Nostalgia Abounds In 'Jurassic World Dominion'
Starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Laura Dern, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, BD Wong, Omar Sy
Rated PG-13
Action, Sci-Fi
Run time: 2 hr, 26 min
Directed by Colin Trevorrow
In theaters June 10, 2022
In the last two weeks, I’ve now seen two sequels within pop culture royalty that came well after the first installment of the series. And Jurassic World Dominion had the unfortunate task of following Top Gun: Maverick. They both have a lot of the same features: homage to the original, the return of beloved characters, a retread of iconic moments and a lot of cinematic moments that were clearly filmed to impress on an IMAX or 3D screen. But Dominion had one handicap that Maverick didn’t: there were mediocre films within the franchise before. We already knew what a questionable movie looked like in the Jurassic Park Cinematic Universe. And while thankfully, this installment didn’t quite follow its predecessor’s lead, it also didn’t live up to the first (in either the original trilogy or the current one).
Thankfully, Dominion isn’t determined to retread the exact plot steps that the others in this franchise have (one of the true problems of the second Jurassic World). We open on a world in which dinosaurs are just living among the people. Some seem to coexist just fine while others (namely the giant or the carnivorous ones) are definitely causing a bit of a problem. There are two main stories: Owen (Pratt) and Claire (Howard) have moved into the wilderness to protect Maisie (Isabella Sermon) from anyone who would want to take/harm her, and as a bonus, Owen gets to do some wrangling of dinos out in nature (and Claire gets to try to quiet her guilt by liberating captive dinos from breeding camps and illegal poaching/capturing operations).
If that isn’t intriguing enough, there is a plague of locusts that puts the biblical one to shame. This is where we get some more familiar faces. Ellie Sattler’s (Dern) environmental research leads her to these prehistoric locust shenanigans to investigate. All signs point to (of course) a sketchy mega-corporation in the scientific/bioengineering field. Luckily, Ian Malcom (Goldblum) is there and is giving Ellie a way into the headquarters, and she wants her old friend Dr. Grant (Neill) to join her. Unsurprisingly, these plots (including a kidnapped raptor baby that I haven’t even mentioned before now) are all going to overlap and converge, and despite having a lot of the elements we come to expect from a “monster movie” a la earlier Jurassic-s and modern Godzilla or Kong flicks, it feels a bit fresher than the ones before.
We do get a maybe-evil-ish-who-knows CEO that clearly fits the “Steve Jobs but possibly a sociopath” stereotype that is now common. We also get a truly insane Jeff Goldblum, who I can only assume made up a majority of his dialogue, because while he said Ian Malcom-esque things, I couldn’t get past the idea that there was just so much Goldblum-ness infused into it. Some of the other dialogue is incredibly cheesy, but I was able to let some of it slide since it was trying to do something we don’t often see anymore: close a series. Sure, I’ll believe it when I see it, but it was a relief to watch a film that does not try to keep the door open too much for a sequel. There are quite a few “oh sure, that just happened to be where they ended up” and far too many semi-coincidences in order to make the plots work, but if you’re a Jurassic fan, I think this does a relatively decent job of just bringing you back into this world.