is shockingly safe. At only one moment in the film did I ever genuinely fear for the safety of one of the main characters and wondered whether they would all make it to the end credits.
I rewatched Jurassic Park the night after watching Dominion, and there is a freshness and awe and spectacle to that movie that is completely lacking in this one, and has been in every sequel since the original’s 1993 release, except for fleeting moments in Jurassic World. The dinosaurs are sparsely and judiciously used in Jurassic Park, they are commonplace in Dominion. The movie makes attempts to nod to the past, our first reintroduction to Ellie Sattler recreates a shot from the original movie. The Barbasol can that Nedry used to try and smuggle dino-DNA from the park is shown at one point. There’s also a distinct air of third entry in a trilogy fatigue, similar to that of Star Wars: Rise of Skyywalker. Similar to that movie, there is a feeling of being left wanting and wishing that more thought and care had been put into a more satisfactory conclusion to the trilogy and franchise.
One of the classic lines from Jurassic Park is Ian Malcolm saying that their scientists were so preoccupied with wondering if they could that they never stopped to consider if they should. The same could be said about the studio, the director, and the screenwriters for the Jurassic World trilogy. Jurassic World: Dominion shows that the franchise had its time. There is nothing left to wring out of this world. There are no special, unexplored plots and storylines hidden in amber that can be extracted for more content here. To quote an old man from another, wholly unrelated movie about bringing things back from the dead, sometimes dead is better.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars