Breaking News! Jurassic World 3 is the franchise’s worst. Park and World casts combine with new characters to deliver terrible dialog and too many people to keep track of. Zero stakes and zero chemistry. Go see it now!
Wait, so you’re telling me that you didn’t want all the good parts of something to be boiled down to a news blast in the very beginning? Well then you’re in for a rough 2.5 hours watching Jurassic World Dominion (no colon, officially).
Fallen Kingdom left with the promise of dinosaurs in our world. We’ve waited through a pandemic and delays to finally get a T-Rex stomping through the streets. Last year we were teased with a YouTube short of campers coming across the new wildlife. Oh boy I can’t wait to see the places we go with these dinos.
Spoilers, it’s not that.
Plot, as Much as There is One
After the opening newsreel showing the movie I WISH I WAS WATCHING, we start yo-yoing between the new Jurassic World cast of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard trying to keep the half-dinosaur cloned kid from the last movie secret from poachers. While they are having adventures in the Sierra Nevadas, Laura Dern is looking into some of the effects dinosaurs are having on the modern world. Well, I assume that’s what she’s been up to. We just jump in to her investigation into giant locusts. And if there is one man that knows his extinct creatures it’s Sam Neill.
I cannot emphasize enough how jarring and unrelated these two threads are. There was no concrete screenwriting reason to bring back all our favorite characters from the originals. Only legacy sequel making reasons.
They get the band back together and journey to a secluded valley of the dinosaurs somewhere in the eastern hemisphere. Because if there’s one thing I wanted in my movie about dinosaurs in our world, it’s dinosaurs in a jungle away from everyone. It might as well have been a fourth island or whatever number we’re at now.
The One Cool Scene
Poachers eventually do get Maisie, the little girl responsible for all of this. (Okay actually it’s little boys that like dinos forcing their parents to pay box office dollars to this creatively deceased franchise that are really responsible for all of *waves hands frantically* this.) So BDH and Pratt have to chase her to the dinosaur black market where we find that bad people have indeed weaponized dinosaurs just like they promised they would in Fallen Kingdom. Sierra from Dollhouse has a crew of trained raptors that will hunt anything she points her laser pointer at. I didn’t do a great job selling it, but the ensuing chase after Pratt gets targeted is really good action filmmaking. Raptors in the city chasing a dude on a motorcycle trying to make it to the plane riiiiight before it takes off. Seriously, those 11 minutes were some of my favorites at the movies this year.
The Problem With Bringing Back Everyone
Eventually the two groups get together at BioSin (okay it’s BioSyn like synthetics, but I like that the bad guys literally sound like they have sin in their name. It’s biblical.) and we find out the real problem of these legacy sequels. It gets very cluttered very fast. Jurassic movies have classically set up a small group that gets smaller as the movie goes on because the deadliest animals in earth’s history are, ya know, eating them. But not in this movie. For as much as it was advertised as the End of an Era (does that mean Cretaceous Park is the next movie in the franchise? Or actually the next era is the Cenozoic. Sorry, like most 9 year old boys, I was pretty freaking into dinosaurs) none of our main characters eat it. Meaning they could all sign big contracts for more of these awful movies.
Or maybe Universal will come up with a couple TV series that go straight to streaming. Reminder, NBCUniversal is the conglomerate associated with these movies, theoretically aligning them with The Peacock.
Why the Jurassic World Trilogy is Exactly the Star Wars Sequels
I just can’t keep caring about this dumb movie, so I’m going to jump on the trend of comparing these movies to another failed trilogy.
- The first one is just a rehash of the original and it made literally a billion dollars
- The second one is polarizing by leaning into some things that some fans love and showing off a seedy underbelly of the world
- The third one has to spend it’s first half catching everyone up and telling two different stories leading to an unsatisfying conclusion
- How was Star Wars more willing to kill of their legacy characters than the franchise that has dinosaurs eating people at every turn
Okay wait, I have one better.
Why the Jurassic Movies are Exactly Friday the 13th
- Okay first of all Jurassic Park: The First One, is way scary for a massive blockbuster. Spielberg will do that to you. Jaws is credited as the first ever summer blockbuster and it’s a straight monster movie!
- Critically the franchises peak with their first movie, trail off, spike again but not as high at their fourth, and then fall off again
- At some point they marketed that the killing machines were going to the big city…and then didn’t actually do it. Dominion featured just as many dinosaurs ripping through our world as Jason Takes Manhattan did. Sounds cool to get out of Crystal Lake or off Isla Nublar, but for whatever reason, the writers just don’t stick to it.
That Stupid Framing Device
I hate hate hate fake news casts in movies to deliver exposition. It is lazy and it shows something the filmmakers know is cool and we want to see, but they can’t figure out how to do it. Okay fine, shame on me for believing the marketing that said dinosaurs would be a part of our world. But even worse is that they totally were, and Colin Trevorrow just decided to make a movie about something else.
So the movie ends, just like it began, with the news telling us that dinosaurs live among us. But what did we freaking learn? Everything that happened with BioSyn and their weird tech founder didn’t matter. The B-Roll of dinosaurs at the beginning was that they were bad, and then at the end they were all good and co-existing, but no one told the dinosaurs that the good guys won. They are still apex predators living in a world not equipped to put up a fight. We got cool shots of out-of-proportion dinosaurs chilling with other animals all of a sudden. This movie meant nothing, didn’t further the story it’s telling or end it or whatever it wanted to do, and it saved its coolest shots for the dumb beginning and end wrap up of the movie we just watched. So I’ll end my review the same way this movie did. On a whimper, but hoping for better in the future.
Jurassic World Dominion is in theaters June 10. For a lighter adventure through the jungle check out our thoughts on this year’s The Lost City.