Jurassic World Dominion

Jurassic World Dominion, the third movie in the Jurassic World series that has Jurassic Park original cast returning to the franchise, feels like an unnecessary film that doesn’t do any good to the franchise. Barring some moments where you have old movie references from the reprising characters, Collin Trevorrow’s film lacks originality, and the coexistence-preach fails to create that wow factor one would expect in a movie with the dinosaurs.

So in this sequel, dinosaurs are roaming around freely, and the governments are trying to protect civilians from them. A company named Biosyn is in charge of capturing and protecting these dinosaurs. Dr. Ellie Sattler’s team discovers something that shows Biosyn’s evil side. Her efforts to get solid proof against Biosyn’s wrongdoing with the help of her Jurassic Park colleagues is what we witness in Jurassic World Dominion.

By introducing Biosyn into the picture, Colin Trevorrow is basically trying to duplicate the situations in the first Jurassic Park films. But the charisma of the Spielberg film is definitely not there, and the cliched tone of the screenplay that just follows a predictable template makes things even duller. The placement of humor at times will make you wonder whether it was some kind of Joss Whedon reshoots. At one point, the screenplay almost goes after this Godzilla versus Kong-like conflict, which got forgotten very soon.

Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard as Owen Grady and Claire are okay in their respective roles. And the demand seems to be more physical. The semi-comical and romantic interpretation of Laura Dern and Sam Neil’s characters felt really odd. Jeff Goldblum offers some fun moments, although the writing overdid the irreverent characteristics of Dr. Malcom. Isabelle Sermon was confident as Maisie Lockwood. Campbell Scott, as Lewis Dodgson, used the character’s quirks impressively.

The screenplay by Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael has a highly predictable trajectory. While the Spielberg version had set-pieces built around the story, here, it felt like the story was built around the set pieces they created to exploit the Jurassic park nostalgia. Every step in the story felt like a familiar move that we have seen in a zillion other movies that came after Jurassic Park.

The fear Spielberg created in 1993 was full of craft, and the water ripple scene was just enough to show how effective the horror was in the first movie. Despite having CGI and even showing a fight between two monstrous dinosaurs, Trevorrow had to depend on certain jump scares to create that sense of horror. Interestingly, an evolved CGI was less scary than the Animatronics Spielberg used three decades ago.

Jurassic World Dominion is one lame exploitation of the name of a cult franchise. The germ of the idea is thinking about a world where the dinosaurs will co-exist with other species. But the listless writing fails miserably in creating a convincing and exciting story out of that, and all we get is a routine sci-fi movie action package.