There will be significant “Jurassic World Dominion” spoilers below. Be careful as you go.
After a 14-year sabbatical from our screens, the “Jurassic Park” franchise returned in 2015 with “Jurassic World,” and audiences all over the world welcomed it with open arms. While some critics at the time were a little harsh on the movie, overall the reviews weren’t too bad, and moviegoers like the movie’s “the park is open” premise. But what happens after that? Since “Jurassic Park III,” this franchise has struggled to come up with a solution. However, in 2018’s “Fallen Kingdom,” a messy solution was found by literally blowing up Isla Nublar and having a dinosaur auction so that the dinosaurs may be present on the mainland with mankind. For the first time in history, people and dinosaurs had to live in harmony. What a notion!
This was “Jurassic World Dominion’s” promise.
This seemed to be the direction that everything was going. Six films, billions of dollars, and decades of work went into creating this picture of a planet where creatures that have existed separately for millions of years are suddenly forced to coexist in an unsettling way. But, strangely, the third instalment of the “Jurassic” trilogy from director Colin Trevorrow reduces its biggest magic trick into window dressing and instead chooses a very perplexing, fragmented plot involving, among other things, enormous locusts. Mind you, those locusts are the movie’s main plot device, so this is not a small matter.
Reunited and it doesn’t feel as good
I would be hard-pressed to think of a single individual who went to watch the sixth film in a series of dinosaur movies who was enthused about the idea of swarms of enormous locusts and a plot about controlling the world’s food supply, and I adore practically every movie in this franchise on some level. As opposed to actually witnessing several dinosaurs coexisting with and around humans. Look at the “Battle at Big Rock” short, for example. Think of that expanded to a feature. That was the same premise on which this movie was promoted. It was the fact that “Fallen Kingdom” put a lot of effort into defending a movie that clearly came across as a means to a goal. One assumed that there was a justification for deviating that far off the path. Were locusts actually to blame? However, since this is “Dominion,” this is how we get at the pinnacle of one of cinema’s most successful franchises.
How much the dinosaurs are relegated to the background in this movie is truly amazing. Yes, there are many dinosaurs in it, but their presence in our world today isn’t really the main point. We see some very cool shots of the chaos they cause and hear about them in the news, but once the film really gets going, the human characters and the convoluted, multi-faceted plot take centre stage. The story revolves around Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) fighting corporate rulers who want to utilise them for profit in order to safeguard Blue’s baby and Maisie Lockwood (Isabelle Sermon), the clone girl from “Fallen Kingdom,” who they have subsequently adopted. In an effort to keep Maisie safe, Owen and Claire have established a makeshift family in the woods. They have at last reunited. Within the context of the trilogy’s overall story, this relationship is significant, but their actual relationship doesn’t feel as significant as it should. That narrative isn’t helped by the film’s lack of focus.
But the biggest of the big things in this movie involves reuniting the original trio of Ellie (Laure Dern), Alan (Sam Neill), and Ian (Jeff Goldblum) for the first time since “Jurassic Park.” This was the biggest hand that Trevorrow had to play and it was a tantalizing hand indeed. Their storyline involves figuring out how to prove that the locusts were created by genetics corporation Biosyn, a rival to InGen. Ultimately, this rescue mission and the corporate espionage our *checks notes* dinosaur experts are involved in end up at Biosyn’s isolated plot of land where most of the world’s dinosaurs are now being kept. Yes, despite all of the hullabaloo in “Fallen Kingdom,” there is now another isolated location housing dinosaurs that humans can safely avoid.
Well, there it is
Unfortunately, the natural chemistry that existed between these characters in the original 1993 blockbuster classic can’t be recreated. When these characters show up there are glimmers of those wonderful feelings that Steven Spielberg’s timeless film brings, but “Dominion” simply can’t get there. The magic is gone and even the kind of forced, not-at-all-subtle “Will they? Won’t they?” between Alan and Ellie falls pretty flat. Between the dinosaurs taking a back seat in their own movie, and the long-awaited character reunion not living up to its promise, it’s hard not to wonder what could have been. Was this really the big plan from the beginning? Was this the big crescendo everyone had in mind? Was this truly the envisioned endgame?
Granted, it’s difficult to blame Trevorrow wholly when it comes to the original trio problem. Audience members bring a lot of baggage to this kind of reunion, and if it fails to activate those delightful nostalgia muscles, maybe that’s an internal problem more than it is strictly a movie problem. Then again, the movie at hand, complicated as it is, doesn’t do the reunion any favors. “Dominion” is too busy setting hoards of locusts on fire, briefly bringing back characters we met before in glorified cameos, and attempting to deal with the ramifications of “Fallen Kingdom” as best it can. All due respect to Sermon as an actress, but the Maisie storyline really muddied the waters in a big, bad way. This movie would have been much better off without having to contend with that character or the head-scratching nonsense she brings with it. Her mom is suddenly an important character in the history of the genetic science that makes all of this possible? Axing all of that extra fat from the film might have helped but, again, “Dominion” was anchored to what came before.
There’s also the matter of bringing backLewis Dodgson(Campbell Scott) as a major character, our primary villain as the head of Biosyn, and hardly addressing the fact that this was someone who was deeply connected to the original film. Dodgson was the man who gave Dennis Nedry the briefcase full of money and the Barbasol can to seal the dinosaur embryos from InGen. He, in many ways, kickedall of thisinto motion. And yet, I’d wager a great many audience members wouldn’t even realize this was meant to be the same character, which would have been a fun bit of full circle, connective tissue. Instead, he’s just another mustache-twirling corporate bad guy with a silly plan: controlling the food supply using locusts in a movie that is supposed to be about dinosaurs.
This movie consistently seems to take a left where there should have been a right. Dinosaurs running loose all over the planet? Where 30 seconds of well-thought-out action might have been good, 45 seconds worth of nonsensical plot or meandering is weaved in instead. You finally bring back the damn Barbasol can that was buried in the mud on Isla Nublar, one of the biggest mysteries in the history of these films, and for what? To have Dodgson throw it in his bag before he’s killed by a pack of Dilophosaurus on a train while never really explain how he got it or what has happened to it in the last three decades? Baffling and frustrating.
