Mark Reviews Movies: JURASSIC WORLD: DOMINION

Jurassic World: Dominion, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 9, 2022

If these movies have taught us anything, it's that things can always get worse, so it should come little surprise that, after the franchise low point of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, a follow-up could potentially be worse. That is the case with Jurassic World: Dominion, which takes a series that seemed out of worthwhile ideas and runs merely on the fumes of an idea.

The core conceit here, which is soon dropped almost entirely for a lot of contrived plotting, is that the dinosaurs from the eponymous theme park have spread across the globe. How did they do this on a planet that is no longer a supercontinent? Don't ask, because this movie only has the answer that the dinos have crossed borders—as if there aren't vast oceans separating a good number of those borders. Definitely don't ask how these creatures survive in the climates of some of these places.

That absence of detail comes in the movie's opening scene, which presents the fact of dinosaurs living among humans in the form of a straight-faced news report. There's some promise in how amusing the sight of a pterodactyl snatching a dove from a wedding ceremony is, compared to the severity of the report's tone. Director Colin Trevorrow returns for this installment, and the opening sequence suggests a bit of the darkly tongue-in-cheek charm that the filmmaker brought to his delayed-sequel/reboot Jurassic World.

Moving slightly deeper than the spectacle, this series has always touched upon humanity's hubris in believing we can control nature. In a way, this entry serves as the ultimate punch line to that absurd joke.

Well, the opening scene kind of does, at least. The rest of it is a messy concoction of multiple plots, which transparently exist simply to get characters from the first three films into the same spaces as the ones from this new trilogy.

The good news is that Sam Neill and Laura Dern return as Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, while Jeff Goldblum's rock-star mathematician Ian Malcolm gets more than the glorified cameo he received in the previous movie. The bad news is that their reunion exists in a movie that doesn't seem to care why these characters are back, except that they have to be—in order to maintain the shallow nostalgia upon which this new phase of movies has increasingly relied.

Those three get one plot, which involves a genetically modified species of locust. Ellie believes it's the creation of Biosyn, a genetics company run by Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott).

With the help of Ian (who works at the company to constantly call the employees' ethics into question) and Lewis' right-hand man Ramsay (Mamoudou Athie), Ellie and Alan try to prove the company's malfeasance. It's as disconnected and cheaply manufactured (They really don't care about security at this company, despite all the damning evidence they leave lying around) as it sounds—and probably more so, considering how much of the plotting relies on coincidence and the characters' collective stupidity.

That leaves Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who are raising the cloned child Maisie (Isabella Sermon), whose existence in the last movie felt like a stretch and who is now a moody teenage clone—whose existence is key to the entire story. She is abducted, along with the baby of Owen's favorite velociraptor.

After an extended series of chases in Malta (where people just go about their business, despite the presence of giant, carnivorous dinosaurs), the trio, along with pilot Kayla (DeWanda Wise), ends up at the same place as our legacy characters. The screenplay by Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael dismisses the multiple opportunities and possibilities presented by the setup of dinosaurs living among humans for layers of pure, dumb chance in a plot that overshadows everything else.

Indeed, the dinosaurs barely seem to matter in this installment, and one can almost feel the screenwriters' strain in trying to cram them into this story, from a black market in Malta to Lewis setting up his company headquarters as a dino sanctuary, which hasn't learned a thing from any of the previous attempts to contain the animals. We get a few chases—involving trained raptors and the apex predator giganotosaurus—and one neat scene of suspense—a close-up of Claire crawling away from the approaching legs and talons of a large, feathered carnivore—for what it's worth.

That isn't much with the filmmakers' lack of investment in justifying the beasts' place here—which is ironic, since their existence just about anywhere else in the world is justified by the movie's own logic. Jurassic World: Dominion does what would seem almost impossible in a series built upon the wonder and terror of dinosaurs: It renders them basically useless.

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