Jurassic World: Dominion
Maybe it’s just time to let this franchise die already?
Set years after a human clone loosed a number of dinosaurs into the human world, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are living deep in the forest with Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon, said human clone), fighting their own fight against poachers, illegal breeders and hunters. When Isabella is captured (along with dino-fave Blue’s baby), and taken to the nefarious headquarters of an evil corporation tasked with safeguarding and protecting the growing world dinosaur population, Owen and Claire must find a way to save her. At the same time, Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill) are also on the way to the same compound, seeking proof that a new locust plague decimating the world’s food supply was created by this same corporation. There, they’ll run into old friend Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), and our old Jurassic favorites will have to team up with the new ones to find a way out.
Jurassic World: Dominion comes hot (read: four years after the last damp squib of an installment) on the heels of Fallen Kingdom, which was a real disappointment but provided potential for the third film in the new trilogy. Fallen Kingdom was a claustrophobic house horror that eschewed all the magic of the franchise in favour of something new, but wound up an utter failure, that felt old and forgettable the second it hit screens. That being said, it provided for an intriguing premise for the third film; dinosaurs loose in our world, and what that might look like.
With Dominion, director Colin Trevorrow (who returns after helming Jurassic World) takes that fun idea, gives it one or two wide panoramic shots of service, and then swiftly buries it in favour of YET ANOTHER ‘park type’ place for dinosaurs to roam around. This time, it’s a sanctuary in the Dolomites, which (aside from being a little colder rather than the usual sub-tropical routine) is largely indistinguishable from Jurassic World, and Jurassic Park before it.
This movie does hold some brief flashes of brilliance; particularly with the action and setting. The Bourne-esque chase scene and Mos Eisley Cantina-esque setting of the Malta sequence is a lot of fun, and speaks to what this movie could have been if the allure of cheap fan service hadn’t completely scuttered originality. Even in the new ‘sanctuary’, there are moments of fun, with some of the dinosaur touchpoints (including a particularly scary hunt for Claire as she crawls into the water) working well. Ultimately, however, it’s a movie of middling visuals, action and character design mixed together with cardboard cutout characters and a plot that barely holds it all together. It also feels like a carbon copy of better films from this exact franchise.
That being said, despite a huge number of jokes and moments just not landing, there will always be something great about watching Sam Neill and Laura Dern on screen as these characters, and Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm is pitch perfect throughout this piece. Malcolm is at his best not when behind a lectern (like in the last installment of this franchise), but in danger, quipping his way through tense scenarios, and the very end of this film gives us brief flashes of what that could have looked like for the whole runtime.
It’s a shame, because by the end when it all gets going, these six characters working together to fend off dinosaur attacks is kind of fun despite itself. It’s just a shame that we’ll never get to see that, because this movie is so obsessed with setting up unthought out plots, giving each character an introduction, and generally swamping us in set up and exposition that doesn’t pay off. Then again, this movie is such a carbon copy of older iterations that we really have seen what that would all look like.
