JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION (2022) ★ ★ ★



If Steven Spielberg couldn't direct a good sequel to the original "Jurassic Park" (1993), what makes us think anyone else can? "Jurassic World Dominion" isn't a terrible movie, but it isn't very good. It inhabits a weird middle ground of a thin story and pointless special effects that are nonetheless conjoined into something entertaining enough to distract the viewer from the real world for two-plus hours. With a summer blockbuster, that's all you can ask for. (Thirty years ago you could expect a bit more.) 

It struck me while watching this movie that every sequel in this franchise makes the same critical mistake: the dinosaurs get far too much screen time. Spielberg knew in 1993 that the only way to generate suspense was to hook audiences with brief glimpses of extinct reptiles, and intersperse them with languorous scenes of humans engaged in eco-management discussions. There was tension buildup in having Dr. Ian Malcolm explain chaos theory to Dr. Ellie Sattler, which was then released by having them flee from real chaos. But in "Dominion," there's no buildup. It's all chaos, all the time, which is less than thrilling. 

This is a common problem in Hollywood today, and I'm not sure what to do about it. What can a man say to get producers to slow their roll? Do they really think audiences are incapable of waiting forty-five minutes before they're shown something exciting? Maybe they're right, but I believe it's worth taking the chance. 

I could spend hours picking apart the storyline issues in "Dominion," but it's been done to death in other forums. I'll only mention the human plot contrivance that is Isabella Sermon's character. She plays Maisie Lockwood, a clone of Benjamin Lockwood's daughter, and she exists solely to drive the action. Her de-facto parents are Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), and she's kidnapped by henchmen for a genetic research corporation called Biosyn, run by Dodgson (Campbell Scott), the same man that hired Dennis Nedry to smuggle dino samples out of Jurassic Park in a can of Barbasol. 

Maisie is a blank-faced teen with the personality of a squirrel. At least the first film featured teens with hutzpah. This one features a human ampersand. Maisie can't exist in a vacuum. She can't even be kidnapped alone; the baddies also grab a baby raptor, which had me wondering which victim Grady and Dearing were more interested in rescuing. I imagine playing Maisie was about as much fun as playing Dodgson, who is equally hollow. In fairness to the writers, Dodgson's return to the franchise was hair-splittingly difficult to pull off. He had roughly fifteen seconds of screen time in the first film, and it wasn't until two-thirds of the way through this one that I remembered who he is.  

Meanwhile Laura Dern and Sam Neill reprise their roles as Dr. Sattler and Dr. Alan Grant, and their whole reason for being is to get to the bottom of who is creating the giant locusts that have been selectively eating all but Biosyn-seeded crops. Gee, I wonder who it could be? The obvious answer, coupled with an invitation from Biosyn employee Dr. Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), has the two penetrating the compound to find proof of Malcolm's suspicion that Dodgson's operation is illegally decimating global food supplies to corner the market with their GMOs. 

A friend of mine mentioned that "Dominion" is two movies wrapped in one, and he's right. The first is Grady and Dearing's action-packed mission to find their adopted human & raptor daughters, and the second is Sattler, Grant, and Malcolm's quest to uncover Dodgson's nefarious schemes. Does it work? Well, I had some fun with it. There are plenty of beautifully-crafted dinosaur moments, including a brilliant airborne escape sequence involving raptors, a motorcycle, and a very old plane. DeWanda Wise has a small part as a retired military pilot who joins the protagonists in their adventure, and despite her character being cookie-cutter and trite, she finds herself in some of the movie's best cliffhangers. It's also neat to see almost the entire cast of the first film reconvened in this one, with Dern, Neill, and Goldblum looking every bit as good as they did three decades ago. 

Also notable are the number of animatronics that were employed -- 18 in total, all designed by John Nolan. He did a commendable job in making the dinosaurs look as realistic as Stan Winston's did, and his efforts helped create a film that is much better looking than "Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" and the first "Jurassic World." But looks aren't everything, and Colin Trevorrow was trapped by Emily Carmichael's mediocre screenplay into directing a mediocre movie. 

Open letter to Universal: You have the director. You have the actors. You even have the effects designer. Now, find better writers.
                                                                                                                                  --- Bill Fontaine

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