Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

Director: Colin Trevorrow

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neill, Laura Dern

Have I Seen it Before: Nope, although after those reviews opening weekend, my speed in wanting to watch diminished more than a bit.

Did I Like It: I’m glad that the movie has bad reviews, because it allowed me to go in with the lowest possible expectations. Is this the worst of all possible Jurassic movies? Almost certainly. Did I have something approaching a good time with it? Also, yes.

Many will complain (and fairly so) that the movie is only barely about dinosaurs, instead cooking up an often convoluted plot surrounding corporate intrigue, the vagaries of genetic research, and locusts. A bill of false goods, possibly, but anyone who has read the original Crichton novel would recognize some ideas brought to their perhaps incredulous conclusion. As I read that preceding paragraph, I’m not entirely sure I’m happy about this direction or not. I’ll only commit to the view that I don’t reflexively hate it as much as others might.

Any film that would give me this much Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is at least something of a winner. I’m looking in your direction, <Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2019>. The other legacy characters are a welcome treat, but I’m inevitably thinking about a far better film each and every time Neill and Dern share the frame. A film that would have been wall-to-wall these characters might have still been a letdown from previous entries in the series, but the film is at its most alive in those moments.

And that quality is in stark contrast to the lukewarm continuation of Pratt and Howard’s characters that make up the other half of the film. Most of Fallen Kingdom fell out of my head by the time I hit the parking lot, so offering us continuation of those themes never seemed like more than a drag. I honestly can’t remember the Pratt character’s name even now. I want to say Skip Burtman? Something tells me we won’t have to endure a legacy-legacy sequel in thirty years where Pratt and Howard sort out their issues and find golden year happiness.

But do you want to know what really irritates me about the movie? Locusts? I’m fine? Raptor trainer Biff Motorcyclovitz tries my patience on the way to becoming a better adoptive father? I can imagine there might be a fan of Fallen Kingdom who exists and would feel cheated without a third act to that story.

No, I can’t stand the beginning and ending of this movie. In recent years, there has been a trend of “The Ending of (insert movie here) explained” videos on YouTube where some smarmy jag with a Blue microphone* goes over the ending of every big movie and explains it to you, just in case you were unable to wrap your head around the intricacies of a movie geared toward ten-year-olds. They are deeply an unrelentingly irritating. The good news is that there is no need for such a video where Dominion is concerned. Trevorrow and company have included it right in the runtime! A movie is usually in trouble when it has to have a voice over to open and close things (you’ll notice <Jurassic Park (1993)> didn’t need one) but we have no entered the age when we apparently need a Youtube video to tuck is in before and after a movie.

We really don’t.

*As a smarmy jag with a few Blue microphones myself, I feel justified in that assessment.

Jurassic World (2015)

Director: Colin Trevorrow

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, BD Wong

Have I Seen It Before?: Oh, sure.

Did I like it?: If a movie isn’t a Marvel movie, chances are it is a legacy sequel. Some have been delightful, like Halloween (2018). Some groan through the bloated run time and are instantly forgotten as soon as the lights in the theater come up, like Tron: Legacy (2010) or, for a far more apt comparison here, Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). 

Why does this one work so well? One might be tempted to say that it doesn’t try to groan its way through including an aging cast member in the proceedings, and lets us learn to like the new characters that are the vehicle of the plot, but movies like Star Trek (2009) and the aforementioned Halloween’s best moments are with Leonard Nimoy and Jamie Lee Curtis. Even so, this film has a reprisal from BD Wong as geneticist Dr. Henry Wu, but it’s not exactly like that was a special moment in the trailer or a focal point in the poster.

Maybe Jurassic World’s secret weapon lies in a mostly successful attempt to capture the spirit of the original film and not just pepper the film with references to the original and jam it into some kind of framework that would be more palatable for a modern audience. The references are there—an extended sequence in the ruins of the original park from Jurassic Park (1993) and a few brief glances at a book written by Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum)—but they aren’t the main thrust of the plot. I’m looking in your direction, Luke/Anakin’s lightsaber. The movie tries its best to capture that Amblin spirit, complete with a sensitive, mop-topped young boy dealing with the fantastic things around him while the family situation may be unravelling a bit.

It doesn’t hurt that the true focal point of the film is one of the more charming movie stars to become a leading man in recent memory, Chris Pratt. He manages to sell the notion of trainable Raptor soldiers, and that isn’t exactly something that any other actor could make watchable. Sure, the special effects have already aged a bit even in the five years since its release, where the first thing remarkably holds up after thirty years, but it is imminently digestible entertainment, and that is all that it aimed for.