Jurassic World: Dominion

Any child with a decent imagination could see what is wrong with the Jurassic World franchise as a whole, and Dominion in particular.  You don't take a wondrous idea, and turn it into a thriller.  You let the audience be awed from time to time.  Here we have a screenplay written on autopilot built up of one dino attack and forced crisis after another.

The very idea behind this franchise makes the mind run wild with possibilities.  Creatures extinct for millions of years are now living among us in our modern day society.  Think of what you could dream up, think of how the world would react to this news.  But director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow chooses to throw all mystique and imagination to the wayside, and give us a two and a half hour thrill ride picture.  I understand that a movie like this wants to be a thrill a minute, but you also have to give your audience a chance to breathe.  There needs to be moments where our heroes are not in some sort of peril, whether it be from a dinosaur, greedy humans who traditionally make up the true villains of these films, or nature run amok.  By the time the heroes were on the run from a swarm of prehistoric genetically engineered locusts that were on fire, I knew that the filmmakers were just really stretching for a crisis.

Jurassic World: Dominion is a shabby piece of goods dressed up with the best special effects money can buy, and a soundtrack that is constantly blasting away at your senses until you just submit, and watch the movie with weary indifference.  It treats the dinosaurs like special effects or targets in a video game, simply running about the screen, and interacting with the human actors as little as possible.  We do get a few fleeting shots of the possibility of dinosaurs existing among us, but you get the sense that Trevorrow is not interested in truly exploring such majestic images, because they're mainly used in shots designed for the trailer, and not the actual plot itself.  This movie gives us so many dinosaur attacks with such regular frequency that I actually started to get sick of them.  That's something my inner 10-year-old would never say, and it pains me to write that, but it's true.

Like a lot of recent nostalgic properties being reinvented for modern audiences, the movie allows us to reunite with some of the legacy heroes, such as Sam Neill and Laura Dern coming back as Dr. Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler for the first time since 2001's Jurassic Park III, as well as the return of Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm, who had a cameo in the last film, and has been upgraded to a supporting role here.  It's great to see them sharing the screen as these characters, but if I must be honest, it would have the same effect watching a reunion interview on YouTube.  The movie does little to advance these iconic characters, and instead slips them into the continuing adventures of the younger heroes, Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who with each passing film have lost any resemblance of humanity they might have had, and are now reserved simply for running and gunning their way through one action scene and narrow escape after another.

Their job is to keep a cloned child named Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) safe from some villains who want to experiment on her, and the dinosaurs as well, who are now part of a black market and underground fighting ring.  Again, intriguing ways that dinosaurs could be implemented into our modern society that are simply touched on by the screenplay.  Our heroes are attacked on the ground, in the air, in underground caverns, a forest, an icy lake, and a science lab one after another to the point that I started to wonder if the screenplay was literally all action scene directions split up by brief spurts of dialogue like "Look out!".  This is a movie that wants to trample on the memories anyone might have of the 1993 original, and deaden the imagination of kids, who could probably dream up a better movie about dinosaurs and humans sharing the same modern world in a heartbeat.

What we're left with are some fleeting feelings of nostalgia, a bit of wonder now and then, and a whole lot of expensive stunt work and effects that don't add up to anything.  Jurassic World: Dominion promises us wonder and spectacle, but its center is dead, cynical and mechanical.

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