Superfan review — Jurassic World: Dominion
My local screening wasn’t as thrilled as I was, but I’m a diehard. The kids sitting next to us seemed to have a blast.
Hail, hail, the gang’s all here. In the continuing attempt to mirror the success of Marvel blockbusters, we’ve got Universal’s latest attempt at pumping new life into a legacy franchise with Jurassic World: Dominion. Results are mixed, but there’s plenty for diehard fans and casual viewers to chew on.
Keeping objectivity is difficult, as I am one of the converted to cult Jurassic. I’ve not only seen all six films at this point but read the two original Michael Crichton novels that inspired them, played most of the videogames, watched the Netflix animated series, and read the one, now canon, cinematic tie-in novel that expands the character of Claire Dearing, as well as collected the no longer canon comic books. I am a Jurassic superfan. Keeping me on board was a walk in the park.
This time the adventure brings along the three stars from the 1993 original putting the entire Jurassic band together, making Dominion the Jurassic version of Marvel’s End Game, something star Chris Pratt and Director Colin Trevorrow have alluded to in interviews. Universal and Co are keen to cash in that nostalgia check for cool cash, hoping Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, and Sam Neill’s characters are enough to bring you back to the theater, and they’re likely right. The only problem is that they don’t seem to know what to do with all that charisma.
Laura Dern’s Ellie is no longer a paleobotanist, but some kind of ecologist that’s trying to save the world from an evil scheme by the Biosyn corporation; this subplot signals viewers toward a certain real-world biotech giant. They don’t go into developing Ellie’s character or catching you up on the career change, you’re just expected to go with it.
She enlists the help of paleontologist Alan Grant played by Sam Neill, who feels the most natural of the three stepping back into their role, as he was already defined as being old and cantankerous, this being his third dinosaur outing, he plays the role appropriately tired and pissed. I can’t help but feel the need for a paleontologist is never really explained, outside of the romance angle, as dino contact wasn’t in the cards if things went according to plan(they don’t). This brings me to my main gripe with Dominion, remove the dinosaurs and we’d have essentially the same story, albeit a far less interesting one. The terrible lizards are little more than added spice for an increasingly confusing biotech spy thriller, and the classic cast’s justifications for getting mixed into it are tenuous at best.
Jeff Goldblum’s Malcolm is the inside man to Dern and Neill’s corporate espionage, he enters feeling like he’s stepped out of the original film with dark foreboding speeches and his trademark “deplorable excess of personality,” but quickly devolves into the quirky, somewhat randy Goldblum persona he’s built for himself in recent years.
None of these characters offer resistance to putting themselves within biting distance of the prehistoric monsters, which is a huge departure for at least Grant and Malcolm’s characters, and all three wear the same outfits they did 30 years ago like cartoon characters with signature looks. I guess every superhero needs a costume. With stakes this high, it feels like superhero territory, and the messaging is clear, the world is ending around us because of avarice. For much of the first act, everyone seems depressed and resigned to wasting their remaining days on a doomed planet, Ian Malcolm even blatantly advocates this course of action. Relatable, sadly.
We pick up with the modern Jurassic family where we left them, living a comfortable off-grid pioneer life in hiding with Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) as surrogate parents to their adopted clone child, Maisie(Isabella Sermon), with their pet Velociraptor, Blue, close by. Claire is still trying to save the dinosaurs in an attempt to redeem herself for her hand in creating them and turning them loose on the world. Owen is doing his part, roping herds of Parasauralophus cowboy style in a clear call-back to the stop motion dino classic In the Valley of Gwangi. Blue has hatched the virgin raptor egg and now has a child of her own. Maisie is sneaking out and helping loggers deal with pesky dinosaurs peacefully. The happy family gets dragged into the Avengers-style mashup when poachers on Biosyn payroll kidnap Maisie and the new baby Velociraptor Beta. It’s basically the Jurassic version of Commando with fewer guns. Newcomer DeWanda Wise is Dominion’s underworld dino smuggling queer pilot, Kayla, that has access to the evil corporation our heroes are trying to stop. She plays the role like a modern Indiana Jones, a total pulp novel adventurer, but aside from her awesome introduction, she’s sidelined by the much more established main characters, of which there are already six by the time they all meet up. There’s just a lot going on here.
The appropriately feathered Therizinosaurus is a territorial beast.
The cast is great, but the allure of these movies, for me, has always been the dinosaurs, and as the science moves beyond the versions we saw in 1993, a minority set of Jurassic fans have longed for an update to our beloved movie beasts. Good news and bad news on that front. We have some delightfully modern movie monster representations for some, not all, prehistoric beasts, but if you’re the kind of paleo nerd that’s bothered by theropods without lips, I’m sorry to say, these critters might be off the menu. And if you don’t know what any of that meant, you’ll be just fine. What’s puzzling is the inclusion of Atrociraptors, newer, meaner, and faster dinosaurs that look exactly like the now retro non-feathered Velociraptors seen in 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which feels like a waste given that the other new raptor, Pyroraptor, is fully coated in feathers, as all raptors were. Why include a new raptor without making it distinct? Why feather one and not all? For my money, the clawed Therizinosaurus was the dinosaur I was most excited about seeing on the silver screen, and while its time is brief, it establishes itself as a memorable movie monster. The Giganotasaurus is the big threat to Dominion’s T-rex, and as the largest land predator that’s ever lived, it plays the villain role well. Fan-favorite Dilophosaurus makes its long-awaited come back and gets plenty of screen time, with a bit of a visual update, the beast is mostly portrayed by practical animatronics, something special effects aficionados will undoubtedly celebrate.
The despite the marketing, the new Department of Prehistoric Wildlife is, sadly, barely present and by that I mean if they were, I completely missed it.
For all the fun, it’s hard not to walk away feeling a little cheated. If you’ve been following the marketing for Dominion, with the Dino Tracker website, the national park-themed emblems seen on merchandise and toys, the excellent five-minute short film Battle at Big Rock, and the amazing prologue, you’re likely under a mistaken assumption that most of this film takes place in our backyards, cities, and national parks, with dinosaurs running loose everywhere. The film instead, reaches into the novels for Jurassic lore and pulls Ingen’s rival Biosyn into the film. Dodgson (Campbell Scott), the man who sends Dennis Nedry on his 1993 mission to sabotage Jurassic Park, is here as the villain, though casual viewers could be forgiven for not making the connection as he’s been recast and little is done to establish his character as a familiar face. B.D. Wong’s Dr. Wu returns, as Jurassic World’s resident Dr. Frankenstein, this time under Biosyn payroll and suffering from some Oppenheimer’s guilt. Biosyn has been cleaning up dinosaurs all over the world, turning them loose in a sort of hi-tech Jurassic preserve so they can be mined for biopharmaceutical purposes, similar to their motivation in Crichton’s novel The Lost World. It’s at this preserve where we spend most of the film’s runtime. If you haven’t been following Jurassic since 2015, this will likely be a confusing but not frustrating experience due to the breakneck pace and relentless exposition but the visuals and action are enough to make it worth a visit to the theater. They seem to want people who’ve only seen Jurassic Park to be able to enjoy this film, but there’s way too much going on to pull it off without spinning a few heads.
DODGSON, WE’VE GOT DODGSON HERE! The real question is does anybody care?
The Biosyn labs are so futuristic they look like something out of Star Trek with sleek, curved, and sterile white surfaces, and screens with lights that blink in sequence. This is in stark contrast to the simple industrial bunkers and sets of the first three films. The lush jungles are gorgeous and feel prehistoric with large ferns and swamps, and some of the more criminal locales are coated in filth you can almost smell on the screen. The film frequently reaches for its horror roots with dark, clever lighting in its more gruesome moments, making it a more sinsister feeling movie than its predecessors, at least visually. The CGI is never off-putting in that uncanny valley sort of way, but the quality is inconsistent. The scenes in Malta, and the jungles of the Biosyn preserve might as well have been real dinosaurs as far as I’m concerned. Early raptor scenes don’t convince quite as well.
If you are a diehard fan, the charm and charisma of the classic cast working with the current heroes, and the non-stop dinosaur action will keep you in the seat and likely to return for more, which after-all was the whole point of this exerscise in the first place, but we lack solid emotional stakes and the characters start to blend together by the halfway point. The film is best in the beginning when we’re seeing our heroes navigate a world changed by living dinosaurs, and protecting them from poachers. The later acts get weighed down by the oversized influence of superhero crossover movies from the competition. The formula doesn’t translate well to Jurassic and hints to some rather egregious studio meddling. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this new trilogy, but it has yet to deliver a story that stands on its own and justifies its existence. There’s a moment in this latest film where Jeff Goldblum is giving a speech about the exploitative practices at Biosyn. He holds up an origami dinosaur making the connection that corporations like Biosyn are manipulating people and blinding them to it by targeting their love of something like dinosaurs. One can’t help but feel this was screenwriter and director Colin Trevorrow subtly telling us something about how these movies are made with Spielberg and Crichton’s chosen mouthpiece doing the talking for him.
The bottom line is dinosaurs are an easy sell, while Dominion isn’t my favorite of the franchise, I had an excellent time celebrating my favorite prehistoric beasts and I’ll undoubtedly be back for more because these dinosaur movies, like life, keep finding a way.