Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) | REVIEW

Directed by Colin Trevorrow — Screenplay by Emily Carmichael and Colin Trevorrow.

Jurassic Park came out the year I was born. I grew up watching that masterpiece and Steven Spielberg’s sequel, The Lost World, over and over again. Heck, despite Joe Johnston’s Jurassic Park III not being particularly good, I still think about that movie all the time and have a lot of fun with it. So, why did this Jurassic Park fan not bother watching Jurassic World: Dominion when it was released theatrically or even review it until this point? Honestly, despite the fact that I liked 2015’s Jurassic World on first viewing and reviewed it favorably, I thought Fallen Kingdom was a low point for the film series and that it made decisions that took the franchise and turned it into something far less interesting than it should be. However, I was hopeful that said film’s ending would signal an interesting sequel, given it opened up dinosaurs to the entire world, but when I heard the negative word-of-mouth upon Jurassic World: Dominion‘s release, I felt incredibly deflated and had no desire to go and see it. That said, now that Gareth Edwards has released his attempt at a Jurassic Park sequel — with Jurassic World: Rebirth — I thought now was a good time to rip off the band-aid and finally review Dominion, which I, honestly, thought was a catastrophic attempt at a sequel.

Set four years after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World: Dominion is set at a time when dinosaurs now freely roam the Earth. Following the events of the previous film, Claire (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) is investigating and trying to prevent illegal human-controlled animal cruelty towards dinosaurs, while Owen (played by Chris Pratt) has become a dinosaur cowboy. Together, they’re raising Maisie (played by Isabella Sermon), the 14-year-old genetically engineered girl introduced in the previous film, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Owen and Claire are thrust back into action when Maisie and the child of the velociraptor known as ‘Blue’ are kidnapped. Meanwhile, Dr. Ellie Sattler (played by Laura Dern) and Dr. Alan Grant (played by Sam Neill) start investigating the swarms of giant locusts that have appeared and are decimating crops all over the country.

Interestingly, in 2019, Universal released a Colin Trevorrow-directed short film titled Battle at Big Rock starring André Holland about an ordinary family having a dangerous run-in with dinosaurs. It is arguably the best thing Trevorrow has done with this franchise because it focuses on the way dinosaurs would impact the real world after the events of Fallen Kingdom. Not only does Battle at Big Rock outshine and dwarf Jurassic World: Dominion, but, with the short film, Colin Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael exhibit a freshness and an understanding of what the film series needs that is shockingly almost entirely absent in their feature-length blockbuster follow-up, Dominion.

Jurassic World: Dominion is a sour-tasting blend of studio notes, ill-advised holdovers from previous films, and lazy writing. It is a complete and utter misunderstanding of what people go to see these movies for. Rather than focus on the awe or horror that humans express or exhibit when seeing dinosaurs in the wild, the film features lengthy subplots or sequences dedicated to human cloning, weaponized dinosaurs meant for military distribution, and giant locusts’ impact on crops. It also doubles down on elements that either did not work previously, have become stale, or are outright eyeroll-inducing. The film mistakenly thinks we’re invested in the clone subplot from the previous film, clings onto the Owen-Claire relationship despite it not being particularly engaging, and it overdoes the dinosaur whisperer hand signal shtick that Chris Pratt’s Owen first used in Jurassic World. It is laughably overpowered in this one.

The dinosaur computer-generated images are hit-or-miss, and the action is only rarely particularly interesting. Though there is some enjoyment in seeing ‘the band back together,’ so to speak, the beloved trio of characters from the original film — Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum — are saddled with a subplot that is expressly not about dinosaurs, and so many of their scenes together are filled with lazily thought-up and cheap callbacks to the original film (e.g., Laura Dern removing her glasses in a particular way, etc.). There are strange head-scratchers like turning the Dodgson character into a Tim Cook-type, and it wastes all of the capable actors at its disposal, none of whom turn in compelling performances. On top of this, the film is tiringly, ineffectively paced. When you feel like the film is about to wrap up, there’s still an hour left to go, which features one of the worst, auto-pilot-esque final acts of any modern blockbuster film.

Now, I’ve been pretty hard on this film in my review, but it isn’t all bad, and so I should highlight what elements, if any, work well. Like I’ve established, I really like the short film, which was all about dinosaurs having an impact on ordinary people (or, in general, scenes where the dinosaurs live in harmony), whose release preceded the release of Dominion. And so, credit where credit is due, I do like it whenever the film gives us that, like in the opening scene with the Mosasaurus attacking the crab fishing boat. That is the kind of thing I thought the film would focus on, rather than crops, giant locusts, clones, and black markets, all of which are elements that pull the film in the wrong direction. I will say, though, that while the ‘NOW THIS’ opening sequence features many of these great scenes, it is also just a blatant and colossal info dump, including a tidbit that is a little bit odd. They state that there have been 37 dinosaur-related deaths in the past year, which, frankly, is an incredibly low number given there are tens of thousands of gun-related deaths each and every year. That figure is oddly low, feels like a miscalculation, and kind of throws a wrench in everything that the segment is trying to set up.

Although I strongly dislike the Malta-subplot, I will say that there have been made some interesting decisions about the action style, as some scenes look more like a dinosaur version of Fast & Furious or the Bourne films than a Jurassic Park film. However, the one moment of dinosaur action or tension that I actually thought worked really well was the scene in which Bryce Dallas Howard is crawling away and hiding from the Therizinosaurus.

Jurassic World: Dominion is the lowest point of the film series thus far. To me, it is a sequel so bad and with so few redeeming qualities that if it hadn’t made a billion dollars at the box office, it would largely have been regarded as a franchise killer based on the quality of the film. Instead, as there’s another sequel in theaters right now, it’s merely an extremely disappointing sequel that points the franchise in the wrong direction while making almost every misstep imaginable.

2 out of 10

– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.