Jurassic World Dominion is one of the worst blockbusters I’ve ever seen. Writer and director Colin Trevorrow has assembled the bleakest kind of repackaged nostalgia that’s sure to break box office records: a shoddy pastiche of a franchise past its prime, with all of the energy of an inattentive parent halfheartedly insisting that the dollar-store knockoff of the toy you want is just as good.
Dominion presents itself as the grand culmination of the decades-long Jurassic Park franchise. The legends of Doctors Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) were a guiding beacon of inspiration to newcomers Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), and now the characters finally meet as their destinies intertwine, where they face the Dark Side together and the Skywalker legacy…oh wait.
After his dramatic exit from the Star Wars franchise, it seems that his Episode IX that could never be weighs on Trevorrow heavily. His response is to make that same kind of legacy sequel spun out of a different franchise. There’s just one problem: Jurassic Park is not Star Wars. It’s a beloved franchise, but not because of its lore or incredibly personable characters. People just love dinosaurs! We love big monsters stomping around and watching smart, charming people run for their lives while the unfortunate side characters get eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! A Jurassic film is at its best when it’s at its simplest.
Following the finale of Fallen Kingdom, Dominion is set up to take place in a world where dinosaurs are running amok among us. Pteranodons share the skies with falcons and eagles, parasaurolophuses graze with horses, and mosasaurs dance with whales. There are a million exciting directions this film could’ve gone. Is humankind’s existence severely threatened? Have the dinosaurs begun breeding with other species? Have they resurrected ancient pathogens? The sky is the limit. It seems almost impossible for the film to be anything but a little entertaining. And Trevorrow, gifted the most exciting Jurassic Park premise since 1993’s original film, confidently chucks it into the garbage and delivers the most convoluted, mind-numbing toy commercial to grace our screens since, well, his first outing in this cursed franchise.
Dominion brings characters new and old together to face off against Biosyn Genetics, an InGen rival briefly mentioned in the first film that has become the world’s leader in the study of dinosaurs. Biosyn’s shady research threatens Claire and Owen’s adopted daughter, the human clone Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), as well as Owen’s beloved raptor Blue and her own baby, Beta. Biosyn’s nefarious work is also of interest to Grant, Sattler, and Malcolm, who are distrustful of its CEO Dr. Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott).
Dodgson’s inclusion in the film is emblematic of the biggest problem with the Jurassic franchise as a whole: its inability to move on. Dodgson is in the 1993 original for maybe three whole minutes, but Trevorrow cannot leave any stone unturned, cannot have a single original thought. Dodgson must be brought back into the fold, the same way everything within the film must be a reference to the very franchise itself. We must be awed as we gaze at old props from the original film, as characters jokingly reference their old wardrobe, as they rattle off references that are only to the audience’s benefit.
The film is constructed in the most confoundingly boring way possible, borrowing aesthetics from Mission Impossible, James Bond, and The Fast and the Furious. All of this is a desperate attempt to make any of the action scenes register as anything but grey-green slop, with an occasional dinosaur whizzing past too fast for you to appreciate the creature design. The film is edited with a chainsaw, dizzying zooms and dutch angles rendering the action kaleidoscopic. Good luck trying to figure out where the main characters are in relation to the dinosaurs in literally any space. There is no sense of scale. Even when the film slows down enough to let you gaze at a brachiosaurus, you’re painfully aware that what you’re looking at isn’t real. Despite all of the technological advances, nothing sings the way Spielberg’s original blend of animatronics and computer animation did almost thirty years ago. Beta the Baby Raptor comes the closest, delivering some adorable animatronic head tilts and growls, but that’s about it.
This is also the Jurassic film that commits the unforgivable sin of sidetracking its own dinosaurs. Save for one legitimately thrilling sequence where Claire silently faces off against a blind therizinosaurus in the jungle, there’s hardly any of that cartoonishly fun dinosaur violence we’ve come to expect from these films. The big carnivore showdown at the end is anything but cathartic. Filmed through a haze of smoke and strobe lights, the drab dinosaurs are barely distinguishable from each other, and the camera swings wildly between the fighting animals and scrambling humans below, making it impossible to focus on either element within the frame.
I’m trying my hardest not to spoil the insanely stupid plot, which has to find the time to grapple with human cloning and its ethical dilemmas, ecofascism, dinosaur rights activism, and emotional pontification about the beauty of motherhood. That last point has stuck with me the most after my viewing. Trevorrow has weird thoughts on women and motherhood. Everyone remembers Claire’s assistant’s grisly end in Jurassic World, seemingly her punishment for not adequately fulfilling her duties as a caretaker. In Dominion, Claire has reached her apex form as a woman. Her severe bob and heels are gone. Her loose waves and adventuring jeans are meant to convey that she has transformed into her best self, a tree-hugging mother whose primary concerns are her daughter and the well-being of dinosaurs everywhere. Never mind that, throughout these films, Claire has not visibly worked through that transition from a woman who referred to these animals as “assets” into an action heroine, running from raptors through Maltan rooftops, enabled by the superpowers of motherhood to survive plane crashes and combat that would give even John Wick pause. Between Claire’s stagnation as a character, Maisie’s origins as a clone, and even Dr. Sattler’s ultimate endpoint in the film, it seems every woman is at their noblest and bravest and best when they’re a mother. The Raptor Girlboss herself, Blue, isn’t free from this limiting fate, either. There’s no room for growth or depth, no conversations about what could drive a woman to choose to start a family or not. Motherhood isn’t beautiful because these women chose to make it so. It’s simply expected of them, no matter what.
To demand any kind of intelligence or interiority from this franchise is fraught. Not that I need a blockbuster to be nuanced and delicate in its themes. Sometimes, some scaly mayhem is more than enough. But Jurassic World Dominion fails on every single metric possible, no matter what lens I try to judge it from. There are no characters to be found, no exhilaration in their adventures, no mesmerizing dinosaurs for the eyes to feast on. The returning older cast has fun chemistry and banter, but their inclusion in the film at all feels contrived and coincidental. It’s sad to see them roped back into a circuitous story that ends exactly where it started, with dinosaurs just coexisting with us now, ecological ramifications be damned. Thirty years later, the mere mention of a dinosaur movie is exhausting more than anything else.
All that being said, Colin Trevorrow might just be one of the most fascinating filmmakers working today. Not because he’s a visionary auteur. Far from it. Instead, all of modern moviemaking’s worst instincts and trends have been bottled up into a singular person. He is one with the algorithm, an expert at delivering cheap fandom slop that certain nerds will gobble up with glee and applause because they don’t demand better. The saddest part? There’s no sign of his reign of terror ending any time soon.
