It's a t-rex, they've been around since, I dunno, the 90s?

JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION

2022

Directed by Colin Trevorrow

Written by Derek Connolly, Emily Carmichael, and Colin Trevorrow

Spoilers: moderate

That's it, that's the review.

I'm arriving at Jurassic World Dominion from an odd angle: more than three years after it came out in theaters, when it was excoriated by basically everybody on the planet with an Internet connection but it made a billion dollars anyway*, while I saw a movie that had been condemned for, amongst other things, being incoherent, in a thirteen minute-longer extended edition that's been made available on streaming, and I like it more than almost anybody I know without actually liking it, yet I don't think whatever extra coherence it attained in those thirteen minutes is any big reason why I do, since, if anything, thirteen extra minutes for a not-good movie that was already 147 minutes long should do nothing besides make it worse.  Well, maybe it's as simple as being able to watch it at home, rather than being trapped in the dark with it; but I suppose I'd have to even own it as my favorite of its "trilogy" (which I suppose still means something, given that despite the Jurassic World branding of the next movie, it's at least finally abandoned these specific characters and situations), though it bears mentioning that I think Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom are pretty miserable motion pictures, so this was a minimal bar that it still barely clears.  (You will note, or at least I will note, that Fallen Kingdom has a colon in its title but Dominion does not.  This is initially annoying; then you'll realize that putting a colon in a movie title when reproducing it in text is, by and large, only conventional, and the actual onscreen titles usually do not have colons, and that should bring you to the brink of madness, because maybe we've been doing it wrong for decades with hundreds of movies, and that's some real head-spinning stuff.)

If Jurassic World and its first sequel are bad, then, maybe it's just that a lot of what's bad about Dominion was already baked in and I don't want to blame it for what's not its fault, namely having to bother with those aforementioned characters and situations.  Still, that charity seems awfully misplaced when I must blame its director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow, who directed and co-wrote that first Jurassic World, and still had his hand in the screenplay for J.A. Bayona's Fallen Kingdom.  But there's something to the notion, I think, and we'll see if we can find what that is.  Trevorrow, anyway, has been accompanied throughout the trilogy by Derek Connolly as a scenarist, and sometimes by other writers for their scripts (Dominion brings on Emily Carmichael as the other co-screenwriter), and, now, I suppose I just find how they worked their way into a sixth Jurassic Park film kind of legitimately fascinating, even if I'm not so compelled to find the approach they took "any good," and would frankly tend to describe it as "catastrophically dysfunctional."

Part of its dysfunction, of course, is that Trevorrow, Connolly, and Carmichael's brief from Universal and/or Steven Spielberg was to bring the iconic (I've toyed with placing the word in scare quotes) heroes of the original Jurassic Park back for this "big finale" (the scare quotes there got added by a practically autonomic function of my nervous system), paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill), paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and fake mathematician/hipster doomsayer Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who all participated in Jurassic Park's two immediate sequels but not all together.  And while the "legacy sequel" this spins up is just the same-old nostalgic pandering everything does these days (and Dominion has much worse to offer on that front), and pandering so belated you'd really have to wonder why they bothered now, I suppose I'd have to agree it's probably one of the reasons I like this one "the best," not so much because I wanted to see these old friends again (and I've never liked Ian Malcolm, only Goldblum's performance thereof), but because the new acquaintances of Jurassic World, ex-zookeeper Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and ex-evil zoo executive Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) have never evolved past a dreary Action Man and Damsel Girl—if anything, Claire has devolved, since while I probably made a little too much of it back in 2015, when I was a more annoying person, "being the totemic focus of the director's psychosexual complex" at least meant her creator cared more about her then—and the addition to their family of a ward, Maisie Hammond (Isabella Sermon), didn't help matters, given that Maisie, a human clone whose connection to those dinosaurs is mostly just that her scientist mother was part of the leadership of the same company that made the former, was allowed to become the wedge that began truly separating these Jurassic Park sequels from the three-word "oh no! dinosaurs!" logline that ought to describe them and "the disquisition on the ethics of biotechnology" they would apparently rather be.  Of course, a lot of the Jurassic Worlds' inadequacy was that 2015 found Pratt at the beginning of his now-fulfilled quest to find his way out of being a newly-'roided goofball comedic actor and into, more-or-less, "null" as far as screen personas go, yet the franchise was stuck with him for some reason nonetheless; so what this Jurassic Park revival means more than old characters is just ancient professionals, who all have unimpeachable screen presence, even when their reunion has left them bemused (Dern), slightly hostile (Neill), and actively making fun of the project (Goldblum)—in fairness, in the latter two cases those are their screen personas and Trevorrow even exploits them for good—and, accordingly, they bring an element of engagement that wasn't here before.  Plus (I don't think it's much of a spoiler), but all you Ellie x Alan shippers, all eight of you, Dominion's got you covered, and honestly, that's cool.

So the challenge of bringing dino-experts together is what this movie had foisted upon it from outside, but I'd bet that if you or I were tasked with meeting that challenge we'd have figured something out, because I think that anybody would imagine that after Fallen Kingdom—a film that seemingly exists mainly just to pose the "what if?" that it had intended Dominion to answer—what Dominion was going to do was finally and at last bring this hexology to its natural climax and throw a world full of out-of-control technologically-resurrected dinosaurs at human civilization and watch those mothers chomp.  And maybe we wouldn't even fret about how bad Fallen Kingdom was at setting that up—Dominion kicks off four years later and supposes that three dozen or so highly-visible and, let's be honest, easily-slain animals somehow generated so many dinosaurs in that short span that you might expect to run into a stegosaurus on the highway or find velociraptors combing through your trash like scaled-up raccoons; you could get the impression from this movie that its makers think enormous megafauna typically reach their prodigious sizes in four years, or that the progression of their reproduction would mean more than about twenty offspring apiece (mostly juveniles) in the most favorable circumstances, or that there's enough prey animals or unused land in North America to support, well, basically anything that we don't suffer the existence of already, or that most dinosaurs would be capable of thriving amidst the Holocene oxygen regime and climate, or that wolves (or simply feral dogs) wouldn't be an ecological match for utahraptor-shaped velociraptors (because that would imply that humans could be a match for raptors), but then, hell, you could almost get the impression from this movie that its makers think tyrannosaurs can swim the Atlantic—but the good news about all this, after a fashion, is that Jurassic World Dominion has not preempted the Dinosaurs Attack! movie I really hope gets made one of these days.  It's a movie with dinosaur attacks in it sometimes, but almost never a movie about humanity's new status quo as the world fills up with dinosaurs and when it is it's mostly because nobody ever... did anything about it.

What it is about, on the Owen and Claire side, is their (very late) recognition that hiding the "fugitive" Maisie in a farmhouse in Nowhere, the American West, while they commit acts of dinosaur rescue from off the grid, will be insufficient for her developmental needs, or even possible, and while she's already feeling her oats, the situation comes to a head when she's kidnapped by a dino-poaching mercenary (Scott Haze) and rendered off, eventually, to BioSyn (eh, I guess we'll let it pass), a company that's taken InGen's place in the world, founded by a dissident from that firm, Dr. Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), whom the film appears to believe I remember from Jurassic Park and I liked it better when I assumed he was a new character that effectively satirizes utopian crackpot CEOs in Scott's "whiny visionary perplexed by this thing you call 'morality'" performance even if it's hugely generic in conception.  Owen and Claire have to go and find their kid, and the screenplay takes a pretty uneasy middle ground between "doing so efficiently" and "having a globetrotting adventure involving dinosaurs and the demimonde of cartoonishly-evil dinosaur smugglers."  (I'm especially impressed by the image of dinosaur kebabs flung in our faces which we're supposed to be horrified by, while outside the movie, we were supposed to buy a Hardee's "Primal Meal.")

On the old guard's side, we have our Jurassic Park reunion, which has placed Ian—who, for fairly spurious reasons, ropes in Ellie, who ropes in Alan—on the trail of a burgeoning swarm of giant (not that giant! only abnormally large, roughly small cat-sized) genetically-engineered locusts.

And yeah: I will echo the sentiment that basically everybody already expressed three years ago, that this comes off freaking insane, this bafflingly overcooked plot stew for a movie that should at last have freed the Jurassics from the twisted contrivances they had to take on to continue sending people back to those doomed Goddamned islands, with a consummately straightforward reason about why dinosaurs and humans are in conflict now.  It is perverse that the "culmination" of the Jurassic Park franchise, sold upon the concept of a dinosaur apocalypse, is actually mostly about locusts and the proprietary genetically-modified seeds they won't eat and sleazy agribusiness, and it is beyond mere "perversity" that the locust story seemingly excites Trevorrow and company more and is the better part of the story.

But... I almost appreciate it?  I don't know if a sequel made in the last twenty years has felt so obviously spitballed into existence, not like the calculations of a $465 milion** studio tentpole but like the churned-out low art of a cash-grab 90s sequel, possibly intended to be released direct-to-video, that nobody really cared about but had to be made and thus unleashed wackadoodle creativity and passions to the side of whatever the hell the franchise was supposed to be about, so okay, assholes, you said you needed Jurassic product, here's my movie about what a bunch of cunts Monsanto I mean BioSyn are that maybe, also, has some dinosaurs in it.  That's something, even if it's miserably unsatisfying, and it's also doubtless not anything akin to the actual way Dominion came into being, so that fascination I mentioned a thousand words ago comes from how the fact that it exists in this hacked-together form anyway is like an autopsy of itself.  Much of the summertime CGI-dino fun is now stripped away to leave the internal contradictions laid bare, effectively explaining why this franchise actually mostly sucks, and the only times it didn't were the integral first film, and the third one, which mostly did not care about, or bother acknowledging, those internal contradictions, and what we have with Dominion is the endgame of a franchise that was consciously building up to that dino-apocalypse I described, which has never been able to treat dinosaurs as anything but objects of pity, because the movies are actually about capitalism and promethean technology and, especially, ecological stewardship—and because they have been, uniformly, about those things stupidly, this compounds the problem that Trevorrow et al face—thus they actually cannot just go and make a movie about slaughtering a few hundred dinosaurs in exciting ways, because, as we all know, the real monster is man, and we can't take that dude's side.  (Or, apparently, the side of the other mammals—or the avian dinosaurs—who have been threatened by these unnatural, invasive species.)

Hence locusts, and clones, and a structure that basically amounts to two completely independent films that collide in a third act—the Jurassic World movie and the Jurassic Park reunion don't actually meet until, I'd guesstimate, the two-hour mark—rather than braid together any earlier than that.  On top of that, the movies are still reliant on "dino-action," and on fetch-questy plots (compare and contrast fanciful caveman movies that just have dinosaurs as part of their milieu), so despite that franchise-swallowing compassion, instead of creatures trying to manage their integration into a new ecosystem that is, after all, still dominated by a 1.6 trillion-pound superorganism, every last carnivore is a maniacal demon that kills for the sake of killing.  So there's a certain repetitiveness to Jurassic World dino-action too: "the raptor's right behind me, isn't it?"  (And then Frankensteinian pretensions fuck up things completely to the side of anything anybody cares about: Maisie's identity crisis is more colorful than, but is still functionally identical to, that of any given adoptee, and it's probably even less emotionally-investing than that thanks to the shrill insistence that her origins are philosophically hefty.  But even on a practical level, it's not entirely clear why she needs to be hidden, or why she needs to be kidnapped rather than negotiated with, and it's very noticeable that this girl-shaped maguffin's reactions to her circumstances and her antagonists' desires for her genome—tissue samples are out of question—are mostly just whatever keeps the ramshackle plot going.  Meanwhile, I don't think it's Frankensteinian pretensions, but by the end of Dominion I'd realized I'd never, ever seen a cinematic relationship between a human and an animal—or a magical friend, which is what this hypothetically amounts to—as astoundingly mishandled as that between Owen and Blue the Raptor, to the point that Trevorrow executes its denouement so unsentimentally that I burst out laughing at the inept dark integrity of his storytelling, making it clearer than ever that this fucking raptor has never liked this guy.)

But I've averred it's not so much of a slog to be hateful.  I've complained about an absence of dinosaurs but 160 minutes probably means that it has about as much dinosaur material as any other movie in the series.  (In fact, let's make a real crazy argument: it actually pulls resources from the locust movie, insofar as the horror possibilities of "swarms of giant insects" are not exploited as fully as was feasible.)  Things begin with a Cretaceous flashback—now we've got that mosquito's origin story—albeit only in the extended edition, and that is presumably the explanation for why these three-four minutes of T. rex and giganotosaur dueling look cheap, though a few more dollars could've been spent to not prime me to notice how surprisingly not-good the texturing can be even in the unimaginably-expensive "real" movie, which meant I was struck over and over by how weird it was that the simpler "reptilian" dinos looked like smooth overlit plastic (and in the case of the snippy little ceratopsian, clay), while the new feathered dinos (a raptor, and a nightmare—hell, Nightmare On Elm Street—iteration of a therizinosaur that I wish got more play) are somehow more persuasive.  Possibly the majority of my warmer feelings about Dominion come from a maybe-unexpected place, the much-disliked interlude in Malta where the movie is doing what it's "actually supposed to" and wrecking human civilization with dinosaurs, and despite typically-reliable composer Michael Giacchino's insistence we're in fantasy Araby, and the obvious Bourne knock-offery, and the call-back to the abysmally stupid laser-pointer raptors from Fallen Kingdom, and the brute-force insertion of a new Han Solo for this franchise because the last one flopped like a dead fish in the form of smuggler-with-a-heart-of-gold pilot ("let's just literally do Han Solo this time") Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), it's pretty fantastic, about as exciting and fun and even well-built*** a piece of popcorn cinema as the 2020s produced, once it gets going with Claire's rooftop raptor chase and Owen, absurdly, barely outrunning a raptor on a motorcycle (to clarify, Owen's on the motorcycle, though Joe Johnston might've gone for it) in pursuit of a aircraft that, itself, is flying off a cliff.

This is the apex—the second act's subsequent action is charmingly incoherent, in its insistence that frozen alpine lakes exist within five minutes' walk of misty jungles—but it's always blithely watchable until its two separate movies hit each other, and the action becomes a slurry of pantomimic reenactments of scenes from Jurassic Park, and locusts so flammable BioSyn should sell them as a new fuel technology, and so fucking many hero characters who can't die that the frame becomes comedically overstuffed with them, and ultimately what feels like a self-loathing joke about how half of Pratt's performance across three movies has been holding his hand out at the camera while making a neutrally-stern face, and now he's leading poor Neill in a tai chi exercise, or perhaps soliciting his assistance in casting magic spells on velociraptors.  It is, like I said, still a bad movie.

Score: 5/10

*These two facts are not entirely unrelated, and I'll ask what I've asked many times before, "Why do you do that?"

**That cannot possibly be true.

***I mean, I hear you that this is "badly edited," but either you were wrong, or the extended cut fixed it, and it's maybe a hair better-constructed than Jurassic World's finale, the one good thing about that movie.