Review: Jurassic World Dominion

After an hour of tedious (and not-so-important) plotting, Jurassic World Dominion becomes a wholly different beast and plucks its best action sequence straight out of The Bourne Supremacy, but with dinosaurs. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) go to Malta after Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) gets kidnapped by operatives working for BioSyn, the film’s evil corporation. It’s the only sequence where the movie (and its actors) have any semblance of fun, surprisingly delivering on the premise of a spy film with dinosaurs in it. And had the film been a spy flick, involving Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) with the Jurassic World characters, it would’ve been a blast. 

The movie quickly fizzles out after the Malta sequence, reminding you what it’s actually about: locusts. Oh, you paid for an IMAX ticket to see dinosaurs duke it out? Ha! Prepare to see more locusts than dinosaurs. That’s right, BioSyn’s evil CEO, Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), specifically engineered locusts with Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) to decimate the world’s crops…except for BioSyn’s. And so while Owen and Claire go on their spy mission in Malta, Alan, Ellie, and Ian are trying to extract locust DNA from BioSyn to expose their corruption. The two groups of characters, of course, incidentally meet at BioSyn headquarters with two new characters, former Air Force Pilot Kyla Watts (DeWanda Wise) and Ramsay Cole (Mamoudou Athie), BioSyn’s head of communications who helps Malcolm in exposing Dodgson’s corrupt plan. 

Let’s be real, no one watches Jurassic Park, let alone the sixth entry in the franchise,  specifically for the plot. All they want to see is dinosaurs duking it out and scaring the living crap out of humans. It's the sole reason why the Jurassic Park franchise is a billion-dollar critic-proof one, and if you deliver enough spectacle involving the titular creatures of the movie, most of us would forgive any screenwriting inconsistencies that could occur. It’s part of the reason why Jurassic World was enjoyable–there was a lot of cool spectacle involving dinosaurs, even if the story itself didn’t make much sense. But Dominion seems to forget that the general public couldn’t care less about locusts, and only want to see big dinosaurs fight in big-scale action scenes, while the characters are thwarted yet again in the middle of it all. 

So why on earth are we spending so much time on locusts? They’re the least frightening creatures of the movie, but writer/director Colin Trevorrow and co-writer Emily Carmichael draw many sequences involving those damn locusts as if that’s the best the supposed final chapter in the Jurassic Park franchise can offer. There’s an extended action scene with Sattler and Grant, as they get viciously attacked by locusts after an alarm goes off, or another one with Sattler and Dearing in a power grid.

And if you thought those sequences were dull, wait until you see locusts…on fire…falling from the sky like meteors and conveniently attacking our protagonists. All of these scenes take too much of the film’s hefty runtime and aren’t interesting in the slightest. Even the dinosaur sequences are boring. Take the Malta chase scene out of the picture (which has legitimate kinetic energy it almost feels like they hired Paul Greengrass for that segment alone. Heck, it feels like it’s a completely different movie than the rest), and you have the most unimpressive CGI fights with the most unimpressive cinematography possible. It is an impressive feat to make the central attraction of your movie unimpressive, and even more impressive when some of the action scenes have practical dinosaurs thrown in the mix. There are a couple of scary moments here and there, but they’re so sparse that they’re quickly forgotten amidst a sea of dull, and cut-and-paste, CGI action scenes. Not even Michael Giacchino’s score (which was one of the highlights of Fallen Kingdom, arguably the worst of the franchise) can add an ounce of rhythm and excitement to these scenes. 

Not even the film’s cast can save it. Sam Neill looks genuinely bored, much more than he did in Jurassic Park III since his character virtually has anything of interest to do. Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum try their best to save face, but they’re clearly not interested in the film’s material as they were while making Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original. Both Pratt and Howard are fine, but their level of interest in the material has clearly dwindled from when they made the first Jurassic World in 2015. The best performance of the film comes from DeWanda Wise, who is far more compelling than the film’s protagonists and legacy characters combined! She’s the only one who fully cares about the movie, and makes the most of her limited screen time.

And as for the antagonist, well, he isn’t as caricatural as Fallen Kingdom’s roster of wacky villains, but Campbell Scott’s performance suffers from the same problem as everyone else (except for Wise): he looks bored. His line delivery is one-note, and there’s very little that motivates him from unleashing a swarm of locusts to decimate the world’s crop other than “world domination” type stuff. But who cares? He’s bored. Neill is bored. Pratt is bored. The dinosaurs play second fiddle and their fight scenes are boring. As such, everyone is bored, and so are we while watching it, even if you go all-in for the IMAX 3D experience. 

Colin Trevorrow has managed to transform one of the most iconic creatures in cinema history into a dull, lifeless shell that serves as the backdrop for uninteresting fight sequences trying to distract us from a truly abysmal plot on locusts that nobody cares about. There’s not a single person that will go see Jurassic World Dominion during its opening weekend for the locusts. Trevorrow had one job, literally just one, and couldn’t bring himself to deliver the ultimate dinosaur spy flick spectacle that the Malta chase seemingly hinted at. Had the film blended The Bourne Supremacy and Jurassic Park, it would’ve ruled so much and might’ve just been Trevorrow’s best movie. Unfortunately, Jurassic World Dominion may go down as one of the most disappointing legacy sequels in recent memory, considering the massive amount of potential it had. (The best Jurassic Park sequel will always be The Lost World. Forever Spielberg’s most underrated film.)