Jurassic World: Dominion Review

The Jurassic franchise has come to an end this past weekend. At least that’s what Universal has been claiming in their advertising of “Jurassic World: Dominion.” If you believe them in this statement, which I most certainly do not, then you can perhaps accurately say that it both went out with a bang and with a pathetic thud, depending on your point of view. Obviously opinions are a personal thing, but on the more objective financial side, it opened to a massive $145 million, only slightly down from the $148 million of “Fallen Kingdom.” It makes sense that neither sequel was quite as high as the $208 million opening of the franchise revival “Jurassic World,” but it’s still very impressive that all three movies were massive financial hits… despite the less than stellar reaction. That leads to the “pathetic thud” side of the coin. “Dominion” scored a franchise low 30 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, claiming that title of worst reviewed in the franchise by a large margin, below the 47 percent margin of “Fallen Kingdom.” Exiting on that level of toxicity is probably not what Universal was hoping for, but their bank accounts might not care about what the critics or audiences have said.

If you read my June movie preview, you’ll note that I thought “Dominion” was going to fall in between “Jurassic World” and “Fallen Kingdom” in regards to opening weekend, not below both. I think the best explanation is that the heavy negative buzz leading up to release, combined with the continued dominance of “Top Gun: Maverick,” contributed to a certain number of people deciding to pass on the finale, especially if they weren’t a fan of “Fallen Kingdom.” Perhaps they chose to go see “Maverick” again instead. I myself was close to not seeing this movie and only did so out of obligation rather than excitement. I’ve seen and reviewed the others. Might as well complete the set.

That said, fans of the Jurassic World movies might not really take this review seriously, claiming that I was going to hate this no matter what, perhaps accusing me of going in looking for bad things to criticize rather than trying to give it an objective look. To that potential accusation, I say… fair. I’m not going to argue that vehemently. I grudgingly went into a movie that I expected to hate and maybe that affected my experience to a degree. Although perhaps a slightly more accurate way to phrase that was that the movie had a very large hill to climb in order to win me over. I was very mixed to disappointed in “Jurassic World” and I left fuming after “Fallen Kingdom.” I put that as my worst movie of that year. And given that Collin Trevorrow, director of “Jurassic World” and “Dominion,” and writer for all three, was again on board, having been given the keys to the car by Universal to do whatever he pleased, my confidence level in him listening to the complaints of his movies and winning me over with a third one was incredibly low. Sometimes you can predict that a movie will be bad based on the filmography of the director and be right. It’s like going into a Michael Bay Transformers movie. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me… five times, shame on me if I thought the result was going to be any different.

And thus we get Collin Trevorrow. A man who does not know how to direct a movie. And I’m supposed to believe he can turn things around and match Spielberg’s epic “Jurassic Park” in this third and final movie in the Jurassic World series? I feel this was less of me being a grumpy pessimist and more of me knowing what this was going to be and not allowing myself to get disappointed once again. I’d rather be surprised that he proved me wrong rather than get my hopes up only to have my heart ripped out again.

As such, it’s been quite interesting trying to digest and analyze my specific thoughts about “Dominion” after walking out of it. When you’ve successfully not let yourself get excited for a movie over the course of the past four years and it turns out that you successfully predicted it would be an awful movie, you can’t exactly experience that feeling of disappointment. Being disappointed comes with the connotation that something did not meet your expectations or hopes. When one did not have hopes, one cannot be disappointed. Thus this movie did not disappoint me. It also did not surprise me. It was, simply, par for the course. A bad movie that I fully expected to be bad. One could say I was numb to the experience.

And thus in a strange and somewhat contradicting turn of events, my approach to this undoubtedly bad movie allowed me to have a certain degree of entertainment that I did not have with the previous two movies in this Jurassic World trilogy. I was highly amused during most of the movie and laughed quite a bit. But it was most definitely not a degree of entertainment that was intentional from the vantage point of the filmmakers. I was laughing at the movie, not with the movie. And thus I honestly think this dives into the realm of being “so bad that it’s hilarious.” A movie where you can put on with a group of friends and laugh at how atrocious the whole thing is in a “Mystery Science Theater 3000” sort of way.

And I can promise you that this was not the movie’s intentions. I genuinely got the feel that they were trying to make a good Jurassic World movie. I just found entertainment at the wrong parts.

Case in point, there is a sequence in the movie where Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard got caught in some sort of ring of scandalous dinosaur trafficking mischief. Again. And there’s a point where the generically evil people are using the laser-trained dinosaurs that “Fallen Kingdom” set up to try to kill Chris and Bryce. And thus there is a long sequence where our two heroes are running from these raptors that are trying to eat them for dinner. The theory behind this sequence is that the audience would feel a degree of tension as they worried for the lives of their beloved main characters. For me, though, when the raptors started chasing them, I was, like, “Get them!” I was definitely on Team Dino. And I found a degree of entertainment from the movie as I was hoping that these dinos would kill and eat our main characters.

There was another moment where Bryce Dallas Howard nearly plunged to her death after evacuating an airplane, only to find herself alone in the jungle with a giant bird dinosaur thing that was chasing her. She hid in the water and the dino was inches away from getting her. At this point, I found a level of morbid amusement because, instead of feeling tension similar to the original “Jurassic Park,” I gained excitement at the idea of this dino reaching down a few feet further and biting her head off.

Again, this was not the intention of the filmmakers. They were trying to make intense sequences where the audiences feared for the lives of the main characters. Instead of feeling that emotion, I gained a level of adrenaline at the idea of wanting our main characters to get eaten alive. They did such a horrible job at writing these characters over these three movies that the only level of satisfaction I would get is if their arcs ended with them becoming dinner. And you know you’ve failed miserably as a screenwriter when I’m cheering for the main characters to die. Yet their failures provided me with entertainment that I most certainly did not have after leaving the other two movies. So in a weird way this is kinda the best of the three even though it is also easily the worst of the three?

The only slight glimmer of hope that I had for this movie that I most certainly suppressed is the idea that Collin Trevorrow openly admitted that he wanted to make a movie where dinosaurs ran freely across the world and essentially treated the two movies leading up to this as a bridge movie to get to his final destination. In which case, I suppose there’s a chance that the two previous movies were bad because the writer/director literally didn’t care about them and only used them as a means to get to his desired destination. And maybe that would lead the final movie to being a good movie because it’s the movie that the Trevorrow actually cared about?

The result of this particular glimmer of hope lead to… confusion. Again, not disappointment. This movie was not eligible to disappoint me. But Trevorrow spent years of his life teasing this particular premise for this movie only to not take advantage of the premise?

Because, yeah, outside a few random shots of dinosaurs living and roaming in random places in the world, usually through cliché news footage sequences, this is not that movie. A very strong majority of this movie takes place at the headquarters of an evil massive corporation and the immediate jungle surrounding this movie. A total area that is probably smaller than the area of both Jurassic Park and Jurassic World. The whole time through this premise, I was, like, “THIS was your end game, Trevorrow?”

Not to mention, the biggest conflict of this dinosaur movie did not even involve dinosaurs. There’s a plague of giant, prehistoric locusts that are starting to swarm the Earth and deplete the planet’s food supply. These locusts are secretly released by this evil corporation, who of course via advertising are making themselves look like the good guys, so that they can gain huge financial increase by being the one source of the world’s food supply when the planet runs out. And because of this conflict, Dr. Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler are brought back in an attempt to stop this plan and get rid of the giant locusts.

Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard get roped into this because their adopted clone child from “Fallen Kingdom” gets kidnapped by this evil organization. And somehow the baby of Chris Pratt’s pet raptor also gets taken, so Pratt makes a promise to his pet raptor that he would bring the baby raptor back. Somehow they end up at a detour to this other place where they got chased by laser-trained raptors before getting rescued by DeWanda Wise’s character, meet a half dozen other characters that are brought in to do nothing, and the whole gang is united at the headquarters of the evil organization to fulfill their plans that I just talked about in these paragraphs.

And, oh yeah, they randomly run into some dinosaurs along the way.

That’s it. That’s the movie. The more I think about this specific plot, the more I am extremely confused as to how professional screenwriters wrote these plot points. Screenwriters who have dedicated their lives to the art of filmmaking and most likely spent many years of school studying these things and writing them. And this is what they came up with? Even more confusing is how the drafts of this screenplay wound up on the desks of the humans at Universal and the humans at Universal looked at this screenplay and greenlit the thing.

I’m not saying I could make a better movie. Filmmaking is not something I have ever pursued and I have mad respect for people who have. I’m just saying as one who has spent the last decade plus watching and critiquing movies as a hobby, this is just one of those movies that is extremely confusing as to how it became a thing.

What I will say is that, despite the baffling incompetence of the screenwriters of this movie, there did seem to be a lot of people involved in the technical aspects of the movie that did their job proficiently. The movie looks great. The CGI dinosaurs might not be as magical as the original Jurassic Park, but they look great, nonetheless. The movie has a great score. It’s edited just fine. The cinematography and camera work are great. And for the most part it seems like the actors involved in the movie look like they cared about performing their roles well. Chris Pratt is the one that seems like he’s bored and checked out. And bless her heart, Bryce Dallas Howard is trying. I’m a fan of hers and I think she has a great career ahead of her in both acting and directing. But her character is written atrociously, which is why I wanted her eaten. But the clone girl is great. The original trio of Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, and Laura Dern seemed like they had a lot of fun returning. DeWanda Wise and Mamoudou Athie played great side characters. Even Campbell Scott as random, evil CEO dude seemed like he was having fun, even though his character was the most generic bad guy ever.

What I’m getting at here is that there was a lot of pieces in play from professionals who were doing a great job at what they’ve been paid to do. And it’s really unfortunate that their talents were completely wasted due to the gross incompetence of the man steering the ship. This movie’s failure is 100 percent on the feet of Collin Trevorrow in my opinion. And he should feel all the shame in completely destroying one of cinema’s best franchises.

Another moment of me giving credit where credit is due is that the dinosaur sequences in the final act of the movie are genuinely the best dinosaur sequences in the entire Jurassic World trilogy. It’s again a missed opportunity that the dinosaurs were more of the side obstacles to overcome rather than the main conflict. And the specific instances of dinosaur terror were extremely random rather than being calculated incidents that the movie built towards. But nevertheless, if you isolate the individual moments and ignore the rest, those are good moments that deserve praise.

But it still doesn’t all add up to something that is worthwhile. And it’s still extremely disappointing in general that so much potential was squandered with this trilogy as a whole because Collin Trevorrow seemingly has no idea what made “Jurassic Park” so effective in the first place. It is also disappointing that Universal gratefully and willingly gave him the keys to the car and were perfectly happy with him driving that car off a cliff. This could’ve been special. But instead it’s a big waste of time and money.

My closing recommendation is that you skip this movie in theaters. Wait until it comes to streaming or until it is cheap enough to rent. Then get together with a group of friends and have fun laughing at it. Through that, entertainment can be had. But I don’t give the movie credit for that because, even though I enjoyed this movie in a weird way, the idea that the Jurassic franchise has devolved to the point where it falls into “so bad it’s good” territory is extremely depressing because that’s not what a Jurassic movie is supposed to be.

Grade: 3/10