[Rating: Minor Rock Fist Down]
Bummer, man. I was really hoping Jurassic World Dominion would re-capture that lightning-in-a-bottle magic that we all fell in love with in 1993 when Steven Spielberg took us to Jurassic Park and give this franchise that I have loved for thirty years a proper send off.
Yeah, that does not happen. Safe to say, the last chapter in the Jurassic saga misses whatever mark it was shooting for and unfortunately bringing back the old cast members to mix with Chris Pratt and company feels more like fan service without giving the flick any real presence.
This sixth movie in this series picks up some time after the events of the last Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Dinosaurs are roaming the Earth. Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is trying to clear her conscience by freeing dinosaurs from black market captives, Owen (Pratt) is living in the mountains, rounding up dinosaurs.
The bad guy here is Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) — remember him? He was that dude that was buying embryos from Nedry at the beginning of the very first movie (the character, not Scott)…Now he is running Biosyn and creating monster insects because his company wants to control the world food chain. So they need to capture the clone kid, permanently grounded by Owen and Claire, who are trying to be good parents but Maisie (Isabella Sermon) instead feels like a prisoner. The Biosyn bad guys want her DNA to fix some catastrophic problems they’ve created and then something else to do with Blue’s new baby raptor, Beta. I really think that plot line is there to remind us this is about dinosaurs, or was, or was supposed to be, or was going to be until they decided to lean into the clone story and kick it up a notch with an ecological disaster thread about giant locusts. Yeah, it’s a lot of wtf?
The biggest problem I had with Fallen Kingdom was the cloned granddaughter story. Sorry kids, they lean into it for a good hard hour of exposition and reshaping Maisie’s back story with a few all-too-brief glimpses of the dinosaurs. By the time we get to the meat and bones of the action, it’s kind of hard to start caring about anything that’s really going on. In fact, as I write this, I’m not sure what was the threat of the film, other than science going too far. Sure, it’s always been a theme but the “oooh” and “aaaah” of seeing dinosaurs on the big screen just isn’t much fun as it used to be, or should be.
The one big piece of glowing praise I have for Dominion is in one of its stars, Bryce Dallas Howard. This woman is coming into her own as star but also as a filmmaker, having shown off her skills with a few episodes of The Mandalorian and Boba Fett. It’s no surprise here that she is at the center of pretty much every kick-ass, intense scene in this movie. Other than that, obviously the dinos are awesome. T-Rex is back, a bunch of new raptors, I already mentioned good ol’ Blue, and some new species and old get in on the fun. Loving the addition of color, fur and feathers to the dinosaurs proving that Hollywood can pay attention to real science even if they still don’t get the simple idea that British accents are not genetic.
When it comes to a Jurassic flick, I don’t really need to be bogged down with complicated things like “story” and “plot.” Get to the dinosaurs, man. Give me some cool dinos with some spectacular visual effects, some dino action, a few good dino chases and some rockin’ dino fights. Let’s face it. This should be Friday the 13th, or the first Alien. Oh no, a plane crash, survivors on the island come face to face with dinosaurs; or tragedy strikes a cruise liner, or a shipwreck, what have you. Survivors. Dinosaurs. Jungles. Get off the island.
Colin Trevorrow returns to direct this movie after delivering a very by-the-numbers Force Awakens-esque soft reboot with the first Jurassic World. After skipping the last one, he’s back and working with a script he co-wrote with Emily Carmichael, and honestly, this movie doesn’t know what the hell it wants to be. Is it a movie about dinosaurs or a movie about the evolution of clone science? Either way, the man-is-God thanks to genetic science isn’t enough to pump blood into a summer blockbuster.
Even bringing back OG cast members Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum isn’t quite enough to make it interesting chapter. Although it takes far too long, we do finally get the old cast members and the new cast members together. Sure, they’re fun to watch again for nostalgia sake, but Trevorrow and Carmichael’s script doesn’t give them anything interesting to do outside typical run/scream mode.
Jurassic World Dominion has been advertised as the end of an era. I assuming it means the last of the Jurassic era and maybe they’ll start making movies about wooly mammoths and saber tooth tigers on Ice Age Park or whatever. Either way, probably a good thing to bring this story to a close.
That is of course…unless someone thinks of a better way to do a sequel, then I’ll watch because I’m a sucker for dinosaur action. Anyone? Give me a call, Universal.
Lover of movies and tacos. Ad man. Author. Member of the Kansas City Film Critics Circle and the Broadcast Film Critics Association. Founder of the Terror on the Plains Horror Festival. Creator and voice of the Reel Hooligans podcast.
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