Jurassic World Dominion (2022) Review
The weirdest thing about the World half of the Jurassic franchise is how quickly each one abandons it’s premise as early as possible. Jurassic World does very little with the operational park and sends the protagonists into the jungle. Fallen Kingdom wraps up the sequence in the jungle with loose dinosaurs by like 2nd act and moves the action to a mansion. Now Dominion drops the “a world overrun by dinosaurs” for a plot featuring black markets, secret labs, and dinosaur nature preserves that are not at all predicated on dinosaurs being loose worldwide.
There’s not really much to discuss when it comes to Dominion. It’s just not good. It’s not like a failed experiment or an issue of some specific mistake in the narrative. It’s uninteresting scenes strung together to make an uninspired movie. It’s so far removed from what made the original film great. If you showed an AI all the Fast and the Furious movies and the toy commercials from JP, Dominion is the movie it would make. There’s a part where the heroes hear very loud footsteps coming down a hallway, so they turn around and run the opposite direction. And their footsteps make no sound. It’s that kind of dumb.
The cast is here earnestly. Nobody is phoning it in and both the original cast and the new batch seem like they’re having a good time playing their characters. If there is any cynicism it’s at the studio level for knowing whatever crap came out the other end of production would be fine as long as it had the branding.
There’s an early scene where giant prehistoric locusts attack some farmer kids and I thought that was pretty cool. The impact of prehistoric insects was an aspect of a Jurassic World I had not considered. It was neat. Then it turned out that WAS the movie. The movie is ABOUT those locusts and the dinosaurs are only involved in the sense that our protagonists proceed to crash, fall, or wander into what turns out to be a spot with a scary dinosaur in it.
I would not have been as hard on this movie if I thought it was the end, likethey promised it was. There is zero sense of finality here. If anything, there is a very real threat of more. That’s really the worst part.
P.S. the dinosaurs are not integral to the plot. That’s not good in a Jurassic Park movie.
