[5]
Sooner or later all franchises grow stale. Jurassic World: Dominion, the sixth film in the franchise, brings back director and cowriter Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World) and unites the cast of the original Jurassic Park with the new stars of Jurassic World. It’s also the first film in the franchise to take place outside the park — that’s right, dinosaurs finally rule the world and live right alongside humans. At least that’s what the film promises.
The film begins with news footage reminding us of all the ways dinosaurs live among us — nesting in skyscrapers, capsizing ships, and interrupting all variety of outdoor gatherings. After this opening sequence, there’s one major action set piece featuring dinosaurs let loose in Malta, and then that’s it for global dinosaur mayhem. The rest of the movie takes place… in a park. Another park. So much for the epic scale.
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s characters are re-introduced living a rustic life in the Sierra Nevadas, taking care of the genetically cloned girl (Isabella Sermon) from the previous film. Blue the velociraptor is back, too, sticking close to Pratt’s cabin and raising a new child of her own, nicknamed Beta. When bounty hunters kidnap the girl and the baby dino, Pratt and Howard begin their journey to rescue them. Meanwhile, Laura Dern’s character discovers prehistoric locust are decimating entire fields and fears an ecological collapse may be imminent. She reteams with Sam Neill and the two head to the remote, isolated laboratories of Biosyn, where Jeff Goldblum now works. As Goldblum reveals a corporate conspiracy involving the locust, Pratt and Howard discover Biosyn is behind the abduction of their loved ones. The characters are finally united about halfway through the movie at Biosyn’s dinosaur sanctuary, where — of course — good old fashioned dinosaur shenanigans ensue.
Dominion has the most over-complicated plot of any Jurassic movie, spending substantial time developing its lame locust and human cloning subplots. It’s not a pure and simple monster movie like its predecessors. With it’s considerable two-and-a-half hour run time, globe-trotting, and myriad characters, it feels more like a James Bond movie than a Jurassic movie — and that’s not a good thing. Because there’s nothing about the over-plotting that interests me or makes me like these characters more. I just want to see dinosaurs do scary shit.
The film seems to have banked on audiences wanting to see the casts of both trilogies united. Well, we thought we would. But it turns out to be a fairly joyless affair. First of all, it takes more than half the run time for the characters to even meet. And once they do, no character really gets to shine. At a certain point, you just wish the dinosaurs would eat half of them — as long as Goldblum survived. It’s probably the least humorous of all the Jurassic movies, which only further accentuates how desperately the movie needs more of Goldblum’s darkly comic gifts. It’s also the loudest Jurassic movie. The action is often non-stop and exhausting, with composer Michael Giacchino over-scoring much of the time to convince us that what we’re watching is an excruciating life-and-death affair. There’s an air of desperation to it. In the end, there’s not one action scene in Dominion that matches any in the previous films.
Despite all its many shortcomings, we do get to see dinosaurs again. In fact, early in the film there are some compelling scenes of dinosaurs having a hard time fitting into the modern world — having to be herded away from work sites, having to be rescued from those who would sacrifice them for profit. Dominion should have been about the dinosaurs themselves — how do humans and dinosaurs live side by side? That would have been a better movie than this locust/cloning movie. Even though it’s not really their movie, many favorite creatures are back, including our good old T-rex, the velociraptors, triceratops, and even those slime-spitting dilaphosaurs that killed Wayne Knight in the first movie. And there are some new ones as well. The feathered ones are particularly memorable and ferocious. The film’s single scariest scene is one in which a huge feathered dinosaur with Wolverine-like claws stalks Bryce Dallas Howard into a lake.
It’s also great to see Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum back in action. Goldblum is magical in everything he does these days. While he gets a fair amount of screen time, you’ll wish there were more of him. Sam Neill, on the other hand, doesn’t seem at all happy to be back in the saddle. The script rekindles his relationship with Dern, but otherwise just doesn’t know what to do with him. DeWanda Wise makes the most of her new supporting character, a pilot-for-hire who ends up throwing in with Pratt and Howard. Speaking of Pratt and Howard, even though they get marginally more screen time than anyone else, their characters are pretty uninteresting here — basically existing just to do whatever it takes to get their adoptive, cloned daughter back.
Maybe Dominion bites off more than it can chew. Or maybe it tries too hard to be something it’s not. I love monster movies so much that I still enjoyed parts of this one. But for a series so loved and ripe with potential, Dominion is disappointing at best, easily my least favorite of all six movies.
With BD Wong, Mamoudou Athie, Campbell Scott, and Omar Sy.