Jurassic World Dominion (Trevorrow, 2022)
Jurassic Dominion World or Jurassic Dominion Park, or whatever the heck it is called, exists in that vast expanse of mediocrity between “not as bad as film Twitter would have you believe” and “not exactly good.”
It is PG-13, so it doesn’t have the nasty gore that turns me away from most of the franchise, but neither does it have any real sense of wonder or even threat. (Before the movie, I asked my friend to take the over/under on a 5.1 bet of how many of the six main characters survive. Without hesitation he took the over.) These qualities don’t in themselves disqualify the film, so what was it that made it feel simultaneously bloated and underwhelming?
My answer to that question is that the movie can be scarcely bothered to come up with a premise, and once it does, it doesn’t take its own premise seriously. There is an overly long first act establishing that dinosaurs have now begun to reproduce in the wild, so humans will have to decide whether to try to hunt them back to extinction or to co-exist with them. One character raids an illegal breeding farm. Later (in Act II), we run across a black market for buying and selling.
I certainly wasn’t expecting a fully developed debate about man’s dominion over other creatures, but why set up such a thematic conflict if the end game is to gather dinosaurs and humans in yet another self-contained location so that both can escape? It’s as if the film didn’t know where to go after the set-up and so just reverted back to formula while forgetting to trim the introductory stuff.
The plot is decidedly James Bond with Owen and Claire hunting kidnappers (who will lead them back to the supervillain’s lair) while Ellie and Alan play the scientists looking for evidence that giant locusts that eat everything except Biosyn plants might have been bioengineered by…who knows, Biosyn maybe? Ellie and Alan want evidence that the species in the wild are a genetic match to those bred by Biosyn because such evidence will somehow get some government powers to do something about corporate types controlling the world food supply. Meanwhile, poachers take Blue’s baby raptor, but she agrees not to chew Owen’s arm off after he promises her he will return the baby. (I’m thinking of a Taken meme, with the baby raptor under the bed and Owen saying, “Now is when they take you….”
But Owen has a very special set of skills which includes dinosaur whispering, riding motorcycles, and not suffering from hypothermia after being submerged in ice water. In most franchises that would make him the default hero, but here the hero turns out to be a dead character from another movie that you may not even remember.
What I am about to say is by no means limited to dinosaur movies. Dominion Park Jurassic falls squarely in the modern spectacle format that seeks to be as familiar as possible while trying to convince the audience it is seeing something new. It is chock full of a handful of references to other movies, and it feels very self-aware of its movie-ness. None of these characters act like human beings or have actual human responses to being chased by dinosaurs. At one point Ellie looks at a captive Whateverasaurus and gushes that the wonder of seeing dinosaurs “never gets old.” It’s not really a good sign when a movie has to narrate for its audience what they are supposed to be feeling…especially when there is such a disconnect between what the characters say they feel and what emotions the film actually elicits.
Anyhow, planes are crashed, teeth are gnashed, and an occasional philosophical bromide is spouted. Buttons are pushed to bring shields back online and motherhood is praised to remind everyone of Aliens. See you in three years for I, Jurassic Robot, about how Blue and Owen join the police force in the newly formed Hate Against Animals Crime Division.
