In preparation to writing this, I did something I rarely do. I went back and re-read my Reactions for the last two movies. I don’t know why I don’t normally do this. Probably laziness. I do also like to avoid writing something to underline my points about the last movie rather than coming up with something new to say about the current one. Besides, it’s fun going back afterwards and realizing I made the same pun each time independently. I needed it for Jurassic World: Dominion though, because there’s been too much noise about the franchise over the years.
Jurassic World hit theaters like a freight train Summer 2015, riding a wave of goodwill from a successful 3-D re-release of Jurassic Park to a record-breaking opening weekend at the box office. At the time, I enjoyed it with caveats. In the years since, the flaws of the movie have been the main things I’ve remembered and director Colin Trevorrow has become a critical punching bag [somewhat unfairly]. I needed the reminder that I kind of liked Jurassic World. I also needed the reminder of how strongly I disliked Fallen Kingdom. It feels like the public sentiment caught up to me on that one eventually and it’s coming across in the franchise-worst reviews of Dominion. This happens more than people like to admit. They often vent frustrations about the next movie because they hedged on the last one. That’s not some conspiracy either. I’ve done this a lot. I’ll see a movie that I thought was bad, but I’ll soften my Reaction thinking I must’ve missed something. By the time the sequel comes along, I’ll realize I didn’t miss something. I just didn’t like the movie. Then half of my Reaction for the sequel will be about how much I disliked the last movie.
This is all a roundabout way of saying that, while I didn’t love Jurassic World: Dominion, I thought it was completely OK: not deserving of its series low Metacritic and RottenTomatoes scores.
In my Fallen Kingdom Reaction, I talk about how it may be the park as much as the dinosaurs that make the Jurassic series work. That’s why putting most of Fallen Kingdom in the middle of a volcano or in an indoor compound sapped it of a lot of life. You really need a controlled environment that is no longer controlled. So, instead of a poorly run park, Dominion uses a poorly run wildlife sanctuary/corporate headquarters. It’s just really hard to mess up a T-Rex terrorizing people in a tropical forest surrounded by man-made structures intended to control it. Or, more simply put, a Jurassic movie is better when it is man encroaching on the dinosaur world than when it’s dinosaurs encroaching on the human world. Dominion has a lot of the former.
The story is still incredibly dumb and convoluted. Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) are still in hiding protecting the cloned Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon). They’ve been keeping her isolated while still going on adventures of their own. But, inevitably, the evil BioSyn Genetics company finds her and brings her to their remote headquarters which is also a dinosaur compound: basically a Jurassic Park but not open to the public. Owen and Claire of course follow her to HQ to rescue her. Meanwhile, Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) pulls in Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to investigate a herd of locusts infused with dino DNA that are wiping out the world grain supply. This also leads them to BioSyn HQ where Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is working as the on-campus Ted Talker, and might also be a mole.
A surprising number of faces from the previous movies like Omar Sy and Justice Smith show up to let you know they aren’t dead, I guess. The big additions are DeWanda Wise as a pilot who gets Claire and Owen to the island and Campbell Scott as the latest CEO who thinks he can harness the power of dinosaurs for himself. The cast is too big for the movie to reasonably maintain, so no one gets much more sketching than they had from previous movies or than can be established from assigning a basic character type. For example, Pratt and Howard do not sell the parental affection for Sermon at all. I felt nothing when they get reunited. It’s still crazy to me that they use “wise-cracking Chris Pratt” so little in this series. It’s like other than Guardians, there’s a mandate that action movie starring Chris Pratt can’t be the incredibly funny Chris Pratt that made people want to turn him into an action movie star.
Jurassic World on a story level has a similar issue as another series inspired by a Michael Chricton book. The appeal of Westworld to me is the park or parks. It’s a cool, fake world. I love seeing how they imagine it would run from an operations perspective and what it looks like when it falls apart. That show really lost me when it became more about the robots existing in the real world and trying to take down an evil corporation and/or humanity in general. Jurassic World is the same. I like the dinosaurs. I don’t care as much about how dinosaurs can eventually coexist in the real world. I don’t need to see harmonious shots of dinos galloping with horses in a field. It’s insane to me that the major threat in a Jurassic World movie is killer locusts. And I really don’t need conspiracies surrounding human cloning. I know these are all natural developments that can happen in a world where we can recreate dinosaurs. They just haven’t come up with a better idea than “What if there was a park with dinosaurs?” so the series feels so tired 6 movies in.
Jurassic World: Dominion gets close enough to the premise that works for me to enjoy it. Getting back the core original cast to add to the JW cast is cheap but effective. Putting them back in a facility getting overrun by dinosaurs is a smart move. Backing away from amplified dinosaurs as superweapons is wise too. I see why this movie isn’t being received well. There’s a lot of stupid to it. This franchise relies far too much on no one knowing how to run a secure facility: secure from dinosaurs and secure from people trying to mess with it. I think Dominion remembers just enough about what has made this series popular to work. After JD Bayona’s over-directed mess in Fallen Kingdom, I was happy to have Colin Trevorrow back to be kind of invisible.
Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend
(Note: Just because I found a movie somewhat watchable doesn’t mean I’ll recommend it)
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