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The Squandered Potential, Desperation, and Toothlessness of Jurassic World: Dominion


For all of its’ faults, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ended in a place of immense curiosity by taking dinosaurs for the first time in this franchise permanently off-island. This opened a whole lot of doors in terms of story, setting, narrative tension, and even themes. What would the world look like with dinosaurs roaming free in it, what would that mean for the environment, politics, society, or just our existence as a whole? The scope was magnificent and the possibilities were endless.
Jurassic World: Dominion squanders just about all of them. Sure it includes some shots here and there of dinosaurs in the world: a velociraptor with free reign through the forests of Nevada, and one big set-piece involving multiple dinosaurs in Malta -but for the most part relegates its’ action to yet another isolated environment and small collection of characters trying to escape it. All the while focusing its’ major plot thread on genetically engineered locusts while the dinos serve next to no real function. They’re used for a lot of conflict and they drive the action and suspense scenes, but for a movie that seemed to promise a genuine Jurassic World for once,  they are window dressing, bizarrely not the chief concern.
Fallen Kingdom wore out the novelty of the dinosaurs themselves on me, but there was one thing to draw me back to Dominion, the last cheap tool in the shed for this series, and that of course is the legacy cast. But it can be a pretty alluring tool, and effective -Sam Neill’s return is just about the one reason to watch Jurassic Park III after all. For all the talk of its’ groundbreaking effects and brilliant suspense and potent themes on the exploitation of scientific discovery, one of Jurassic Park’s unsung strongest features was its’ characters, and the exciting performances of the actors playing them. And so there is a nice feeling in this movie when Alan Grant appears at a dig site in Utah, Ellie Sattler arriving to meet him for the first time in years, even if the script is a bit one-note in its’ treatment of them -writer-director Colin Trevorrow, like many of us clearly disappointed in the canonical break-up between Alan and Ellie, works overtime to bring them back together in ways that feel very out of place. Still, while the presence of Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum doesn’t save the movie in any way, it does make swaths of it easier to take -even on autopilot mode (which one could argue is the case for Goldblum) these actors are still compelling as these characters.
Which stands in stark contrast to the returning protagonists of the Jurassic World brand, as dull and unremarkable as ever. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are living in a cabin in the woods raising Maisie (Isabella Sermon), the human clone child left behind at the end of Fallen Kingdom -one of a few dumb threads this film is forced to carry on with. Owen’s loyal velociraptor Blue is there with a child of her own now, and the kidnapping of both that baby and Maisie sparks their call to action. Much more goes on in their portion of the story, which is presented in parallel to Alan and Ellie investigating the headquarters of Biosyn (the company from the first movie that conspired to steal those dino embryos). As they attempt to track down Maisie, we see shades of an interesting world through black market dinosaur smugglers in the Mediterranean and an aerial attack by a Quetzalcoatlus, but all of it is anchored in these dreary leads with no personality, outside of Pratt’s generic smarmy attitude, on a mission that only seems barely theirs to take on.
The whole reason for Maisie’s capture does indeed tie into the plots’ odd fixation with giant locusts terrorizing crops as the main problem to be dealt with in this world of dinosaurs roaming free. It’s a bizarre shift of priorities that never conveys the weight it is meant to, and on top of that takes up a lot of Alan and Ellie’s screen-time, which isn’t very fun (the two of them engaging in amateur espionage work really doesn’t fit their professions, personalities, or ages). Pertaining to Maisie’s identity, there is at one point a clear effort by Trevorrow to, following in the footsteps of the man who took his Star Wars job, retcon the choices made by his predecessor in Fallen Kingdom -which only convolutes everything about her history even more. Watching Dominion, it’s hard to believe this series ever had a solid believable grasp on theoretical genetic science.
It really doesn’t take long for the action to converge on an isolated dinosaur valley operated by Biosyn, where the movie can simply play the hits. And so we have a scene where Claire is stalked by a large predator, one where Alan, Ellie, and Maisie are chased through a tunnel by a variety of carnivores, and a modestly creative bit where Owen and smuggler pilot Kayla (DeWanda Wise) are cornered on ice by some kind of avian raptor. There’s a touch of decent thrill in the pacing when basically the entire main cast is faced with a Giganotosaurus, but there are hardly stakes to any of these -virtually every character is narratively safe for one reason or another, and indeed this installment has probably the lowest kill count of any Jurassic movie. All the while, the biggest dinosaur stars of the series are mostly absent: one Tyrannosaur appears at the end and Blue bookends the piece as the only Velociraptor.
Which is strange because otherwise the movie is quite open about shameless nostalgia-baiting. Ellie is introduced in pretty much the same clothes she wore for the duration of Jurassic Park (Malcolm too), and through the use of a cringing mimic of that iconic pan-up when she sees the brachiosaur for the first time. From these original cast members there are a handful of such bland visual quotes or gags (the worst probably being a reference to the famous shirtless Malcolm shot) that only serve to highlight Steven Spielberg’s directorial prowess at the expense of Trevorrow’s. The chief villain being Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) is itself just another OG hallmark (and of course because we live in a meme-ified world, there’s a dumb “Dodgson here” reference) -ironic given he was once supposed to be the villain of the first sequel. BD Wong is still here for some reason, his Henry Wu on a redemption journey no one asked for; and of all things, the shaving cream canister makes an appearance -part of what is ultimately the laziest callback (and a weird attempt at poetic justice) of the entire movie. Even Jurassic World is paid homage, the finale set-piece yet another large predator fight in the ruins of industry. Omar Sy, who was Pratt’s sidekick in that film, comes back for a short time too and I couldn’t help wishing he had been the protagonist of this trilogy instead.
Not a lot can be said for the films’ craft, only that it is fairly generic; working off of what came before in tandem with the trends of modern Hollywood, but with no interesting artistic expansion. Even with some practical dinosaur effects, there’s nothing technical in this movie that hasn’t been done better by one of its’ precursors. There are a few evocative shots, but they only serve as reminders of what could have been. The last we see of this series is a silhouette of a triceratops alongside elephants on the Serengeti, alluding again to that far more exciting idea involving dinosaurs in our world. That they took such a promising set-up open to a  multitude of new and appealing possibilities, and chose the dullest direction to pursue with it will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in modern blockbuster cinema.
This could be said of the whole Jurassic World trilogy. But I don’t agree with the takes that this series has run its’ course. Indeed I think its’ largely been a failure to truly capitalize on the storytelling potential of its’ root premise. Jurassic Park is still one of the great blockbusters of all time, and there continues to be more to glean from it than any of its’ sequels have but scratched the surface of.

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