Jurassic World Dominion: Just Go Extinct Already

With the imminent release of Jurassic World: Rebirth in just one week, I have mixed feelings about the upcoming movie. On the one hand, I hear good things about the test screenings. And on the other, I remember what Jurassic World: Dominion was like. To be truthful, I just watched it today, but to be fair to my poor, Asperger-riddled memory, whatever. Dominion is not a good movie, and that's a shame because it's oh-so-evidently trying to do things differently than its predecessors. Whatever you might think about giant locusts of all things being a major antagonistic player in this movie instead of the ever-so-familiar and often strangely villainous raptors, this movie is trying to rebrand its franchise and act the free spirit in some ways, and I can appreciate its thoughtfulness. What I can't appreciate is its inherent lack of focus and its ever-present, sigh-inducing, and even contrarian sameness.

To give you the round-up on what Dominion is about, four years after the volcanic eruption in Fallen Kingdom leveled Isla Nublar, dinosaurs have spread all across the globe, learned to adapt to our modern environment, and integrated with both the existing wildlife and the human population. Meanwhile, Owen and Claire are living together in a cabin in the mountains and secretly raising a girl named Maisie Lockwood, who you may remember as a person of interest to corporations in Fallen Kingdom. But when swarms of giant locusts begin decimating crops, Owen and Claire will have to do a lot more research and run from a lot more hungry dinos to save the world. There are some things that I do like about this movie, and some early strengths that made a good first impression. Dominion starts as a mockumentary, a technique that grounds it in a weird sense of reality, and seeing dinosaurs interact with a familiar world is also fascinating. For instance, watching Velociraptors hunt rabbits in a snowy forest is just one of several sights that make for an interesting what-if scenario.

Nevertheless, all of this is undone by a story that's far too sprawling for its own good, pretty much the only complaint I can level against this movie that I couldn't also apply to Fallen Kingdom. Yes, Dominion is a big, globe-trotting adventure with too many moving parts, and it's never able to settle into any rhythm where it can feel like it's going anywhere important, or even feel much like a Jurassic movie at all. Some may call it subversive, but I ask for what purpose? It's entirely too much and yet never enough because of it. Dominion loses its focus early on and never finds it again. And when your story is as excessively and unnecessarily intercontinental as this one, I couldn't tell you where to start looking.

For as big as Jurassic World: Dominion tries to be, there's rarely any real sense of importance to be found here. Of course, long-time fans will be and probably were delighted to once again have the chance to see some old and familiar faces from the classic films, and the filmmaker in me was pleasantly surprised by some of the early signs of creativity, but these cool features eventually give way to a been-there-done-that narrative that can't find any compelling reason to justify its bloated scale. I can understand that people working at Universal need to put food on the table or buy a fifth yacht, but come on, is there some unspoken rule that legacy blockbusters have to sacrifice integrity in the name of entertainment value? So, is Dominion better than Fallen Kingdom? Yes. But not by much, and that's not a high bar to clear at all. Just a smidge more intentionality and focus on telling a tighter story could take stories like this one much further than they're going now, and if that's too much to ask, maybe there's nothing wrong with admitting that perhaps it's time for impersonal and wow-factor-centric blockbusters to go extinct.

Jurassic World: Dominion - 5/10

Genesis 1:27-28