Jurassic World Dominion fucks up absolutely everything it's possible to fuck up. It even fucks up how to put a colon in its own title. To my knowledge, the oldest film to have staged a scene of a dinosaur attacking a human is Willis O'Brien's partially-lost The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, from 1918. So by time we get to Dominion, 104 years later, we should have figured out how to do it well, or at least functionally. Nonetheless, director Colin Trevorrow, who isn't even making his first Jurassic Park movie (he co-wrote and directed the film that reignited the franchise after a 14-year absence, 2015's Jurassic World), seems to be at a complete loss. He and co-scriptwriter Emily Carmichael, and co-story writer Derek Connolly, have made the decision that nobody in 29 years of this series has ever made, because it is a completely fucking idiotic decision, "well, what if we made a Jurassic Park movie that was, instead of being about dinosaurs, not about dinosaurs?" And not in some namby-pamby "see, it's really about the characters" way, because of course you couldn't even tell that lie with a straight face; in six movies across three decades, there have been not more than two well-written characters in total, both from the first movie.No, I mean in the way that Jurassic World Dominion is about giant locusts and how Monsanto is going to kill us all by fucking up the environment.

To be fair, in an intellectual sense, this isn't completely off-limits. The Jurassic Park films have been, on and off, fables about environmentalism since the second one, 1997's The Lost World: Jurassic Park. To be even fairer, in an actual sense, this has always gone horribly and is responsible for some of the very stupidest bits of screenwriting in the series. But yes, in theory, you could argue that the "point" of the Jurassic Parks is to explore the complex relationship between humans, the environment, business, and technology, and that we need to be better custodians of the natural world, and make the choice that this is the appropriate focus of the self-appointed finale to the series. It is the wrong choice. But it is a choice that previous films in the series have made available.

Anyway, to make a long story short - and at 147 minutes, Jurassic World Dominion is very wretchedly long indeed - there are two parallel plots going on here. In one, following the events of 2018's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, former theme park employees Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) have hidden themselves deep in the Sierra Nevada, where for the last four years they have raised the clone child Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) up to be a sullen and resentful teenager. But they put up with her incredibly shitty attitude because they know that her status makes her a rich target for the various organisations that have been hoping to rifle through the ashes of the long-dead genetics company InGen for hints of its technology. Unfortunately, Owen has been getting sloppy, and Maisie's not even trying, so they get found out by a mercenary named Rainn Delacourt (Scott Haze), and he steals the girl away. Owen and Claire thus go on a worldwide hunt that brings them to Malta, and the den of black marketeer Soyona Santos (Dichen Lachman), who is currently working with Biosyn, a genetics company that has been haunting the edges of these movies for a bit now.

In the other plot, former paleobotanist turned... soil scientist, I guess, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) has learned that Biosyn has engineered a new species of locusts the size of housecats, and they're tearing they way through the Great Plains of North America, destroying all of the crops that weren't grown with Biosyn's proprietary locust-resistant strains. This is about to trigger a worldwide food shortage, so she goes to one of the only people she knows she can fully trust, crotchety technophobic paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), to ask him to come with her to Biosyn's remote lab headquarters in the Italian Alps. She has a man on the inside there: superstar chaotician Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who has tipped her off on a lot of nefarious secrets, but for whatever reason is not interested in gathering the evidence himself. I mean, the reason is obvious: because he needs to find some reason to motivate assembling Dern, Neill, and Goldblum all in one movie for the first time since the original Jurassic Park in 1993. Because that is 1000% the only kind of play that Jurassic World Dominion has any clue how to play: bash some nostalgia in there like a small child smashing a Play-doh figure into a thin, broken pancake.

Fun, isn't it, how I just summarised a 2.5-hour dinosaur movie without making a single reference to dinosaurs, and I suppose if anything about Dominion was actually working, I might be less pissy about that. I mean, it's not like the dinosaurs that actually manage to show up in the film actually elevate it. Trevorrow and his second unit - and to extend the absolute maximum amount of charity towards the film that I am even a tiny bit interested in extending it, this film was basically the very first big-budget production trying to figure out how to make a movie while abiding by pandemic filming restrictions, so the fact that the footage appears to have been shot and assembled somewhat at random is because it kind of was - stage by far the worst dinosaur setpieces in the history of this franchise, stripping out the mildest degree of tension from the attacks and selecting angles that always manage to leave the maximum amount of ambiguity as to where the hell people are standing relative to each other and the creatures. In the first big actual dinosaur scene, a race through Malta against some new perversions of nature called "Atrociraptors" (which would, to be sure, be an outstanding name for secondary monsters in a 1990s Saturday morning cartoon designed to sell toys), Owen and his former colleague Barry (Omar Sy) are able, by the thinnest of margins, to trap a raptor in a cage, after a tense stand-off. And then the image cuts to show another raptor plunging at them from the other side of the room, and it's like, was it just hanging out? Just waiting to see whether its buddy was going to be able to kill them? Later on, Owen and Claire are hanging off a metal ledge that's being torn down by this film's new mega-carnivore, a Giganotosaurus, and in one shot, we see them sliding down towards its hungry, spiny face. In the next shot, we see them in mid-air, in the middle of a jump. So how the fuck did they escape? Did it fucking sneeze? This is the approximate level of care and attention found in all of the film's dinosaur attack sequences, though to be fair, I think I have just identified fully half of the ones that occur across the film. Jurassic World Dominion is revoltingly eager to let its named characters survive, and mostly chooses not even to inconvenience them.

Plotwise, this picks up from Fallen Kingdom, sort of, by suggesting that in the four years since that film, the dinosaurs that escaped during its finale have spread across the globe, fundamentally re-writing the rules of how our planet's ecosystem functions. Please note, this isn't the ecological disaster that the characters are trying to solve, and indeed, it is implied, such as it's noticed at all, that the impulse to just round up and kill the genetic monstrosities and be done with it is strictly the opinion of reactionary sickos. But this franchise shat that bed all the way back in The Lost World. The new problem that's unique to Dominion is that it has suggested this worldwide catastrophe is the effect of what appeared to be not more than a few tens of animals in the last movie; and even more than that, having spent the opening setting this scenario up, it has absolutely no interest in doing a single damn thing with it. The Biosyn villains have rounded up most of them and dropped them into that same valley in the Alps, under the wicked guidance of CEO Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), a character whose entire appearance in the first Jurassic Park was to set up the beat that nobody cared about his presence. 29 years later, nothing has changed, despite Scott's best effort at whipping up a supremely itchy performance as a self-involved tech bro who doesn't complete his sentences. At any rate, this means that the dino action almost exclusively takes place in foggy, primordial forests, just like it has taken place in approximately 100% of these movies. Other than that horrendous Malta sequence, which basically asks "what if The Bourne Supremacy had a raptor chase?", and I want to promise with my hand held firmly across my heart, it's not as much fun as that makes it sound.

But I don't want to act like putting dinos back in the forest is the wrong decision. On the contrary, it is one of only two things about Jurassic World Dominion that I think is ever any good; it strongly resembles the parts of Jurassic Park III that don't suck. The other good thing is Laura Dern, who is doing terrific work recreating the body language and vocal patterns of her performance from '93, but with the thoughtful addition of years to show how Sattler isn't the same person as much as how she is. It's certainly the only way that the great big "get the band back together" gesture works out: Neill is only barely less transparently irritated by the material than he was in JPIII, and the script is at such a complete loss for what to do with Malcolm that even Goldblum's extra-weird performance doesn't really register. Otherwise, the attempts to re-stage moments and puke out callbacks are shameless, stupid, pandering: we even see the damn shaving cream can from the first movie. And three films in, none of the material unique to the Jurassic World films has enough of a personality that it even registers that we're meant to have some kind of emotional investment in what happens to the horrible, horrible Maisie.

The whole thing is sheer miserable drudgery: the locust thing is such a profound misfire that I cannot fathom how the idea even survived it to the end of the sentence where somebody first started articulating it. The smugglers and kidnapping plot is an arcane maze of dropped plot threads, arbitrary developments, and characters who blatantly should die, and somehow don't, capped off with our heroes leaving the Maltese to their own devices to stop a pack of carnotaurs presently devouring their way through tourists. It's incredible how, even with such a sluggish, indulgent length, Dominion still feels, very obviously, like about 20 minutes of story material was hastily and sloppily chopped out. The best it can do is to be harmlessly boring as it rehashes forest scenes from earlier films, and even that doesn't really kick in for well over an hour. Obviously there's no chance that this is really the end of this cash cow, but for now, thank God that there's not going to be more where this came from; the last time dinosaurs were subjected to a disaster this bad, there was an asteroid involved.

Reviews in this series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)
Jurassic World Dominion (Trevorrow, 2022)


Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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