Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

Four years ago, I walked out of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom shaking my head at its collective stupidity.  It was, I wrote that night, a movie so badly structured that I had to ask my wife if I had, perhaps, missed something.  Amid all of the technology was the story of a tiny girl cloned from the same material as the dinosaurs and arrived at an ending that not only didn’t make sense but would, if possible, lead to the otherwise preventable deaths of tens of millions of people.

It gives me pleasure to report that, at least, the follow-up Jurassic World: Dominion not only makes more sense but it strives to get back to its roots.  We’re not here for homespun drama, we’re here for the dinosaurs, and maybe a little human drama.  It’s also a reunion, Dominion catches up with some of the series’ legacy characters and puts them in the center of the action without having it feel like fan service.

Dominion, is not perfect, but I give the writers credit for one thing: They took the dumpster fire ending of Fallen Kingdom and have at least built it here into a very harrowing global crisis, one that threatens to deplete the human race by means of cutting off its food supply.  I’m not going to go into exactly how, but I’ll just say it has biblical implications, not to mention imagery.  The movie strives to be a lot of things, equal parts James Bond, Taken, Mission: Impossible, Michael Clayton and Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend.  And somehow I’m with it!

As the movie opens, we learn that dinosaurs now freely roam the Earth giving to a global crisis with efforts to control them failing.  The megacorp BioSyn wants to round them up for breeding purposes using a particular genome that can be harvested for pharmaceutical purposes.  That’s the evil corporation, and it even has an evil corporation bad guy, a bland soulless rich guy played in a bland soulless performance by Campbell Scott.

Meanwhile Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard, again) has gathered a team is investigating illegal breeding sites and gathering information on animal cruelty.  Meanwhile Owen Grady (Chris Pratt, again) is living off the grid in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he is holed up, trying to protect the genetic clone Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) from the bad guys at BioSyn.

Into this fracas, and not without purpose, are Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern, again) and Alan Grant (Sam Niell, again) who are tipped off to BioSyn’s plan by Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, again) who knows the diabolical environmental extinction-level plan that the company could very well be responsible for. It is always nice to see the band get back together, and fortunately they are here for a purpose, as service to the story and not just the fans.

My favorite parts of the movie are close to the beginning, the daffy vision of a world in which humans and dinosaurs are forced to co-exist, leading to an underground market of dino cock fights and selling dinosaurs on the black market.  It’s that kind of movie. Yeah, it’s silly but think of how bland it would be without it.

Jurassic World: Dominion is far from perfect, but it seems to have a much better hold on it’s story and its characters than the messy turmoil that was Fallen Kingdom. The plot is only the clothesline.  We’re here for the action, the stomp-stomp, crunch-crunch and this movie has a lot of it.  The movie has a lot of action set pieces and a lot of tension, one especially good scene involves a chase through the streets of Malta and another has Claire hanging from an ejector seat in the jungle.  Scenes like that are plentiful here, however I wish that the movie had settled into more scenes of majesty and wonder.  I wish it would have observed the creatures more.  But I like what I got here.  I had better time than I thought I would.  Is it perfect, no, but it has some moments of real bite and I enjoyed it.