by Josh Sewell
Considering the Jurassic Park franchise has only produced one truly great film (the 1993 original), the odds were stacked against the supposed finale Jurassic World: Dominion from the beginning. I mean, if Steven Spielberg himself couldn’t make a sequel work (1997’s The Lost World is mean-spirited fun, but it’s got a lot of problems), what chance does notoriously hit-or-miss filmmaker Colin Trevorrow have?
I suppose we should’ve seen it coming since Trevorrow’s just-okay Jurassic World has aged like milk and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (which he co-wrote and executive produced) is one of the worst sequels I’ve ever seen. I’m guessing the powers that be had similar qualms, since they decided to go with full-blown nostalgia for the new installment, logic and narrative coherence be damned.
Original stars Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum return to play a substantial role in the proceedings, with a story that runs alongside the newer characters’ plot until they inevitably collide in the third act. Furthermore, the movie is jam-packed with so many obvious winks to the first film that it goes from tolerable to irritating at top speed.
Four years after the galactically stupid conclusion of Fallen Kingdom, dinosaurs have broken through their theme park barriers and now exist in the wild. Despite the lunkheaded chain of events that brought us to this point, I’ll admit a Jurassic Park movie that spans the globe, chronicling how society handles this new way of life sounds intriguing.
Too bad Trevorrow and his co-writer Emily Carmichael have minimal interest – at best – in exploring that idea. Instead, by the halfway point of the 146-minute(!) film, all the characters are once again running around a singular location (this time, a bioengineering research facility), looking for scientific doodads and trying to avoid becoming lunch for a bunch of non-scary, obviously CGI dinos.
The protagonists of the new trilogy, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) – I had to look up their names because the characters have made zero impact over seven years and three movies – eventually get there because bad guys have kidnapped their adopted clone daughter (Isabella Sermon) and the baby of Owen’s raptor friend Blue. (That might be the dumbest sentence I’ve ever written.)
Along the way, Dominion turns into a Fast and the Furious spinoff for some reason, with the characters traveling to different countries, engaging in high-speed chases through crowded city streets. They also befriend a sassy, hotshot pilot (DeWanda Wise) who spouts excruciating one-liners clearly written by a middle-aged white guy with no clue how black women actually speak. Through no fault of Wise, clearly trying to elevate the appalling material, her character is cringey at best, insulting at worst.
Meanwhile, in a totally different movie, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Dern) is investigating a new species of giant locust that destroys the crops of every farmer who doesn’t use a particular company’s seed. She enlists the help of her old friend Dr. Alan Grant (Neill) to uncover the conspiracy, which leads them to the state-of-the-art facility where Dr. Ian Malcom (Goldblum) now works. Guess where the kidnapped clone girl and the baby raptor have been taken, leading to a massive franchise team-up? What are the chances, right? Too bad it happens way after I stopped caring what happened to any of these characters.
It’s baffling to me that at some point in the screenwriting process, either Trevorrow or Carmichael apparently said, “Dinosaurs are cool, I guess. But you know what audiences will really love? Big locusts! Let’s focus on them for an hour!”
That’s not even getting into the overly complicated subplots about human cloning; gene manipulation; despicable agrobusiness CEOs; shady black-market dealings; and other tangents I’d already forgotten about by the time I got back to my car. Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is a moderately brief, simple adventure in which relatable characters are thrown into a dangerous situation and must work together to escape. There’s not an ounce of fat on it and we root for the people because we care about them.
At no point do the characters in Dominion exhibit normal human traits. Actors don’t speak to each other to convey thoughts or emotions – they’re exposition delivery systems. The characters have no consistent arc – Owen and Claire literally have different personalities in every film. Sattler and Malcolm bear only a faint resemblance to the brilliant scientists from the original movie, acting and speaking in ways that reduce them to a workaholic woman who needs love and stammering comic relief, respectively.
It’s frustrating to see a series with such creative potential squander it at every turn. A big world is quickly reduced to a series of dull rooms and dark corridors. Characters make stupid decisions solely because the plot forces them to. One guy even seems to have the ability to teleport since he shows up in two back-to-back scenes that take place miles away from each other.
Trevorrow is clearly more interested in crafting cool trailer moments and pushing older viewers’ nostalgia buttons than making a case for why we should care about this stuff in the first place. If Universal’s marketing is being truthful about Dominion serving as the franchise’s final installment, it’s probably for the best – the series wore out its welcome long ago. However, I’m skeptical the studio is going to leave money on the table when the intellectual property is still generating billions of dollars in ticket sales, merchandising and theme park admissions.
I don’t think we’ve seen the last of these flicks. But I do hope enough time passes that a new, more imaginative filmmaker can find a better direction that helps the concept reach its full potential instead of making audiences wonder what might have been.
Jurassic World: Dominion is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action, some violence and language.
Grade: D
I suppose we should’ve seen it coming since Trevorrow’s just-okay Jurassic World has aged like milk and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (which he co-wrote and executive produced) is one of the worst sequels I’ve ever seen. I’m guessing the powers that be had similar qualms, since they decided to go with full-blown nostalgia for the new installment, logic and narrative coherence be damned.
Original stars Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum return to play a substantial role in the proceedings, with a story that runs alongside the newer characters’ plot until they inevitably collide in the third act. Furthermore, the movie is jam-packed with so many obvious winks to the first film that it goes from tolerable to irritating at top speed.
Four years after the galactically stupid conclusion of Fallen Kingdom, dinosaurs have broken through their theme park barriers and now exist in the wild. Despite the lunkheaded chain of events that brought us to this point, I’ll admit a Jurassic Park movie that spans the globe, chronicling how society handles this new way of life sounds intriguing.
Too bad Trevorrow and his co-writer Emily Carmichael have minimal interest – at best – in exploring that idea. Instead, by the halfway point of the 146-minute(!) film, all the characters are once again running around a singular location (this time, a bioengineering research facility), looking for scientific doodads and trying to avoid becoming lunch for a bunch of non-scary, obviously CGI dinos.
The protagonists of the new trilogy, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) – I had to look up their names because the characters have made zero impact over seven years and three movies – eventually get there because bad guys have kidnapped their adopted clone daughter (Isabella Sermon) and the baby of Owen’s raptor friend Blue. (That might be the dumbest sentence I’ve ever written.)
Along the way, Dominion turns into a Fast and the Furious spinoff for some reason, with the characters traveling to different countries, engaging in high-speed chases through crowded city streets. They also befriend a sassy, hotshot pilot (DeWanda Wise) who spouts excruciating one-liners clearly written by a middle-aged white guy with no clue how black women actually speak. Through no fault of Wise, clearly trying to elevate the appalling material, her character is cringey at best, insulting at worst.
Meanwhile, in a totally different movie, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Dern) is investigating a new species of giant locust that destroys the crops of every farmer who doesn’t use a particular company’s seed. She enlists the help of her old friend Dr. Alan Grant (Neill) to uncover the conspiracy, which leads them to the state-of-the-art facility where Dr. Ian Malcom (Goldblum) now works. Guess where the kidnapped clone girl and the baby raptor have been taken, leading to a massive franchise team-up? What are the chances, right? Too bad it happens way after I stopped caring what happened to any of these characters.
It’s baffling to me that at some point in the screenwriting process, either Trevorrow or Carmichael apparently said, “Dinosaurs are cool, I guess. But you know what audiences will really love? Big locusts! Let’s focus on them for an hour!”
That’s not even getting into the overly complicated subplots about human cloning; gene manipulation; despicable agrobusiness CEOs; shady black-market dealings; and other tangents I’d already forgotten about by the time I got back to my car. Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is a moderately brief, simple adventure in which relatable characters are thrown into a dangerous situation and must work together to escape. There’s not an ounce of fat on it and we root for the people because we care about them.
At no point do the characters in Dominion exhibit normal human traits. Actors don’t speak to each other to convey thoughts or emotions – they’re exposition delivery systems. The characters have no consistent arc – Owen and Claire literally have different personalities in every film. Sattler and Malcolm bear only a faint resemblance to the brilliant scientists from the original movie, acting and speaking in ways that reduce them to a workaholic woman who needs love and stammering comic relief, respectively.
It’s frustrating to see a series with such creative potential squander it at every turn. A big world is quickly reduced to a series of dull rooms and dark corridors. Characters make stupid decisions solely because the plot forces them to. One guy even seems to have the ability to teleport since he shows up in two back-to-back scenes that take place miles away from each other.
Trevorrow is clearly more interested in crafting cool trailer moments and pushing older viewers’ nostalgia buttons than making a case for why we should care about this stuff in the first place. If Universal’s marketing is being truthful about Dominion serving as the franchise’s final installment, it’s probably for the best – the series wore out its welcome long ago. However, I’m skeptical the studio is going to leave money on the table when the intellectual property is still generating billions of dollars in ticket sales, merchandising and theme park admissions.
I don’t think we’ve seen the last of these flicks. But I do hope enough time passes that a new, more imaginative filmmaker can find a better direction that helps the concept reach its full potential instead of making audiences wonder what might have been.
Jurassic World: Dominion is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action, some violence and language.
Grade: D
Reach out to Josh Sewell on Twitter @IAmJoshSewell
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