Four years after the destruction of Isla Nublar, dinosaurs now live–and hunt–alongside humans all over the world. This fragile balance will reshape the future and determine, once and for all, whether human beings are to remain the apex predators on a planet they now share with history’s most fearsome creatures in a new Era.
The final movie in the second ‘Jurassic Park’ trilogy is here and it’s been billed as the finale to the whole saga (that is, at least until it is likely rebooted again somewhere down the line), bringing to a conclusion the story that began in 1993 with Spielberg’s (still) high point for the series. ‘Jurassic World Dominion’ does pretty much what you would expect it to do and is exactly what I expected it to be, by which I mean that it is good fun to watch at the time but also entirely disposable and I’ll likely have forgotten most things about it by this time next week.
The plot picks up 4 years after the events of the previous film (‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’), in a world where de-extinct dinosaurs now roam the earth freely, wreaking havoc as they go. In order to control this, Biosyn Genetics, the shady corporation introduced in ‘Jurassic Park’, have received a government contract to establish a dinosaur sanctuary where they can conduct tests with a view to being able to help the world with this new prehistoric problem. Of course, they are actually up to no good (or at least their CEO Lewis Dodgson is), and it is down to Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Owen and Claire to stop them, with a little help from some familiar faces for fans of the series in Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum. After a short detour to Malta which is fairly unnecessary, all of these characters converge on Biosyn’s compound in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains, bringing them into contact with several monstrous dinosaurs, and some monstrous humans as well.
I can’t say I was overly invested in the plot of ‘Jurassic World Dominion’ or the fate of its characters, although I did find myself rooting for Dern, Neill and Goldblum, more because of a legacy affection for their roles in ‘Jurassic Park’ than for anything here, but I did find it pretty enjoyable for the most part. Good special effects to bring the dinosaurs ‘to life’, some tense and thrilling set pieces and overall a decent take on how a world coming to terms with dinosaurs in it might react. I would have liked the movie to have been a bit more expansive given the premise than it was, with the choice to frame much of the drama in a compound not taking the franchise much further from its origins as a ‘dinosaurs try to break out of a small area’ movie.
I can’t imagine I’ll watch any of this ‘new’ trilogy again but I’ve enjoyed them all in the moment, which I suppose is a little like damning with faint praise. Neither bad nor anything coming remotely close to capturing the magic of the original movie, it’s nonetheless a worthwhile watch if you know what to expect going in.
Rating: 3/5
Directed By: Colin Treverrow
Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, DeWanda Wise, Mamaodou Athie, Isabella Sermon, Campbell Scott, BD Wong, Omar Sy, Justice Smith and Daniella Pineda
'Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either’ Ordinary People (1980) 