Jurassic World Dominion Parent Guide

Following the mass escape of dinosaurs into Earth’s ecosystem, authorities engaged the genetic engineering firm Biosyn to isolate most of the animals in a secure facility in the Dolomite mountains. Now a plague of massive locusts threatens to destroy the world’s food supply - with the exception of the biotech company’s seed crops – and paleobotanist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is suspicious. With an invitation from Biosyn consultant Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), she takes Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to get to the bottom of the issue.

Meanwhile, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are trying to protect Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) from Biosyn. The fourteen-year-old is the only known cloned human and is eventually kidnapped by corporate thugs, along with a baby velociraptor named Beta. Now Owen and Claire will have to hurry if they want to find girl or dinosaur alive…

Despite its near-constant callbacks to previous films, Jurassic World: Dominion does a shoddy job of living up to the franchise’s legacy. The soundtrack to the original film is haunting, mysterious, and, at specific times, triumphant and dramatic. This score has none of the mystery or nuance: it randomly alternates between being either loud and bombastic or quiet and forgettable.

As for the visuals, director Colin Trevorrow chose to return to animatronic dinosaurs to give the film some credibility. There’s just one hiccup: the new animatronics look less convincing than the ones in 1993. Steven Spielberg understood the necessity of careful lighting and camera angles to sell his robotic dinos but Trevorrow simply parades them around in the worst conditions, making them look like the mannequins in “It’s a Small World”. They are plasticky, jerky, and completely unconvincing.

Fans of the series have cause to mourn over the fact that this franchise is irretrievably mired in the La Brea-like tar pits of almost unbelievably idiocy. We are a far cry from the harder sci-fi approach of the first film and we’re gaining distance from the more action-focused fun of the second. We aren’t even in spitting distance of the outright weirdness of the third. Where we’ve found ourselves instead is fully marooned from reason, storytelling, and entertainment, slowly sinking into a pit of frustrating clichés and pointless characters. Since the screenwriters can’t articulate the point of the story, dialogue is almost exclusively exposition and all nuance is gone. None of the characters sound like real people, the bad guys would be more at home in a James Bond film, and the protagonists have all the appeal of the soggy leavings in an industrial dumpster after pickup – and the filmmakers leave us to wallow in it for an unforgivable two-and-a-half hours.

The movie’s writing is so bad that not even the cast can save it. Chris Pratt wanders around trying to sound macho and holding his palm out towards multi-ton prehistoric predators as if that will protect him from being eaten and Bryce Dallas Howard has been reduced to looking nervous and screaming anytime something comes within thirty feet of her. Even the legacy cast of Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum can’t seem to get this bloated, festering story off the ground.

Worse still, this film has become bitterly ironic. The original Jurassic Park is a film (and book) about corporate recklessness in the face of potential profit. The dinosaur park fails because the creators were “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” In much the same vein, the producers of this sequel have abandoned any consideration for whether these films have a story worth telling and have focused primarily on one thing: box office earnings. Unaware of their own hubris, the filmmakers have condemned their unfortunate audience to boredom and frustration. Overriding greed has taken the name of a beloved story and associated it with years of pointless stupidity and millions of wasted dollars.