Film Review - Jurassic World: Dominion (12A)

 Jurassic World? Not a fan. (Dr Ian Malcolm)

He said it, not me! Let me make this clear - while no JP sequel film has come within an argentinosaurus' length (longest ever dinosaur - google it) of the glorious original, there's never been one I disliked. Until now. True, Jurassic Park III fizzled into meh, and Jurassic World was fundamentally a bigger budget why-bother retread of Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic, but they still carried some proper entertainment value. Despite its many detractors I even enjoyed 2018's Fallen Kingdom - click on the link to see how much! Then along lumbered Jurassic Park: Dominion, a movie so tedious that it calls into doubt the wisdom of having revisited the franchise at all. How bad is it? Think of that enormous hill of fly-infested dinosaur dung in Jurassic Park, double it in size, and we've got ourselves a metaphor.

Too harsh, maybe, but we're still in 'two hours plus of my life that I'll never get back' territory. So, what makes this a test case in how (and possibly why) not to do a sequel? Let's start with the story... 

Fallen Kingdom ended with the intriguing prospect of dinosaurs having escaped into the world to wreak the kind of havoc about which Jeff Goldblum's Ian Malcolm character had always warned. And then... it's all kind of normalised. By the start of Dominion, so a news montage informs us, dino activity is out there and already absorbed by society. So instead, the plot becomes one of black marketeers kidnapping raptor babies and cloned adopted children, and trans-global pursuit, and nefarious goings-on at dubious scientific research institutes. So while there are lots of dinosaurs around snapping at our leads, they're kind of sidelined plotwise in their own movie. Rather than roaming free - because that would, when you really think about it, be a tricky story to tell in any focused way - they end up rampaging around a human-built facility just like in Jurassic Park. It's a wee bit like there was no overall game-plan for the trilogy, and everyone was kind of winging it along with the pterodactyls, reliant on a locked-in fanbase. (Call it Star Wars Sequels Syndrome.)

All of this could have been salvaged with other merits, of which there are precious few. Three films into this franchise renewal and it hasn't made me care about the characters an iota. Sure, Chris Pratt is charismatic, but charisma dies in a vacuum, and here he's left gasping, his Owen Grady having been given nothing beyond a now stale raptor-wrangling schtick. Yet he gets off lightly compared to Bryce Dallas Howard's corporate-suit-turned-dinosaur-rights-activist Claire Dearing, whose behaviour in Dominion is every bit as daft as her three-movie character arc. What's the dumbest option in this scenario? Okay, let's go for THAT one. Then the story brings in the Jurassic Park old-guard. It's momentarily nice to see Laura Dern and Sam Neill reprise their roles, but so much more painful to realise how the screenplay is giving them bugger all to work with. The only person who squeezes any entertainment value from their role is Jeff Goldblum, because - well - his charisma has its own life-support, apparently. Much like life, JG will always find a way.

And what of the actual dinosaur action? Doesn't it carry the day? Two things here... Firstly, considering how wowed we all were by walking, stampeding, snacking brachiosauruses and T-rexes in 1993, it's surprising they don't seem to look much more convincing in 2022, thereby recapturing some of the original wonder. And secondly, it turns out that once dinosaurs trying to eat humans has lost its novelty, you need a thing called character development to provide dramatic tension. That and a bit of patience in the build-up. Dominion doesn't even have the latter, fudging the kinds of suspense sequence that Spielberg took in his stride, and that J. A. Bayona likewise managed to inject into Fallen Kingdom. Result - the music by always-impressive Michael Giacchino sounds like it's scoring a whole other film, i.e. an exciting one. Oh, and the action sequences look sloppy and unconvincing too. At its best this movie is a half-hearted Jurassic Park tribute act. 

Let's be fair - I watched this film off the back of Top Gun: Maverick, the ultimate nostalgia-flick-done-right and a tour de force of practical filmmaking, so anything less than totally immersive was going to be a comedown. And in the first full summer of theatrical releases since Covid shut down the world's cinemas I'm not going to begrudge any movie decent box office returns. (At time of writing Dominion has racked up $650 million globally and continues to climb, which while not the brontosaurus-sized profits of the other franchise entries, is still good news for your local multiplex and mine.) But considering how 2022 has proved that retreads of existing properties - Top Gun, The Batman - can still be fresh and innovative, it's just ironic that of them all, Jurassic World: Dominion feels most like a dinosaur. 

I didn't need it to be great. I just wanted it to be better.

Gut Reaction: Unmoved. Bored. Hoping that the franchise is now extinct.

Memorable Moment: The trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder was fun...

Ed's Verdict: 3/10. It takes one unwieldy, charmless rehash to make you love a cherished original just a little bit less, but that's what Dominion did for me. I take back the 'too harsh'. This really is - to quote Goldblum from Jurassic Park - 'one big pile of shit'.