Jurassic World Dominion Review

Jurassic World Dominion Review

 

It’s finally here, the newest installment in the Jurassic franchise! Dominion has been marketed as the final film, the culmination of the previous Jurassic Park trilogy and this new Jurassic World trilogy, bringing it all together for a stunning conclusion.

Well, that’s what the marketing wants us to think…

Jurassic World Dominion is strangely similar to Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in the way it’s been delivered as some kind of big ending to the long-running franchise, as well as having been co-written and directed by the same guy who made the first entry in the reboot trilogy, even though he stepped back from directing the follow-up. To be clear, here’s the comparison I’m making: Star Wars: The Force Awakens, directed by J.J. Abrams, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, directed by Rian Johnson, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, directed by J.J. Abrams. Jurassic World, directed by Colin Trevorrow, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, directed by J.A. Bayona, Jurassic World Dominion, directed by Colin Trevorrow.

My reaction to Dominion is similar to my reaction to Rise of Skywalker. I had rock bottom expectations, but didn’t hate it. There were some fun moments, but at the same time, I didn’t feel much investment, and the whole thing kind of glossed over me. I’m not going to bother comparing Dominion and Rise of Skywalker any further. Dominion, to me, was more like The Force Awakens in the sense of seeing the characters I loved from the original trilogy make their big return. Jurassic Park was the Star Wars of my childhood, so seeing them all back again really drew my interest. Compared to the previous Jurassic World movie, this one was less infuriating to watch overall, but also more problematic in certain ways.

Let me do a quick recap of my feelings on the previous 5 films. I re-watched them all in preparation for Dominion (because of course I did, the best thing about these new inferior sequels being released is creating an excuse to go back and watch the original (not that an excuse is ever needed)) and I don’t have too much new to say about the original Jurassic Park or The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but I do have to say, Jurassic Park III seems better to me now with the Jurassic World movies to compare it to. Sure, it feels like a simpler and cheaper adventure following the previous two movies, but I enjoy that it’s a 90 minute thrill ride, with some genuinely exciting sequences, visual effects that live up to the previous movie, and Sam Neill as Dr. Grant back in the main roster of characters.

Jurassic World tricked me the first time I saw it. Just like with Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the same year, it was so exciting to have a long-awaited franchise return with a new installment that I overlooked some of the more lamentable aspects of the movie and just had a fun time—and I will give Jurassic World credit for trying to be fun. It hits on that nostalgia and recreates the original movie with some pretty broad strokes, but there’s plenty of dinosaur mayhem and its structure is relatively sound because it lifts so much from the original movie. The thrills come at the expense of logic, though, and the human characters are pretty generic.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, on the other hand, ripped off part of The Lost World with its plot and created some new scenarios that were grossly miscalculated. I was pretty letdown with it the first time I saw it, and I didn’t feel any desire to re-watch it until this new one came out. Fallen Kingdom is simply a bad monster movie. Jurassic World was already more of a monster-on-the-loose movie than a dinosaur movie like the original, and the follow-up went even more in that direction. The dinosaur auction, the Indoraptor stalking the mansion like a boogeyman, and the cloned girl letting all the dinosaurs loose because “they’re like me” (Blah!) which made the whole world overrun in dinosaurs all added up to a really unsatisfying, stomach-upsetting sequel with no heart, no logic, and little in the way of enjoyable moments.

So what kind of movie is Jurassic World Dominion then? It’s still basically a bad sci-fi/monster movie, but at least they got rid of the stupid hybrid concept. I went in just hoping this movie wouldn’t be as bad as Fallen Kingdom, and I can’t really say with confidence it was better, but overall, I enjoyed it more. Here’s the thing, comparing the two movies: Fallen Kingdom is more structured and as well directed as possible given the material to work with, but the ideas in the movie are so dumb that it’s worse overall. Dominion is messier and more sloppily made, but overall more enjoyable.

A word I’m sure many reviews will use for this movie is “disjointed” and that’s very appropriate. This thing is all over the place, in many ways. We get off to a rocky start with the Mosasaurus attacking a boat straight out of Deadliest Catch, then a news report recaps the events of the previous movies and introduces us to the idea that dinosaurs live all over the place now, and it’s just a normal thing. How, exactly, have dinosaurs suddenly spread so far and wide, when only a few of them were released from that mansion at the end of Fallen Kingdom? I guess we’re not supposed to think too hard about it. 

Dominion brings back Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ellie Sattler, and Dr. Ian Malcolm, all of them together again for the first time since the original movie, and all of them again played by Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, respectively. They should have been back from the beginning. Dr. Grant is recruited by Dr. Sattler to investigate some shady stuff going on with the company BioSyn Genetics (which is the company from the Michael Crichton novels that’s a rival to InGen), and guess who else is back? Campbell Scott plays BioSyn CEO Lewis Dodgson. I have to quote Dennis Nedry from the original: “Dodgson, Dodgson, we’ve got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares.” In case you forgot, Dodgson is the guy who gave Nedry the can of shaving cream to smuggle the embryos out of the original Jurassic Park lab. Well, he’s back, and he’s the bad guy, running BioSyn like he’s Steve Jobs, and he’s the most annoying bad guy we’ve seen in any of these movies.

Like I said, the original cast should have been in these Jurassic World movies from the start, because they are great, and seeing them back was genuinely enjoyable. Sure, the dialogue they have to work with is extremely cringe worthy at times (Ellie tells Alan how Ian “slid into her DMs”) and the situations they find themselves in are often just plain dumb, but these actors are true professionals, they sell even the worst material. The plot they are tied to involves BioSyn growing giant prehistoric locusts that could cause a worldwide food shortage, which is not terrible in concept, but the execution is rather flimsy and feels disconnected from the usual focus of these movies. Giant locusts are not from the two novels by Crichton, they aren’t something that was established in earlier movies, this is an idea the creative team just thought would be a good idea, I guess, and they went with it. What was it Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, about being so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should? Oh yeah, that was it…

Even though Alan, Ellie, and Ian are part of this odd BioSyn story line, their parts are the most interesting, and the original cast is the main pillar of what made Dominion more enjoyable, for me, over Fallen Kingdom. The other part of the movie concerns Owen (Chris Pratt), Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and the clone girl Maisie living in isolation at Owen’s cabin. Somehow the Velociraptor Blue reproduced all on her own (a little too Godzilla 1998 for my liking) and is prowling the woods around the cabin with her offspring, Beta. Beta gets captured, as does Maisie, so they go after them both, and there’s almost an interesting theme of parenthood, or something, but any chance of the movie having a deeper meaning is quickly snuffed out by the loud, chaotic action scenes that follow. There’s a part where raptors are chasing Owen and Claire through the tight streets of Malta, and I’ve never been so bored during a dinosaur action scene. There’s hardly any music, the effects look cheap, the camera is unstable, and the stakes are low, because you know Owen and Claire are going to walk away without a scratch in the end.

After three whole movies with them in the lead, I don’t feel like I know all that much about Owen or Claire or have many reasons to like them. They are uninteresting main characters, and some fans might be disappointed that they are separate from the characters of the original Jurassic Park for so much of the runtime, but once they get together, it doesn’t make the movie better. Some of the elaborations on the back story of clone girl Maisie get extremely convoluted and even a little uncomfortably weird. It feels like Owen and Claire just move from one dinosaur scene to the next for the most part, and when all the characters unite for the third act, it becomes clear no one is in any real danger. There are hardly any deaths in this movie—not that a high kill count is needed to make a Jurassic Park movie good, but this has to have one of the lowest fatality rates in the franchise, as well as the least tension or scares.  

I’ll get into some of the specific things I actually really enjoyed. DeWanda Wise plays a new character named Kayla, a tough pilot, and she’s the best new character in the movie. In fact, she’s one of the best new characters from the entire Jurassic World trilogy. She isn’t overly exaggerated, she doesn’t utter stupid lines, she’s cool and played by a good actress. There’s a scene early on with Owen wrangling a herd of Parasaurolophus on horseback, and I thought it was fun. It reminded me of The Valley of Gwangi with an old-school sense of silly entertainment. In Malta there’s an underground dinosaur dealer and we see a bunch of species being traded and put into fighting rings, which is a goofy idea but also kind of fun. There’s a moment when Dr. Grant looks out of a plane at some long-neck dinosaurs grazing as they arrive at the BioSyn dino-sanctuary and he says “Is that Dreadnoughtus?” with the same kind of child-like whimsy he had when he saw the Brachiosaurus for the first time decades earlier. It felt like a genuine Jurassic Park moment. 

Some of the nostalgia they infused into this movie was amusing, some of it was surprising, and some of it was annoying, but what I found funny about it was you can tell the filmmakers already picked all the lowest hanging fruit for the previous two movies, and this time they had to reach way higher into the nostalgia tree to find things to use. This is no more obvious than when the T. rex walks in front of a round window and we get the Jurassic Park logo recreated using the real T. rex. Why is this shot in the movie? Is it supposed to be cool, or creative, or surprising? I just didn’t get it. I won’t spoil all the little nods, but one of the bigger intentional creative choices made to reconnect with fans of the original movies was to use more animatronics. There are several notable moments when you can tell there really is a dinosaur in front of the camera interacting with the actors. Here’s the thing: fans didn’t just want there to be more animatronics used. Personally, I wanted to see more shots of dinosaurs that looked real, like the original Jurassic Park movies. Even using animatronics, they still didn’t achieve this.

The transitions from animatronic creatures to cgi creatures are jarring, and most of the animatronics look too shiny and plastic, are too stiff in their movements, and are not well shot. The baby raptor Beta looks faker when it’s in front of the camera than when it’s rendered as a computer generated image. I knew from the first trailer the animatronics wouldn’t be up to par when that Dilophosaurus opens its frill and hisses at Bryce Dallas Howard, and unfortunately I was right. They tried, but they didn’t try hard enough. The colossal Giganotosaurus animatronic is used for a few shots, but it’s in such a dark environment and moves so slowly it doesn’t look any more or less impressive than when it cuts to the cgi version seconds later. While on this topic, I think this is the worst-looking Jurassic World movie, and that’s saying a lot. The overly saturated, hyper-crisp digital cinematography from Jurassic World looks nowhere near as good as the first three Jurassic Park movies. J.A. Bayona shot Fallen Kingdom a little differently, but like its predecessor, it too suffered from cgi overload (at least Dominion doesn’t have a super fake computer-generated mansion). Still, the cgi is wildly inconsistent, with some truly incredible-looking dinos and some that have less texture and weight than their counterparts from the Jurassic World Evolution video game.

Even beyond the dinosaurs, the way everything is shot is lazy and unskillful. Colin Trevorrow has now clearly proven himself as an amateurish director. The editing is not just choppy, it makes no visual sense at times. Characters teleport around, one scene feels like it’s literally out of place and should have happened earlier, and I don’t think any shot lasts more than ten seconds. We don’t hold on any of the dinosaurs or any of the scenery or any of the action, it’s constantly cutting. The pacing, too, is way off. It feels like nothing happens in the middle of the movie, and there’s no momentum built up to the end, it just drags on to the big finale. I have to comment on the ending, but will do so in a minor spoiler paragraph below. If you don’t want to know anything about the ending, skip the next paragraph.

Minor ending spoilers: just like Jurassic World and Fallen Kingdom, Dominion ends with a big dinosaur fight. It should come as no surprise that it involves the new Giganotosaurus and the old favourite T. rex, but there’s a third dinosaur involved, too, which was a little surprising, but what surprised me the most (in a negative way) was how this final fight is essentially a remake of the final fight from Jurassic World, but not as good. It’s as if they said “what if we just do the same thing we did before, only make it look worse?” It is shot in the dark, the camera moves so clumsily and confusingly it made me actually have to look away from the screen and rub my eyes, and it’s so dumb that it’s not at all satisfying. It also relates to that weird pacing issue; the Giganotosaurus attacks the main cast earlier, and it feels like that could have been the big ending, but then there are many more scenes that follow, and it makes the whole third act feel more drawn out than necessary. By the time it got to the final fight I was ready for the movie to be finished. Spoilers over.

The last thing I need to touch on are the dinosaurs, of course, because that’s what drew me to watch this movie in the first place. I said it in my review for Fallen Kingdom: I realized it would take a lot for me to truly hate one of these movies, but it also seemed the direction they were going for with the next one left few options, story-wise, that would intrigue me, so I just hoped for good dinosaur action at the very least, and I was mainly disappointed even in that regard. The dinosaurs weren’t really the main antagonists this time. They weren’t protagonists either, which was good, but they were just…kind of there, in the background a lot of the time. The new big bad, the Giganotosaurus, is barely in it, and the T. rex even less so. I was surprised how little Blue featured in the story too (not that I was upset, I don’t care for Blue), but there are some new species that were neat to see, though none of them factor in to the plot in very intricate or interesting ways.

For the first half of the movie it felt like there were two different movies happening at the same time, and I was only really interested in one of them. I could have done with a whole movie of the old cast and would not have missed Chris Pratt or Bryce Dallas Howard in the least. There were a lot of ideas (the majority of them not great) and there was a lot of content crammed into this thing, but I didn’t feel a sense of conclusion. There could easily be more movies to follow this one. Many of the reviews I’ve seen from critics and fans have been incredibly harsh, but some of the criticisms confuse me. The last two movies weren’t very good, so why did anyone have any kind of expectations for this one? It’s as if this movie being bad is a big surprise. It was pretty consistent with the previous two Jurassic World films, so I can’t get all that upset about it, or be that disappointed. Jurassic World is a fun monster movie, Fallen Kingdom is a dumb monster movie, and Dominion is more like an Indiana Jones-style adventure mixed with an off-brand Michael Crichton sci-fi techno thriller with some dinosaurs thrown in for good measure.

I’m sure the more I think about Jurassic World Dominion the less I’ll like it, but with this being my initial reaction to it, I’m in that pleasant space of existence where it’s still fresh in my mind as a new movie-going experience, and the fact that it wasn’t worse than Fallen Kingdom was enough that I at least left the theater with my hands in my pockets, not with my face in my hands. I didn’t leave feeling angry or frustrated like I have for other unnecessary entries in long-running franchises, but I definitely left feeling like I’ve had enough of these movies for a good long while. No more Jurassic World movies, no more Jurassic anything please. It’s time to let it rest again.