Jurassic World Dominion (2022 | USA | 146 minutes | Colin Treverrow)
Somewhere around the sagging midpoint of the latest installation the Jurassic franchise, Laura Dern’s “iconic paleobotanist” Ellie Sattler pauses to cuddle a baby triceratops nasutoceratops bound for a life in captivity in yet another dinosaur refuge. Delighting in the infant creature’s wide eyed attention, she muses “It never gets old, does it?” If only the filmmakers shared that reverence or even a fraction of Dern’s rare longstanding capacity to really see the dinosaurs and convey a true sense of wonder, this closing chapter might have been anything other than a long perfunctory drag.
The film’s production notes claim that “no film series has had a more direct, profound and enduring impact on a field of science than the Jurassic franchise.” It’s a difficult claim to repudiate, but whether the original re-invigorated paleontology or sparked the imagination for recombinant genetics, it certainly marked a revolution in blending practical and computer effects. The animated dinosaurs that seemed so revolutionary in Steven Spielberg’s original have flourished and become afterthoughts.
Similarly, in the aftermath of the preposterous events of Fallen Kingdom, as detailed by a funny introductory newsreel (one of the film’s rare moments of actual humor), dinosaurs have begun to re-populate the globe and have increasingly become commonplace nuisances. For those blessed enough to have missed it, the last spin with these resurrected lizards saw an international dinosaur auction at a haunted mansion gone horribly wrong and a clumsy revelation of a human clone (sadly, not a human-dinosaur hybrid, cowards). In what’s become an increasingly cynical series of bad imitations squeezing life and originality from a wondrous masterpiece, it was easily the worst. So, this alleged final chapter arrives with the soft bigotry of no expectations. Compared to the impossibly low bar run into the ground by Fallen Kingdom, Dominion succeeds, if only barely, by not being worse.
It accomplishes this at the expense of being incredibly conservative in its ambitions and deeply uncurious in its execution. Despite the hamhanded way it got there, Fallen Kingdom left us with the tantalizing premise of what would happen if dinosaurs ran amok and infiltrated everyday life. Are they sad pests overrunning cities? Or are they still a hot commodity worth giant sums on the global dark dino dark web? Or rare and fragile creatures in need of a protected refuge, yet another Park-like setting, perhaps? From scene to scene, the film can never quite make up its mind. Like the majority of survey recipients in the fictional news story, Treverrow strongly prefers “DESTROY THEM” to interrogating these questions.
Because it promises to unite the original gang of serious scientists with the next generation of corporate functionaries, dino wranglers, teenage human clones, and a super-intelligent velociraptor, the film’s first stultifying hour is consumed by catching up with everyone. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard have been playing house in the snowy mountains, raising their pseudo-adopted teen clone. Their days are consumed by infiltrating unethical farms with underground Dino Liberation Front allies (BDH, Claire Dearing now in sensible shoes and occasionally caught in the Nomadland-like framing of van life), playing cowboy driving herds of dinosaurs across the open range (Pratt, as Owen, whose superpower is making eye-contact and hand gestures to tame the beasts), sulking (Isabella Sermon as Maisie), and raising a bloodthirsty miracle baby out of the back of an a school bus (Blue, the velociraptor, easily the most charismatic of the bunch). The humans are all quite dull and far less convincing than any of the animated creatures. Their desperation to escape the green screen prison of these movies shows through one-note performances, yet we’re unfortunately stuck with them for the long haul.
Generation 2.0’s road to Dinotopia is catalyzed by an easily-predictable dual kidnapping, that breaks them free of cabin-life and on a circuitous international rescue mission that promises the thrill of dinosaurs gone wild in a crowded ancient city. They’ll stumble through a literal underground dinosaur bazaar and evade dinosaur assassins who relentlessly chase the laser pointers like furious cats. Their survival, though, is less about their own cleverness than the deeply improbable willingness of a complete stranger (DeWanda Wise, whose cargo pilot never quite makes sense) to put her life and livelihood in severe jeopardy to assure their passage to the next setting. During none of this time, despite the tantalizing possibility, does a raptor ride a motorcycle, which seems like huge missed opportunity.
The other half of the film’s plot is equally, if not more egregiously silly, but at least it is buoyed by charismatic actors and residual nostalgia for characters who had the benefit of development before such luxuries went extinct. Having raised a family, sent her kids off to college, Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler has settled into pre-retirement, taking on investigations of less trendy understudied topics like giant killer locusts who are primed to disrupt the global food supply (with the glaring exception of crops made by the latest custodians of the dinosaurs, Biosyn). Her suspicions motivate her to infiltrate this company with the help of her old pal, Alan Grant (Sam Neill), who’s living his somewhat lonely life still digging bones out of the ground for tourists even though the living beasts are free for the looking. For reasons incomprehensible, Ellie decides that they must sneak into this remote corporation to get a blood sample from a giant insect in a lab despite there being millions of them in the outside world terrorizing children and wheat fields alike. Because nothing in this film requires ingenuity, they easily score an all-expenses paid loosely-supervised tour of the facility by way of chaos magician and leather jacket aficionado Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). He, too, has a family to feed and has settled into his silver-haired years cashing checks from the Biosyn CEO (Campbell Scott, doing a slightly less doofy version of Mark Rylance’s Don’t Look Up visionary scientist) to give contrarian lectures to the best and brightest scientific functionaries in a glittering Apple-like campus populated by rescued dinosaurs high in the Dolemite mountains. It’s deeply nonsensical, but at least it gets this beloved trio back together.
Honestly, it would be very easy to ignore the rest of the film’s offensively creaky plot logic if it was in service of anything remotely as fun as the occasional spark of their reunion. But instead of cutting loose with the vast thrilling possibilities of the most universally exciting creatures, the film gets bogged in backstory and plods through dinosaur encounter after dinosaur encounter like a sad theme park ride. We are shown yet another largest carnivore ever to walk the earth; even it yawns.
It’s an overstuffed cast and no one is particularly well served by the overcrowding. With little time to develop credible motivations, everyone comes and goes, quips to the camera, and does what the plot demands for the simple reason that the plot requires it. A major conceit requires us to believe that a precocious young scientist pioneered a revolutionary therapy without once collaborating with another colleague or even maintaining a lab notebook. There’s possibly a great corporate thriller hiding in here if only there was time or interest in developing the supremely competent Head of Communications (Mamoudou Athie). Similarly when we catch up with BD Wong as Henry Wu, one of the few characters have the unfortunate distinction of being stuck in every awful sequels, he’s afforded only a few passing lines to convey the deep exhaustion with this nonsense and his scientist character’s evident yearning for redemption, or at least for release. Soon, we begin to root for the dinosaurs, if only to thin the cast’s ranks, raise the stakes, or bring some clarity of purpose. But, alas, only the most plainly loathsome are allowed to be eaten alive by hungry carnivores.
There are, of course, some poster-worthy moments for the real stars of the film, the animated dinosaurs. They get a few heroic moments here and there. And yes, the film answers the pressing question of whether dinosaurs would’ve looked silly with Edward Scissorhands claws, covered in feathers, and/or swimming in icy waters (spoiler: yes, yes, and most definitely yes). Sadly, still, at no point does the T-Rex give another dinosaur a high five with her tiny claw, but for one thrilling moment, one dares to dream.
The saddest part of this dreary conclusion is that with vast resources at their disposal it should be the easiest thing on the planet to make awesome movies about prehistoric beasts revived into modern times. Yet in inadvertent parallel with the plots of each of these films, the most dull-witted people keep being handed the keys to make ever paler copies of the original until all of the wondrous goodwill has been squandered. Unlike the corporate scientists who must concoct lofty proclamations of benevolent ambitions to justify their greed-fueled dangerous disregard for the laws of nature, the near-certainty of a gargantuan box office is reason enough to keep churning these monstrosities onto the big screen. Just as why the “genetic power” of murder lizards is a surefire cure for Alzheimer’s merits negligible onscreen interrogation (no one ever asks about a demented dinosaur), it seems that no one involved in the production of the film paused to ask whether they should put effort into anything resembling effective screenwriting or even coherent action sequences.
Worse movies (in this series!) have had highly lucrative balance sheets; so I have little doubt that these dinosaurs will do their job and turn a profit. Like many a character in this series, the people making these movies know this system. Although nearly all of the best scenes are in the trailers, even a disappointed curmudgeon like me appreciates the appeal of showing your kids these fantastic beasts on the big screen. But if its wondrous reverence for the majestic creatures of the prehistoric world you seek, though, I suppose there’s always that lavish new David Attenborough docuseries waiting for you at home on AppleTV+ to fill in the many gaps.
Jurassic World Dominion arrives in theaters on June 10
Images courtesy Universal Pictures