Courtesy, Universal Pictures

Movie Review: Jurassic World: Dominion

15:00 June 14, 2022
By: David Vicari

The thrill really is long gone from the Jurassic Park movies. Actually, I feel Steven Spielberg's 1993 original movie is the only truly good one, and I revisit it often. It's a pretty great roller coaster ride of a movie. The rest, however, are subpar. I did kind of enjoy Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), which most fans hated, but it was a much better made movie than its predecessor, Jurassic World (2015), and actually had a few inventive moments.

Jurassic World: Dominion is the new film, and please, for the sweet love of God, make it be the last, because this is a bloated bore. This movie actually makes dinosaurs dull! That's a real crime.

In Dominion, the destruction of Isla Nublar has caused the genetically created dinosaurs to escape into locations all over the world and to live alongside humans. Of course, they eat humans when they get the chance, and, in turn, humans hunt the dinos.

Courtesy, Universal Pictures

Former operations manager of Jurassic World, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Raptor whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) are living deep in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and are hiding the genetically created girl, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), from people who would harm her. A subplot involving an engineering corporation creating locusts the size of squirrels to monopolize the world's food supply synthetically adds the main characters from the original Jurassic Park - paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) - into the mix. There are a bunch of other characters too, and the film becomes a James Bond-ian globe trotting spy adventure. The cast is huge, but no one has the chance to do much. I did get an unintended laugh from a shot late in the movie which portrays a large group of the cast having their exit blocked by a carnivorous creature because the shot and the actors poses looked like the album cover of Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings.

Both Dominion and 2015's Jurassic World were perpetrated by director Colin Trevorrow, and they have the same problems - a lousy script and lackluster direction. The screenplay here - by Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael - is a jumbled mess, and the film rambles (Two-hours and 26-minutes) and never has a clear story focus. And having the character of Ian Malcolm become a sellout is wrong and unforgivable.

The dinosaurs are superfluous to the plot. They are just there when the movie needs an action scene, but after five previous movies, these dino chase scenes are really tired. Missing is the expert execution of Spielberg at the helm, because the action scenes here are shot jittery with quick cutting, making it nearly impossible to see what is happening.

Yes, the T-Rex is here, the raptors are here, and so are other dinos from the previous films. There are also the visual callbacks to moments from the original movie. So, everything in Dominion we've seen before.

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