The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
My mother loves the original Jurassic Park and has come with me to see every movie in this series since that first film back in 1993 when I was nine years old. The moment that the end credits started to roll on Jurassic World: Dominion, she turned to me and said “this is the last one of these movies that I’m coming to see with you.” I think that about sums it up.
Jurassic World: Dominion is a hot mess. Much like Jaws, Jurassic Park was a simple story that didn’t call for sequels. Much like the vindictive and seemingly psychic shark in Jaws: The Revenge, this movie shows that such sequels will eventually require that a simple concept be stretched into something incredibly convoluted in order to keep the money machine rolling. For the duration of Dominion’s painfully-long 2.5 hour running time, my most frequent thought was to ponder just how ridiculously fucking complicated this movie is. I have heard that the original cut of this movie was nearly six hours long, a prospect that nearly just made me have an aneurism and faceplant into my laptop.
Much like The Rise of Skywalker, and that’s not a healthy comparison right off the bat, Dominion makes the error of trying to conclude not just the current trilogy, but tie together the entire franchise in one shot. The result is an absolute clusterfuck. We have two plots going on: Plot A features the cast of the original Jurassic Park trilogy (Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum) while Plot B features the cast of the Jurassic World trilogy (Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and whoever those other people are). These are essentially separate movies for the majority of the film and don’t intertwine at all until the final act, making the movie feel like a shitty double-bill where the two movies have been edited together for no discernable reason for the majority of the running time. The result is godawful pacing and a film that feels like it will never end. I really thought that this movie was over at one point and was waiting for the end credits when a character said “hey, we need to go save the raptors!” and I thought fuck you and fuck your raptors, I want to go home.
Let’s start with Plot A because of the alphabet. This movie has the unfortunate timing of being released a few weeks after Top Gun: Maverick, which showed that it is indeed possible to do one of these legacy sequels without feeling like a cynical, soul-sucking corporate product that exists purely to exploit nostalgia. Dominion is more in the camp of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, where the old characters and repeated callbacks only exist to get a cheap emotional reaction out of the audience, hoping to trick us into liking it purely because it reminds us of something from our childhood. All of the original characters could have easily been written out of the film with the only consequence being a more merciful running time. Their plot isn’t even about dinosaurs, for fuck’s sake, it’s about locusts. That’s what finally brings these characters back: an industrial sabotage plot about frigging locusts. I know I’ve been waiting for that since I was a kid.
Also like other recent nostalgia-obsessed films, Dominion can’t resist simply recreating moments, shots and lines from the previous movies. I could sometimes almost hear the studio executives yelling at me “remember this, you son of a bitch! Yeah, this is amazing, right?” No, you theoretical asshole, no it isn’t. Having Sam Neil say “don’t move” or having Jeff Goldblum waive a torch doesn’t make your movie as good as Jurassic Park. Goldblum gets it the worst, though, playing up the speech patterns and memes that have overshadowed the fact that he is a really good actor. Much like Christopher Walken and Gary Busey, Goldblum has become what the internet has reduced him to being rather than the talent that he actually is and that’s a shame. He even makes a reference to the open-shirt meme in a moment of meta pandering that made me audibly cringe. Rejoice, internet. We got a reference to the open-shirt Goldblum meme. It’s a thing we know so that makes it funny. Fuck characters, I just want references.
Somehow the plot about locusts and farming logistics manages to be more interesting than the plot about dinosaurs in a movie called Jurassic fucking World. Plot B involves Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard who are chasing after Maisie, the clone girl from the first movie, who has been kidnapped. One of the fundamental flaws here is that the plot depends on the audience caring about Maisie and you know what? Fuck Maisie. This is the idiot that released all of the dinosaurs at the end of the last movie and potentially doomed humanity, so they can feed her to the fucking raptors for all I care. Anyway, this chase winds around the world as the girl is kidnapped and transported and we get to meet several Bond villain rejects that I couldn’t care less about. One of them has trained raptors to attack anyone that she points a laser at, which is interesting because I thought that raptors just attacked anyone that stands in front of them without the need for a laser-guided homing system, but I digress. This chase finally ends at the compound of the big evil company that is responsible for the locusts, the dinosaurs and the kidnapping because they like to have a diversified portfolio.
SPOILER ALERT……And who runs the evil company, you ask? Dodgson! It’s Dodgson! We’ve got Dodgson here! See? Nobody cares. If you don’t remember Dodgson, he’s the guy in Jurassic Park that gives the Barbasol can to Newman and asks him to steal the embryos. Turns out that, despite only appearing in a couple of scenes in Jurassic Park and none of the other sequels, he has been the big bad all these years. That’s like watching Gremlins 3 and finding out that the villain has actually been Judge Reinhold the whole time. He also looks and acts nothing like Dodgson from the first movie (the original actor was, um, unavailable) and instead is doing a Steve Jobs impersonation. Why did this have to be Dodgson? I mean other than to make yet another unnecessary reference to the original movie? At one point he even picks up the frigging Barbasol can looks at it with fond remembrance, as if I’m supposed to think that even the characters are nostalgic for the events of the first movie. People fucking died, you know, so why do you have a fondness for artifacts from those events? Why the fuck would he care about the goddamn Barbasol can? Why did we need any of this? END SPOILERS
This film’s trailers are also damn dirty lies, as the franchise once again fails to deliver on the promise of showing dinosaurs freely roaming the world and interacting with humans. There are a couple of sequences like that, sure, particularly the James Bond sequence in Malta, but the film quickly abandons this and returns, yet again, to having the dinosaurs in an isolated forest/jungle. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom wasn’t a good movie, but at least it gave us something different. For the life of me, I can’t understand why this series refuses to explore the possibilities of dinosaurs being loose throughout the world and insists on returning to the narrative safety of secluding them in a compound in the wilderness. This has been done repeatedly and nothing left to do with it. Please, for the love of god, do something else.
As for positives, the effects (especially the practical effects) are very good and there is some creative camerawork to showoff the dinosaurs hunting their prey in unique ways. There seems to be a lot more practical work in Dominion than in the last couple of entries and the quality is vastly increased as a result. There are also a couple of effective, albeit tame, horror scenes here and the best use of the dilophosaurus (aka the spitting dinosaur) since the original movie. That’s about all I’ve got.
A couple of people have told me that I should just enjoy this movie because it’s just a dumb dinosaur movie and I can’t expect more than that. But I can expect more than that and do you know why? Because of the original Jurassic Park. That wasn’t just a dumb dinosaur movie; it had a tight script, witty and heartfelt dialogue and characters that deserved to be cared about. It didn’t just phone shit in and hope to cruise by on low expectations and nostalgia. It was actually a good movie. This has none of that. This is just fucking the corpse of an intellectual property that’s been dead since the 90s. Let it go.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_World_Dominion#/media/File:JurassicWorldDominion_Poster.jpeg
