Jurassic World: Dominion

It Comes Down to Animating Old Fossils

or

"It's Always Darkest Just Before Eternal Nothingness..."
 

Oh, they have been hyping Jurassic World: Dominion to the point where one doesn't have to see the movie to feel harassed by dinosaurs. There's a glut of advertising tie-ins, a "look-back" television special (which I admit I watched), and I'm sure there's a breakfast cereal ready to hit shelves ("T-Chex!").

 

If there is, I'm sure it will be rather stale.

 

This is the sixth "Jurassic Park" film in the franchise, the third in the "Jurassic World" sub-set, which, when written and published by Michael Crichton, seemed like the flimsiest of his high concept novels. The whole thing started as a 1983 screenplay about a lone geneticist creating a dinosaur with disastrous Frankensteinian results. But, Crichton couldn't crack the reason "why" a geneticist would do such a thing. He decided that the only reason to do it would be for entertainment purposes, so he spliced Americans' fascination with theme parks* with kids' fascination with dinosaurs, and (of course!) the thing was a massive best-seller. 

 

And a hit movie; Universal Pictures only agreed to Steven Spielberg's passion project Schindler's List (which they "knew" would not make money) if he first agreed to make Jurassic Park (which they knew would), and both films garnered the studio tons of money and awards. Spielberg even waived his own rule to not make sequels when he directed The Lost World years later. He is an Executive Producer on all the films.

But, that's all pre-history. What's this one about? Well, it's all about ecological catastrophe. The filmmakers have brought back the character of Lewis Dodgson (now played by Campbell Scott), head of the rival genetics company BioSyn who has hired geneticist Dr. Wu (BD Wong again), who has engineered a super locust that decimate crops that are not grown with BioSyn seeds, thus cornering the market on food production and threatening a world shortage unless his products are not used. The Jurassic Park island of Isla Nublar was destroyed due to volcanic eruptions, but Lost World's Isla Sorna (or "Site B"), where the engineering work was done is still a preserve for some of the creatures. Dinosaurs are now migrating throughout the Earth, which would seem like a big deal. Raptor whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) live in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, carrying for Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the cloned daughter of an InGen executive. The surviving member of three trained raptors, Blue, is also living in the Sierra Nevadas.

 

Got all that?

BioSyn has been very busy, not just planning a world food crisis, but also trying to track Maisie and Blue's child Beta (wait, I didn't say that Blue reproduced?) to bring back to their Alpian HQ for study. Meanwhile, there seems to be a black market for capturing the animals—something that Dearing is involved in trying to stop. That's when Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) starts to become interested in those locusts and their ties with BioSyn. She recruits Alan Grant (Sam Neill), who is always glad to see her, for a little tour of the BioSyn plant to see what's going on. And guess who's working for BioSyn now: chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum)!

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Grady and Dearing discover that Maisie and Beta have been clone-napped by BioSyn and they set off to get them back, using contacts from the CIA. They track them to Malta—where there is evidently a big black-market—and meet up with a pilot Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), who had seen Maisie being transferred to a flight to Italy. So...everybody's going to the same place!

So...everybody's going to the same place and there will be dinosaurs there. You can guess the rest of the movie. Dinosaurs and humans do not mix unless it's in a dinosaurs stomach, so there's going to be a lot of threatened mastication going on. And a lot of running and hiding, and even more distracting dinosaurs with flares. In fact, there are so many of those, they could have just done it in one instance with a single J.J. Abrams movie. 

But, except for running around and hiding from dinosaurs, that's the rest of movie. The entire set-up has been explained and there's really nothing left to do. The trouble is the movie is set up like a bad Bond movie with a minimum of plot that merely threads action sequences. And, unfortunately, the stunt coordinator and second unit director is Dan Bradley (he's not listed in the movie on IMDB but his name is in the credits), who scurries through action sequences with quick shots that they barely register.

How's the cast? Well, Dern, Howard, and Goldblum do the best work—they also have the best lines—and Wise does some nicely laconic work as an Indiana Jones type. But, Pratt seems slightly disengaged as if he was thinking about the next project he's doing. And Neill is always a welcome presence, but his character has relatively little to do, so he goes in for that Harrison Ford-style mugging that was done in Return of the Jedi, just so he's got something to do.

But, the main attraction for the movie is usually the dinosaurs—and with the characters going by the numbers in this one, they have to be—and even there, this movie isn't all that impressive. Oh, the CGI wizardry has advanced so far from its origins in the original that you can practically see a brontosaurus' uvula for all the detail they put into it now. But, the CGI versions have less credibility than the puppets and animatronics—although a couple of triceratops babies look a little dodgy, too. There is no sense of wonder anymore, or sense of awe, especially as the 'saurs are moving so fast that they have less sense of mass...or threat.

As a result, Michael Giacchino's score has very few places for John Williams' celebratory, awe-filled theme for Jurassic Park—just a couple of snippets here and there—and that tells you all you need to know about the movie: fast and transitory, not pausing enough to take anything in, or dwell on it. The ideas have all been mined, so it just jumps from danger sequence to danger sequence.

Perhaps it's time to take a break, not make any of these for awhile, and, in the meantime, take some of Michael Crichton's DNA and recreate him, just so we can get some new ideas. 

 

A sequence that was supposed to open Jurassic Park: Dominion but was cut for time.
Do you think anybody would be interested in a Director's Cut?

 

* Crichton had used the same theme of parks in his directorial debut, Westworld.