‘Jurassic World Dominion’ Review: the Slow Extinction of the Franchise
A Totally Reel Movie Review
Rate It Out of Eight
3.5/8
Full disclosure: At the time I watched this movie, I hadn’t seen any Jurassic Park movie before. Since then, I’ve watched the original 1993 one and have decided to stop there before the quality inevitably declines to whatever Jurassic World: Dominion is. I know, I know, I lose credibility for not having watched such a classic until now. I include that to say that I walked into Jurassic World: Dominion with no expectations nor comparisons. I’m certainly not judging the entire franchise based on what seems to be the worst movie; it’s like judging Star Wars by Rise of Skywalker. Based on critics’ reviews, Letterboxd ratings, and Twitter, this movie might spell the end of the franchise for good. At least dinosaurs got a quick death; Jurassic Park is dying piecemeal with each new movie.
Jurassic World: Dominion is so unnecessarily long, which is the root of its many evils. I don’t know why Colin Trevorrow decided to make it 2.5 hours long. A great story can and should be told in 90 minutes or less. Someone please tell me why a plastic astronaut deserves an hour and 45 minutes. There’s evidence to back up that action movies in recent years with paper-thin plots are well past 2 and nearing 3 hours long. Not to gatekeep, but 95% of the time unless you’re Christopher Nolan or Quentin Tarantino, your movie shouldn’t be this long.
In the following review, I may come off as harsh. I am slightly ashamed to admit that I originally gave this movie a 5/8 for being entertaining. After watching the first movie, that’s dropped to a 3.5 (arguably a 3). The highlight for me was about 40 minutes in when Chris Pratt is on a motorcycle, driving across rooftops and through small winding streets in true 007/Bourne/Mission Impossible style. I walked in knowing Jurassic World: Dominion would be a CGI-reliant movie and didn’t expect much in general. As long as there were some explosions (check) and dinosaurs (check) to keep me awake (debatable), I’d say it was good enough. I didn’t expect this movie to be profound or memorable and that’s okay; sometimes you need to just turn your brain off and not think. And Jurassic World: Dominion did just that… for the first 90 minutes at least.
The Root of All Evil: A Movie 60 Minutes Too Long
Jurassic World: Dominion has a simple plot once you cut away the pointless subplots that get resolved within 20 minutes (SPOILERS AHEAD). It boils down to: mutant locusts are eating the world’s supply of food, threatening global food shortages. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern, a legacy Jurassic Park character) and friends sneak into the bio company that created the mutants. They escape. Meanwhile, Maisie the Clone is kidnapped. And escapes in all but 5 minutes. Chris Pratt and Claire the Redhead (basically her only personality trait) go rescue her and the whole merry gang ends up at the same place at the same time. And they all escape while 3 CGI dinosaurs fight in the back.
That’s it. That’s the plot of the movie. The movie is so bloated with superfluous CGI dinosaurs that you’re often distracted from the plot — not that there’s much to be distracted from. There’s a whole sequence in the middle of the movie where Claire is separated from Chris Pratt and their new friend. Claire spends the next 20 minutes wading into water to not be eaten by a dinosaur and Chris Pratt and his new pilot friend (I feel bad that I don’t remember her name, but I’ll get to that later) also fight a dinosaur. They’re all reunited and the sequence did nothing to advance the movie forward. It feels like that sequence was only filmed to be splashed all over billboards.
After sitting through the entire movie, you’d expect to be rewarded with an epic finale. I distinctly remember wondering when that final battle would start as I watched three CGI dinosaurs fight, only for the human characters to sneakily run away. Having watched the 1993 Jurassic Park now, I wonder if that’s a trend with every movie . Imagine my disappointment when the movie cuts to the resolution, but don’t feel too bad — at least the movie is finally almost over.
Wasted Potential Character Development
If Colin Trevorrow, the director, insisted on making the movie this long, he could have used some of the 150 minutes to better flesh out characters. As an example of how three-dimensional the characters are, I’ll list the nicknames because none of them were particularly memorable.
- Tim Cook Knock-Off: apparently his character’s name is Lewis Dodgson (he was in the 1993 movie, trying to buy embryos). He manufactured the mutant locusts to monopolize global food supply (only food produced by his company is immune to the locusts). His company is called Biosyn, literally pronounced Bio SIN. He dies partway through the movie just like the coder he bribed in Jurassic Park.
- Claire the Redhead: this one is pretty self-explanatory. Having zero context, all I can say is that she tries to be a mother to Maisie the Clone but fails. And that Chris Pratt’s character likes redheads (an actual line of dialogue written by professional writers).
- Ramsay the Sidekick: he was Tim Cook’s lab assistant and helped Chris Pratt and friends escape out of the goodness of his heart. Maybe I’m a cynic, but there were just enough lingering shots for me to wonder if he was secretly pulling some strings. Turns out he was just an actually good person with as much depth as the shallow end of the pool.
I think you get the point now. One character in particular who had potential was the pilot who helped Chris Pratt and Claire on their quest. She was so independent that she only had one ejecting seat on her plane. But apparently she was so consumed by guilt when she saw Maisie being kidnapped (and did nothing) that she decided to help. I was intrigued by her character, wanted to know more about her background and how she became so cynical. The writers did a particularly bad job of describing the motivations of these new characters. We take at face value that her and Ramsay risked their lives simply because they wanted to.
What irks me even more is that fleshing out characters, if written well, does not even take up much screen time. Here’s an example from 1993 Jurassic Park: John Hammond, the man who funded Jurassic Park, sits and tells Ellie about how his first business venture was a flea circus. Now that he’s rich, he wanted to create something more concrete with his ambition. Even as his grandchildren are missing, he’s already thinking about the next iteration of the park and what to learn from this experience: “Now, the next time, everything’s correctable. Creation is an act of sheer will.” He’s an idealist and he dreams of creating this paradise. Ellie reminds him the real illusion is to think he had any control to begin with and we see his face fall as she crushes his dream. This dialogue took no more than three minutes and yet added so much depth to John Hammond and the movie as a whole, a cautionary tale against the hubris of man.
This place… I wanted to show them something that wasn’t an illusion. Something that was real, something that they could see and touch. An aim not devoid of merit.
Same Characters But None of the Magic of Jurassic Park (1993)
I just watched the Jurassic Park movie a few hours ago and it’s fresh in my mind. Sure the 1993 movie doesn’t have the same CGI as the 2022 one, but it has so much more. Spielberg is a master of suspense, the score swells as we’re introduced to Jurassic Park for the first time, and we actually see character development (a foreign concept for Jurassic World: Dominion) and some touching moments as Alan Grant bonds with the kids in his care. We’re invested and we care about the characters. The special effects have also held up remarkably well and the movie is charming, witty, and comforting. There was even discussions about the ethics of creating Jurassic Park — of the need to take responsibility for the bad and the good parts of scientific innovation. The movie was three years before Dolly the Sheep was cloned, but these debates about playing God and attempting to control nature through genetics are even more relevant today.
What you call discovery, I call the rape of the natural world
Ian Malcolm’s observation applies not only to scientific, but also geographic discovery. The Age of Discovery in the 1400 and 1500s brought on centuries of colonialism, birthed the transatlantic slave trade, and all but decimated the indigenous population in the Americas. All this is alluded to in Jurassic Park, which balances the action and humor to appeal to young kids as well.
Jurassic World: Dominion pales in comparison. It lacks substance and overcompensates by dialing up the CGI to create bigger dinosaurs and loses the heart of the franchise in the process. The magic of the first movie that makes it an enduring classic is the camaraderie, friendship, and underlying darkness. The well-timed comic relief certainly helps. Skip forward 29 years later and the franchise has only regressed. Ian Malcolm continues to be great comic relief and Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler have enough chemistry to carry the movie. Jurassic World: Dominion attempts to mimic the same cautionary tale that the original does (dominion by definition means sovereignty or control) about controlling nature and human greed, but it falls flat. The villain is neither particularly nuanced nor is this message given the gravity it deserves. The movie put in no work and simply putting dominion in the title isn’t enough to pay off.
The Decayof the Jurassic Franchise
Jurassic World: Dominion is derivative and nothing groundbreaking, using tropes as old as the dinosaurs. Only pay to see it if you are simply looking for an action movie with no substance or interesting characters. Not even the nostalgia of legacy characters could salvage this completely. After watching the original Jurassic Park (1993) movie, I’ve lowered the overall rating for this one. While Dominion’s box office performance surprises me considering the bad reviews, at the end of the day people will pay to watch the Jurassic franchise on the big screen. Ultimately, Jurassic World: Dominion feels like a fossil - the preserved remains of a once-living, successful franchise.
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