Movie Review: Jurassic World Dominion

Welcome to Jurassic World… Again

The days of cash-grab nostalgia trips and rebooting beloved franchises coming out of Hollywood seem to be endless, this time we have the third and hopefully final part of the Jurassic World series.

Let me start by saying that I absolutely loathed the second movie Forbidden Kingdom and just about tolerated Jurassic World primarily due to it being essentially a poor rehash of Steven Spielberg’s seminal Jurassic Park. The original movie I always put in my top ten favourites list and I even enjoy the far weaker sequels.

Are there Dinosaurs in your Dinosaur Movie?

Dominion starts off bad and plot-wise it doesn’t improve throughout. For some reason after the events of the second movie Dinosaurs have somehow spread across the globe and are now wreaking havoc. Stupidly humanity has for some reason decided to try and co-exist with these monsters (it’s explained numerous times in earlier films that the creatures called Dinosaurs are in reality just scientific abominations grown in labs and that there’s nothing natural about them at all).

In this world humans tolerate massive dinos attacking their homes and trashing towns and cities. If this was happening in the real world I think most of us would be in favour of hunting them all back into extinction.

If you can get over that suspension of disbelief we are then thrown into a weird plot about genetically modified locusts that are devouring crop fields, and illegal dinosaur trading. We are reintroduced to Ellie Sadler from the original movie who is investigating the locusts. (I thought she was a botanist?) Who then ropes in Allen Grant to help her with her investigation despite him still digging up Dinosaur bones… I did warn you this doesn’t make much sense.

The movie then jumps from action scene to action scene as the characters from the newer movies track down the clone girl from the second movie and the kidnapped offspring of the velociraptor Blue who somehow just doesn’t eat Chris Pratt’s character. (Trust me, if she did it would’ve made this film far more interesting.)

The plot jumps from convenient coincidences to awkward action scenes that felt like the director wished he was really making a Mission Impossible movie and we are introduced to bland new characters and some older faces from the earlier Jurassic World movies. Don’t ask me to name any of them because I can’t. They’re that boring and one-dimensional.

One scene that had me rolling my eyes and audibly groaning in the cinema was when Chris Pratt’s Owen and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire are on a mission to rescue the clone girl in Malta. These two characters have such thick plot armour that there was never any tension in the chase scenes (the stunts are pretty good I’ll give it that) because we just know that they’d survive. Events happen that are so convenient to advancing the plot that it actually feels like the movie makers are insulting the intelligence of the audience. Don’t get me wrong, if you just want a dumb popcorn flick then this is passable fare, but if you were hoping for a decent ending to the Jurassic series then you will be sorely disappointed.

There are some pretty good callbacks to the earlier movies such as the main villain being the guy in the shades near the start of the original movie. (Although I doubt many people will make the connection. My wife is a huge JP fan and she didn’t realise until I pointed it out to her after we left the cinema!)

In Summary

The acting in Jurassic World Dominion is okay, everybody plays their part well and does their best with the often shitty dialogue. The best scene for me was the one where Claire has to crawl into a pond to escape a Dino that is hunting her. It had tension and was really well done. There are some good scenes like that in the movie, which is why the end product is so disappointing.

There are glimmers of a good movie here, but the directing and writing let it down badly. This film could have been great, heck the entire Jurassic World could have been but alas it’s not. It’s a series that fails to surpass the first in every way. I just hope that after this one the Jurassic series can finally be left to go extinct.

Score - 4/10