15 Jun Jurassic World: Dominion Review

JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION

dir. Colin Trevarrow, starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neil, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum

BLUF: If you like dinosaurs, this is an ok movie. If you like coherent plots, engaging characters, good editing, consistent sound editing, 2D projection, or contextually satisfying fan service…RUN!

The Jurassic World movies follow the pattern of the Star Wars sequel trilogy:
First Movie: fun franchise action, promising narrative elements, and new characters
Second Movie: throws out everything interesting, utterly fails the characters, but has a couple decent action scenes
Third Movie: spectacularly fails to tie up any of the severed narrative threads from the first two movies; the “script” is devoid of any redeeming qualities
Yeah, that might be all you need to know. For me, this is exactly what I expected. At this point, Jurassic movies make so much money that they will definitely keep making them.
Personally, I watch the Jurassic movies because I love dinosaurs. If all you want is some big-budget, photo-real dinosaurs, then Jurassic World: Dominion is just fine. Like The Matrix, the first movie is a legitimate, near-perfect classic, and everything after falls on a scale of diminishing returns: financial, critical, and intellectual, at the least.
Jurassic World was fun but made a fascinating but fatal mistake: in my opinion, it stands as the #1 movie for sheer density of stupid characters. Every single character makes the dumbest decisions, making it impossible to care about any of the human characters’ well-being. Then we get two more movies, where the carry-over characters do not get much smarter; at the very least, there exists no narrative explanation for why they start acting less stupid. In Jurassic World: Dominion, none of the characters has a decent arc, except for Isabella Sermon’s Maisie. Unfortunately, her meager arc comes at the direct expense of what everyone really comes to these movies for: DINOSAURS. And that is the core problem with these movies: too much human stuff, not enough dinosaurs.
Which brings us to the next point: this movie should have written itself. Like the previous entries, the title, ‘Dominion’, means absolutely nothing, since they essentially ignored the cliffhanger promise of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in which dinosaurs are released into the world and spread across the planet. Aside from a few short scenes at the beginning, we rarely see dinosaurs truly retaking the planet—they are almost always in very controlled environments, occasionally escaping for a brief time before being quelled. It fizzles out like the promise of force-sensitive children revolting against the First Order at the end of The Last Jedi. Writing a movie that prominently features dinosaurs taking over the Earth again, and humans struggling against the rising tide, should have been easy. Instead, we get a movie about a shockingly lame villain doing some dumb evil stuff featuring locusts(?!) that is warped into James Bond-esque globe-trotting adventure following all the dumb people, none of whom have changed one iota since their various initial appearances in the franchise.
Regarding characters, was it fun to see Drs. Grant, Sattler, and Malcolm? Yes, and I got a mild thrill seeing them show up. But instead of anything interesting happening to any of them, they are all…the same as they were 30 years ago, leading to the only logical conclusion: these are stunningly boring people who had that one crazy weekend three decades ago. As for the Jurassic World-specific characters, the main ones are still pretty dumb. “Let’s hide this human child from the world forever” is cliché and never works—why would anyone fall for that, at all? Taming a velociraptor is still so dumb. Chris Pratt gives the movie everything he has, but that apparently amounts to holding out his hand to calm dinosaurs, which mysteriously works all six times he does it. So dumb.
The movie was way too long, given the lack of engaging characters or coherent story. A decent editor should have been able to chop out 15-20 minutes of worthless material relating to humans doing dumb human things. Regarding the story, it reminded me of a criticism I once read about Zack Snyder’s theatrical cut of Batman v Superman. The review articulated that Snyder had made a movie of individual moments, none of which tied together very well as narrative-driven scenes. Fortunately for Snyder, his Ultimate Edition revealed that there was much more connective tissue to the narrative. Unfortunately for Jurassic World: Dominion, it suffers far more from a combination of editing and story beats that lean into the same type of criticism Batman v Superman initially received: it feels like a grand collection of individual parts of fully developed scenes, none of which are particularly good, and certainly do not fit together to create a satisfying whole.
I saw the movie in IMAX, but did not realize it was in 3D, which was awful. At this point, whatever few scenes are actually converted to meaningful 3D (they were definitely not filmed in 3D, methinks…) were left with an effect that looked like terrible green screen. In addition, for an IMAX movie presentation, there were a lot of lines of dialogue and sound effects that were cut off during cuts between shots. Maybe it was a fault in my theater, but IMAX rarely has these kinds of persistent problems throughout an entire movie.
Lastly, this movie suffers from coming out two weeks after Top Gun: Maverick, a nearly perfect summer action movie that is probably the best example of a sequel to a movie that was released decades ago. Top Gun: Maverick incorporated a lot of what some may call “fan service”, but every bit of it was earned by incorporating it into the overarching story in an organic, satisfying way. It featured a highly refined script that understood the old and new characters, and how to set them up for meaningful interactions that served a clear story. Jurassic World: Dominion did the exact opposite: it dumped fan service liberally throughout the runtime that never really served any purpose but to figuratively break the fourth wall and remind the audience of something cool or obscure that happened in a previous movie. It never related to the “story” they were trying to tell—it was simply to get a cheap smile from an audience that was starved for anything interesting. It was sad, lazy, and all-too-frequent.
At its center, the entire Jurassic World trilogy suffers from the same problem as the Star Wars sequel trilogy: no plan, and gradually diminishing quality of scripts. Jurassic World: Dominion is probably the worst: despite having all the money in the world for special effects, a cast of talented, diverse actors, and a premise that should have been a no-brainer, the script utterly fails on every level and leaves the viewer wanting and deserving so much more. Most of the audience filtered out in muted silence from my showing, myself included. There is no problem with trying new things in a franchise (see the Fast & Furious films for a masterclass in reinvention), but at some point, a core theme and relatable characters need to be the anchors. Jurassic World’s franchise-holders understand neither, and really have not since 1993.

Pros:
Dinosaurs are awesome to see
Uhh…good CGI and puppet work on the dinosuars?

Cons:
The dinosaurs are an afterthought at best
Awful, discombobulated script
Utterly wasted characters from the original film
JW characters are still dumb and less interesting than ever

Rating: 2/5
The last gasp of a franchise that has not found a way to match or exceed the original films.

Review by Jim Washburn