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‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ Review: The wonder’s gone extinct

Jurassic World: Dominion
Universal

If you’re hankering for a decent movie about a dinosaur that’s currently showing at your local multiplex, I highly recommend you go and check out Top Gun: Maverick if you already haven’t. That’s a swell movie with something on its mind, chockfull of wit, joy, and wonder, and is the kind of sturdy crowdpleaser we’ve lost the ability to make in the modern era. If you’re thinking of checking out Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World: Dominion, well, you shouldn’t. It’s a clusterfuck from start to finish, doubling down on everything that’s made these movies so intolerable for anyone not already endeared to the franchise simply through their early exposure to Jurassic Park and the subsequent nostalgia they have for their now long-faded childhood. It’s been almost 30 years since that first film came out, and in that time and over the course of five subsequent films, no one has managed to crack the code on how to make one of these things feel anything less than a pale imitation of what immediately came before it. At least this time they got the original gang from the first film back, which is a net positive, all things considered, but normally one has to, you know, do something with them in order to make that work in the way that one would hope it would. Jurassic World: Dominion, on the other hand, takes the laziest and yet somehow the most-complex way to its destination, boring all, entertaining no one. You have no idea how mad I am that I blew the “Giant Pile of Shit” headline on Fallen Kingdom in 2018, which feels like a towering achievement compared to this bloated monstrosity.

Speaking of Fallen Kingdom, it’s been a few years since Isla Nublar’s dormant volcano blew up and, after the folly that Jurassic Park co-founder Benjamin Lockwood and his auctioneer buddies engaged in as they tried to sell the genetically-engineered creatures to the rich and powerful, dinosaurs are the cane toads of the world, an invasive species causing havoc for nations and corporations. The UN’s made a deal with Biosyn, a pharma company, to house captured dinosaurs in a wildlife preserve in Italy where they can be safely kept and experimented on for possible advances in human medicine, but things feel downright catastrophic on the mainland. Dr. Ellie Sackler (Laura Dern) stumbles upon a farm that’s been devastated by giant locusts, which seem to have an affinity for Biosyn-engineered crops, and that have snips and pieces of dino DNA in them. She suspects foul play, and accepts an invitation from Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who has become an in-house philosopher for the company, to tour the facility in order to secure genetic samples if there is a locust problem. She invites her former pseudo-paramour Alan Grant (Sam Neill, who has aged fantastically), the paleontologist who has long had enough of these bizarre things, to come with her and act as a witness to whatever the hell is going on in there. This is the film’s A-Plot, which seems like it was an abandoned draft of the original Jurassic World that got ditched once Neill, Dern and Goldblum said that they weren’t going back for more, and probably would have made for a decent nostalgia-bait legacyquel had the other films not existed.

The fruits of those films make up the B-Plot, which features the continuing misadventures of Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), as they try to clean up the mess that they made when they ruined Lockwood’s auction. Claire’s become a dinosaur-rights activist, spending her nights breaking into illegal breeding camps and trying to atone for her past sins at Jurassic World, while Owen’s a dino rustler, chasing down critters on horseback and lassoing them in a manly showcase of masculinity as Pratt continues to try and remind audiences that he’s not Andy from Parks and Rec anymore. Together, they’re raising Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the bratty cloned granddaughter of the Park co-founder, far away from civilization so that she doesn’t get abducted by crazy conspiracy theorists or pharma people. And, of course, the pharma people do come to get her, along with the daughter of Owen’s former raptor best friend, Blue, who has asexually reproduced an identical copy of herself. This sends the step-parents all across the world in order to recover her from her captors, while Maisie begins to discover that her understanding of what she is exactly might not be entirely correct. That’s right: A good chunk of this film is devoted to retconning a whole lot of Fallen Kingdom, much in the way that Rise of Skywalker did so with The Last Jedi, with a half-hearted recreation of the first film tossed in there because, hey, it’s a Jurassic World movie. What would these things be if they weren’t echoes?

Joe Johnston was on to something when he tried to keep Jurassic Park III under 100 minutes (and he was successful at this — at least the frenetic pace works, even if no other aspect of the film does), but Trevorrow has long abandoned any sense of brevity in his attempts to justify their status as modern-day epics. At two and a half hours, one feels almost like they’re living through the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods during their time in the theater. It’s catastrophically overstuffed, forced to accommodate concessions to nostalgia in the return of Neill, Dern, and Goldblum, the nascent affection that some might have for the new films’ attempts at continuity (tertiary characters from each of the previous films in the trilogy appear, including Omar Sy and Daniella Pineda in what amount to over-glorified cameos), and the unnecessary addition of new heroes (in the form of a tough-talking cargo plane pilot played by DiWanda Wise) and villains (Campbell Scott, playing Tim Cook if he owned a pharmaceutical company instead of a tech giant). I can remember a time when Michael Bay was pilloried for having an ensemble of seven running around Egypt in the second Transformers film, and Trevorrow somehow manages to do the same thing in the film’s third act, where all seven of our main characters have to avoid the Gigantasaurus immediately after colliding together. And hell, I’ll throw down the gauntlet and suggest the overly-referential dialogue between the characters is an even worse sin than Bay’s attempts at juvenile humor, given that there’s no organic reason for it in-scene beyond offering up clap-lines for fans.

But at least it’s a blockbuster, right? You’re bound to have some manner of big-budget Hollywood thrills in there, right? Nah. Dinosaurs, at least under this steward, have become boring: It’s not enough simply to be amazed by the glory of these creatures existing among us; they’re either scary and lurking around each and every corner, or they’re cute and cuddly. The hints of the sublime that enchanted children across the world in ’93 have fully vanished, eliminated by the need for action. It’s not enough for T. Rex to swoop in at the end and kick ass and take names, a roar echoing through the halls of the thoroughfare, now she’s contractually obliged to kick ass at the end of each of these movies to go ahead and reassert her dominance over the world, squaring off in faux-Kaiju battles with other monsters for… reasons. And with that, we hit the crux of the issue, as Dominion just isn’t very fun to watch. As the scope and scale of these movies get bigger and bigger, Trevorrow’s skills as a filmmaker haven’t kept up with that fast-paced growth, and the movie eventually becomes a jumble of incomprehensible sequences that, when combined with the film’s plodding plotting, proves to be inherently unsatisfying.

Say what you will about the Beard and how The Lost World contributed to these things becoming the overstuffed spectacles that they are currently, but at least in the original Jurassic Park the filmmaker who made Jaws was still in control of his facilities, at least when it came to patience. It moved quickly enough, but at a natural-feeling gradual pace, with plenty of time for character development and wonder along the way before the cavalcade of dinosaur-on-human action (outside of the opening, which acts as a teaser for horrors to come). In Dominion, it seems that Trevorrow believes that he has to supply the audience with an action sequence every 10 minutes or they’ll grow bored, and what results are slipshod setpieces without an ounce of grounding to them, with characters hurled all over the goddamn world like they’re Carhartt James Bonds. A mid-film chase through Malta, where Howard and Pratt are being pursued by laser-trained psuedo-raptors, is cross-cut in a wannabe Nolan fashion — Howard’s running across rooftops away from one of the critters, Pratt’s on the back of a motorcycle and trying to outrun them — and lacks the rhythm and grace that makes those scenes work in, say, The Dark Knight. His work here reminds me a lot of when I try to wrap Christmas presents with my shaky, twitchy mitts: Either way, the final product’s likely not going to be aesthetically pleasing or even really competent, but one hopes it will serve the purpose.

That’s the hardest thing to divine about Dominion, though: Beyond the given boatloads of cash that NBC/Universal/Comcast will rake in this weekend, why does this film exist in the first place? What greater end does it serve narratively or thematically, especially given that it bears the portentous and dubious burden of being the “Epic Conclusion” to the Jurassic World saga? Trevorrow was handed a hell of a concept on a silver platter at the end of Fallen Kingdom, with Ian Malcolm’s fears of ecological collapse being very nearly a reality: The dinosaurs themselves were now competing with us for resources and becoming an unnatural part of our natural world, and human civilization would suffer untold effects from the meeting of “apex predators” at the height of their specific skills. His 10-minute short that showed before IMAX screenings of Fast Nine offered at least some kind of a tease, with even an outing to a drive-in movie theater becoming a potential feeding ground for T. Rex and his pals, but beyond short “viral” clips of tourists and beachgoers getting hassled by dinosaurs, it takes the same form as it does in every one of these films, with poaching and underground markets driving much of the dino-related effects on the human world. Remember, the thrust of the plot is based on a swarm of prehistoric locusts devouring crops and giving way to famine, which is a hell of a choice when you have fucking dinosaurs at your disposal. As such, the film’s conclusion mostly resembles that of Fallen Kingdom‘s, tossed up with a half-hearted shrug after the characters reach the end of their slight arcs, having lived through an Italy-set retread of the first film.

If the message of Jurassic Park is that man doesn’t think enough about the consequences when pursuing his Icarus-like imagination, driven to catastrophe by his hubris and only saved by a combination of knowledge, cunning, and bravery; then the fatal flaw of Jurassic World: Dominion is that his dreams are now limited to the familiar, unable to create, content with recitation.