“Jurassic World Dominion” is the final installment in the Jurassic Park/World Franchise. It was co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow and stars Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum.
Unsurprisingly, this film is dumb. The first “Jurassic World” was dumb, the second film was dumb, and now so is this one. Characters will conveniently show up wherever the plot needs them with no explanation as to how or when they got there. Physics are consistently defied and the plot is always distracted. Another issue is that the movie is nearly devoid of world-building. At the end of “Fallen Kingdom,” dinosaurs were released into the human-occupied areas of the world, making it an actual Jurassic World. You’d think that there would be a post-apocalyptic setting considering people can be eaten by raptors at any second, but nobody’s ever really scared and they all act like this is somehow fine. It’s just so unsatisfying to see such great opportunities for drama and dinosaur chaos get thrown away.
The writers chose to split the film into two storylines: (1) an espionage story with Claire and Owen and (2) an evil corporation plot with Alan Grant and Ellie Sadler. While the espionage storyline is certainly ridiculous, it can actually be entertaining at times, especially since it provides some fun action sequences in the second act (namely with Claire falling from a plane and then trying to hide from a T-Rex). However, the corporation story is utterly boring and disengaging. For one thing, it puts Grant and Sadler in a situation where their skillsets aren’t utilized; instead of dealing with dinosaurs, they’re investigating genetically engineered locusts made by a new new evil science research company. Therefore, we follow protagonists doing things they definitely shouldn’t be doing. Additionally, who cares about giant locusts? People are going to this film for the dinosaur action, and there’s very little of that.
Yet when the dinosaur action does happen, a lot of it isn’t noteworthy. The first act basically has no action at all and instead is more focused on generic setup and exposition, the second act is fine and has some cool action scenes, and then the third act delivers on an atrocious action sequence that’s almost laughable.
There’s a common trend in Hollywood in which legacy characters from the older (better) films in a franchise are brought back into newer films to get that juicy nostalgia money. In some rare cases it’s been done respectfully (“Top Gun: Maverick”), but in most cases the old characters are either forgotten about or completely destroyed (Disney’s Star Wars movies). “Jurassic World Dominion” is one of the latter cases. Ellie Sadler and Ian Malcolm are still fine and relatively undamaged, but that’s only because they don’t actually do anything significant. Meanwhile, Alan Grant was treated as a useless comedic relief character being led around by other people. Contrast this with the Alan Grant from “Jurassic Park” who took charge and saved children’s lives, and you have two entirely different people.
Without giving spoilers away, the ending of this film makes the entire movie completely useless. As the story reaches its conclusion, you’ll start to realize that the conflict of dinosaurs being released throughout the world won’t actually be resolved, and instead the only storyline that will be resolved is the locust one.
Ultimately, “Jurassic World Dominion” is just another generic modern blockbuster that lacks the soul of the original 1993 film. It’s well made and visually appealing with some of the exciting action sequences you want in a “Jurassic World” movie, but overall it’s a mess that doesn’t justify its existence. That’s its worst sin.
D+