‘Jurassic World Dominion’ Proves Dinosaurs Belong Extinct (Review)

Expecting logic from a Jurassic Park movie is about as helpful as running from a giant Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s a fruitless cause. Expecting any part of Colin Treverrow’s Jurassic World Dominion to make a lick of sense is somehow even more useless. If all you want from a Jurassic Park movie is one suspense sequence after another that could almost be put together in any order, Dominion is just the movie you need to see. Otherwise, the longest movie in this tired, worn-out franchise only serves to make the shortest, Jurassic Park III, look even more fun.

Dominion is set four years after the events in the forgettable Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), which ended with dinosaurs escaping from the Lockwood estate in the Pacific Northwest and magically appearing everywhere overnight. Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen (Chris Pratt) have isolated themselves in a cabin with Maisie (Isabella Seron), Benjamin Lockwood’s clone granddaughter whom black-market dealers want to kidnap. They were hired by Biosyn, a corporation publicly claiming they want to use dinosaur DNA to cure illnesses, but is really corrupt and behind the mysterious locust plague that is wiping out crops in the Midwest. Maisie’s kidnapping is the thing that gets Claire and Owen to the Biosyn facility in Switzerland.

Since Dominion is also supposed to act as the concluding chapter of the story from the first three Jurassic Park movies, Treverrow and collaborators Emily Carmichael and Derek Connolly toss in Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). This means Dominion has similar heavy lifting to do like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (a movie Treverrow thankfully didn’t end up directing) did. The locust subplot really only exists as a vehicle to get Grant and Sattler to Biosyn, where Malcolm already has a cushy job.

By stealing whole chunks of this movie from the characters they created for the Jurassic World movies, Treverrow and Connolly admit that no one really cares about Owen or Claire. Instead, they realize we just want to see dinosaurs chase, maim, and eat humans (and each other). It’s also an admission that they failed to create memorable human characters on their own. One reason Jurassic Park and even The Lost World: Jurassic Park succeed is Steven Spielberg’s talent for bringing out the human element in stories that could be overwhelmed by the monsters. Treverrow never had this talent from the start. Owen is just Chris Pratt playing Chris Pratt, so the most memorable part of Treverrow’s first Jurassic World movie is the absurdity of the Indominus Rex.

The best part of Dominion by far is the Malta sequence. It’s the only part where Treverrow truly explores what life would be like if dinosaurs magically popped up in 2022, which makes the rest of the movie even more disappointing. The Malta part is a 20-minute Mission: Impossible With Dinosaurs movie, and it completely rocks. All the action is set in the blistering daylight, as Owen rides a motorcycle with a raptor at his back. This is the movie we need to see, but instead, Treverrow finds a way to get everyone in a jungle in the middle of the night with suspense set-pieces that echo those done much better by Spielberg.

Dominion is the conclusion the Jurassic World franchise deserves. It’s chaotic, filled with low-hanging nostalgia, and fails to provide an end that justifies its own existence. The story of the Jurassic Park franchise is one where each subsequent movie struggles to come up with ways to get humans back on a very specific plot of land where dinosaurs are. In Dominion, that shouldn’t have been a problem, and scenes like the chase through Malta or Blue’s life in the snow show the promise of a movie where dinosaurs live next door. Instead, Treverrow insists on making Dominion feel just like every other Jurassic Park movie, only pushing the farce even further. This is, after all, a franchise that now wants you to believe that velociraptors can be calmed just by a guy holding out his hand.