Thankfully 'Jurassic World Dominion' Is the Last One
Please let this franchise go extinct.
Towards the climax of Jurassic World Dominion, touted as the epic conclusion of the Jurassic World trilogy that started with Colin Trevorrow's inconceivably successful 2015 film, a giant Tyrannosaurus rex (because there's always a Tyrannosaurus rex) steps behind a sculptural fountain in the middle of a courtyard, its head for a moment appearing in profile within the fountain's circular ring. Even if you've never seen a Jurassic movie before in your life, you'll recognize the iconic logo that has been the franchise's calling-card since the 1993 original. This is the kind of movie that Jurassic World Dominion is: a corporate product that exists just to make more of itself, constantly reminding you at every turn of the beloved origins this series has warped beyond all recognition.
The world has been overtaken by dinosaurs. They gallop in herds across the fields of middle America, they trudge alongside elephants across the floodplains of Africa, they nest at the tops of the world's tallest skyscrapers. With these novel interlopers comes human greed: Dinosaurs are big business, bred like cattle, haggled over in underground bazaars, bought in bulk by pharmaceutical companies hoping to find ancient cures for modern diseases. Former raptor trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and former dinosaur park pencil-pusher Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) live in a chemistry vacuum—excuse me, a cabin, protecting the human clone Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) whom we met in the previous movie from, I guess, bad guys.
Across the country, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) discovers fields supposedly ravaged by prehistoric locusts, and enlists Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), who is doggedly pursuing paleontology even though dinosaurs live and breathe in the world all around him, in taking a trip to a new high-tech bio-synthetics company (never a good sign) in order to prove that they've been breeding superbugs to engineer a monopoly on the world's grain supply. At the same time, the Velociraptor Blue's new baby and Maisie are both kidnapped by mercenaries and spirited away to the company's remote facility managed by a bland Elon Musk type (the building even has a Hyperloop) where they keep a menagerie of dinosaurs in a man-made preserve. After a slew of ultraloud action setpieces, Owen, Claire, Maisie, Ellie, Alan, and celebrity chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) converge on the facility and havoc is wreaked.
I don't know if Dominion is the worst of the new trilogy of films because I haven't revisited either of the previous two after the first time I saw them. Once was more than enough, and the same goes for this installment, which is one of the most unpleasant experiences I have had in a movie theater in a very long time. You can feel the life drain out of this movie with every uncomfortable line delivery from actors pacing around cramped sets and every incoherent action scene that goes on for 10 minutes too long and exists only to pad the movie's two-hour-plus length.
There is no real reason for any of it. The trio from Steven Spielberg's classic are brought back seemingly because it takes actual physical strain to care about Pratt's and Howard's characters, whose names I have already forgotten. Many have lauded this film for its use of practical puppets in the place of some CGI dinosaurs. Spielberg built a mechanical Tyrannosaur model because it was the best way at the time (and remains so) to get across the sheer scale of what was on the screen. The only reason puppeteered dinosaurs exist in this movie is because… they did it in the original. Everything is just a callback to something better, while trying hard to ignore or overshadow the things that are worse. Most of the actually better things (for one, DeWanda Wise's gruff airplane pilot who looks like she stepped out of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow) aren't given enough time to make more than a broad impression.
While the first Jurassic World was merely cynical and cruel, the treatment of dinosaurs in this film is downright hateful. The animals are beaten with clubs, run over with cars, electrocuted with cattle prods, shot at with guns, burned, kicked, punched, and, in one case, thrown out of an airplane. It's implied at one point that all the dinosaurs kept in the preserve are fitted with electronic chips that herd them around the enclosure with electric zaps. Jurassic Park gave its characters time to marvel at herds of Gallimimus, to reach out their hands and pet the snouts of hungry Brachiosaurus. Dominion's Therizinosaurus, a herbivorous theropod with comically long claws, abruptly and violently kills a deer grazing peacefully on a bush. If I had watched this movie at the age at which I saw the original, I would have left the theater in tears. I can't imagine the kind of person who would derive pleasure from any of it, and I would not want to meet them.
Because my Critic Brain does what it does, I can't help but think of all of this as a bigger metaphor for this studio's treatment of what has become a franchise, which exists seemingly because of the name recognition of its predecessor. Universal's plan for its Jurassic films is akin to locking something beautiful and tender inside a cage and twisting and squeezing the life out of it, one blockbuster film at a time. Will movies like this finally, finally go extinct? We can only hope that life finds a way.