Not even the hilarious Jeff Goldblum can save Jurassic World Dominion

[Karlston]

Fantastic turns by Goldblum, CGI department can't save film's core issues.

Jurassic World Dominion, out this week exclusively in theaters, brings the gang back together—but that's maybe not a good thing.

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How low can you set your expectations for Jurassic World Dominion?

 

If you can burrow those expectations deep into the earth, perhaps so far that researchers don't discover them for thousands of years, you may have a good time. That goes double for parents who are looking for a movie to watch with amped-up, pre-teen dinosaur aficionados. The film's ideal audience agrees with its filmmakers about what matters here: the dinosaurs, not the humans.

 

This is the kind of film in which a Quetzalcoatlus appears on the horizon, and a character responds by saying its name briskly yet accurately, just before the majestic flying dino emerges in terrifying and detailed fashion. This creature gets better and fuller justification for its actions than pretty much any actor in the film—which might have been fine, had Dominion's writers not spent so much time trying, and failing, to stitch its characters' motivations together.

“Look at you... and look at me...”

My favorite things about this film are easy to list, so I'll start there.

 

Impeccably rendered dinosaurs.

Universal

 

First, the dinosaurs are great. The budget invested in this film's roster of ground, air, and sea behemoths is well spent, and the production team clearly had a blast cracking open modern paleontology records and expanding the series' dino roster beyond the usual suspects. Fast ones, lumbering ones, even ones with feathers: they're all here, and they're generally used to terrorize the humans. Even better, the acting, framing, and light-and-shadow bounces in these crucial moments shine in ways that will make you forget how many green screens are likely in use.

 

"Guess who's coming to dinner..."

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Second, the best action scenes are nuts. My favorite, which sees velociraptors chasing trucks and dirt bikes, has been spoiled in trailers to some extent, but there's still a lot of fun to be had in the film's execution. That's largely because the cinematography emphasizes prolonged shots instead of countless rapid cuts, making its stunt driving look all the more incredible.

 

Bring on the Goldblum.

Universal

 

And third, Jeff Goldblum is fantastic. Though he's wedged into the film under some of the series' most moronic pretenses (which is saying something), his character Ian Malcolm shines as a self-professed "chaoticist" (take that, futurists). What's more, his contribution has been upgraded from the phoned-in, behind-a-bench narration sequence in the last Jurassic World film. In one early moment, he greets a longtime friend with Goldblum-ian aplomb: "Look at you... and look at me... and look at you!" It's the exact tongue-in-cheek attitude that this film needs, and he certainly adds to Dominion's watchability whenever he's in the frame.

 

Sadly, Goldblum is crowded out of the film often enough for the rest of Dominion's disappointing content to come through.

A scourge of velociraptors? No, not exactly...

The rest of this review includes spoilers for both Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World Dominion to make critical points. You have been warned.

 

The film's biggest negative is that its intriguing central premise—dinosaurs now live among humans—is criminally wasted. The previous Jurassic World film ended with a dinosaur outbreak, and in addition to being that film's best element, this calamity teased even more fun to come in this year's sequel.

 

Sure enough, Dominion's darkly hilarious opening sequence of shaky-cam videos, captured by smartphones and dashcams alike, makes clear that dinosaurs once again rule the Earth. They're a new plague upon humanity. Sadly, shortly after this sequence ends, so does the threat. Dominion instead focuses on a scourge of super-sized, genetically engineered locusts, which is weird for a few reasons. In particular, while they look pretty gross, these locusts never harm humans.

 

Chris Pratt frequently holds a single hand into the air as a way to calm the film's dinos down. By now, there's really no point in complaining about a dino-calming technique being "illogical."

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At least not directly. As it turns out, the locusts are genetically programmed to only eat crops whose seeds don't originate from Biosyn, a biomedical research firm that has taken up the mantle of researching dinosaur DNA in order to combine it with the human genome (no, Biosyn's operations are not regulated by any global regulatory agency).

 

This is where series veterans Laura Dern and Sam Neill emerge for their roles in the film. Dern's character, Ellie Sattler, is convinced that Biosyn engineered the locusts to wipe out a massive percentage of the world's food supply to corner the agricultural market, and she asks Neill's character, Alan Grant, to join her in invading Biosyn headquarters and searching for evidence.

 

The gang's all here, for better and for worse.

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Never mind that global government agencies with satellite capabilities and major investments in the agricultural sector would probably notice emergent super-locusts eating only certain farms' crops at an incredibly rapid rate. Nor that the world's sole private firm in charge of dinosaur species research might be locked down like Fort Knox to hide its worst secrets. No, we have to get Sattler and Grant into this film somehow.

Kidnappings: When mail-in testing kits simply won’t do

Let's review: this version of Earth is overrun with dozens of far more interesting, dangerous, and unpredictable "emergent species." Velociraptors alone, right? Yet Dominion chooses to instead invent a bioengineered food crisis to move its story forward. (In another casualty of logic, the plot echoes unproven real-life claims about GMOs.)

 

There's also the matter of the oversized cast, which approaches Avengers levels of bloat. The Jurassic World lead-actor core of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard is cut to the bone, as the duo does little more than react to their adopted daughter, Maisie, being kidnapped by Biosyn agents. (This kidnapping, I should add, happens for absurd reasons: Biosyn needs to research Maisie and her unique DNA to "undo" the locust swarm, and not even in a medically invasive way! I suppose a mail-in kit for blood and saliva samples would've been too easy.)

 

Before the kidnapping happens, we see an overlong sequence in which both Pratt and Howard's characters are consumed with dinosaur wrangling; she's a vigilante tracking the dino-trading black market, while he's been deputized to... chase dinosaurs on a horse and occasionally lasso them. Both of these plot threads are dropped almost instantly, with zero callbacks later on.

 

What's worse: being kidnapped for no reason or having to smell this dinosaur's breath?

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Despite their inherent likeability, Jurassic Park's Dern and Neill can't do much with Dominion's inane script, which forces them into a zero-chemistry romance. Viewers must also contend with three toothless Biosyn players—two of whom betray their allegiances as a cheap way for the movie to get this story over with, while the film's bright spot, a helpful pilot portrayed by DeWanda Wise (Fatherhood), is sorely underutilized despite having enough charisma for three actors combined.

 

Campbell Scott's role as Biosyn's big bad combines the tics and behaviors of real-life tech moguls Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, but the writing never takes these references anywhere interesting. Some actors can work wonders with "quiet rage," but Scott merely channels awkward, impotent rage—and certainly gets nowhere near the original Jurassic Park's Wayne Knight, even though Dominion draws clear parallels between the two.

An argument for the series’ extinction

Artist's rendering of the wrecked state this sequel leaves the franchise in.

Universal

 

Obviously, it's cheaper to produce a film that's padded by digitally generated locusts, familiar faces, and overlong speeches about "paleo-DNA" research. While I would have much preferred a movie that focused on dino-human interspecies relations, I could have seen myself happy with a dumb-fun edit of this film that paces out its zaniest action scenes with ham-fisted dialogue and logically unsound conclusions—or, at the very least, made up its mind about whether it wants to be an earnest family drama or a darkly funny thriller.

 

But Dominion feels no less than two full script rewrites away from living up to the fun and bombast of its best moments. The paleo-chaos potential teased at the end of Fallen Kingdom has been absolutely wasted here. And anyone who shows up for nothing more than the promise of rip-roarin' dinos will have to contend with a severely underwhelming ending. Dominion concludes with the creatively bankrupt approach of copying Fallen Kingdom's final showdown and then, uh, inserting a single extra dino into the scene.

 

Series fans will probably have a decent time overall, but they sure deserved better than this argument for the series' extinction.

 

 

Not even the hilarious Jeff Goldblum can save Jurassic World Dominion