Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) Review

 "Jurassic World?  Not a fan."

-Dr. Ian Malcolm

When Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) and the baby velociraptor, Beta, are kidnapped, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) embark on a rescue mission.  They encounter more deadly dinosaurs and meet a few familiar faces trying to expose an unethical biogenetics company.

Spoiler alert for Jurassic World: Dominion.  In short, this movie sucks and is probably the worst of the series, which is saying something.  Don't waste your time.  Spoilers below.

What Works:

The best part of the movie is easily Jeff Goldblum.  He's the only one who seems to care about his performance and did the best he could with what he was given.  Thankfully, Goldblum can do anything and make it magical.  Every second he is on screen is gold.  I just wish he had even more to do.

The only other redeeming quality this movie has is that there are quite a few moments where I laughed.  Granted, I don't think those moments were supposed to be funny.  There are some ridiculous and stupid moments with dinosaurs and humans interacting.  I laughed quite a few times when the dinosuars attacked the humans, especially early on when we see a video of a kid getting attacked by some Compys.

What Sucks:

So, I hated Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and the thing I hated most about that movie was the storyline involving the cloned human, Maisie.  Yeah, she's pretty much the main protagonist of this movie, and I could not possibly care less.  Honestly, I watch these movies to see humans attempting to survive dinosaur attacks.  I don't need much more than that.  I love survival movies.  This movie pretends to be partially about Maisie finding out more about herself and her mother, but none of it matters and none of it is interesting.

I was actually pretty excited for Dominion to come out because the story had a lot of potential and hadn't been done a whole lot in the series.  Dinosaurs are off the island and running rampant.  Beyond just San Diego or the Lockwood mansion.  I was hoping this would take place immediately after the end of Fallen Kingdom.  Nope.  It's four years later and humans seem to be woefully incompetent at dealing with this problem.  It just feels like a major missed opportunity.  

The main conflict of the movie actually isn't even about dinosaurs.  It's about giant locusts eating crops.  Yeah.  You can make a movie about giant bugs eating all of the world's food, but that isn't what anybody wants from a Jurassic Park movie.  It's a baffling story decision and, like the human cloning plot, I couldn't possibly care less.

One problem I had with Fallen Kingdom that continues here is that none of the hero characters die.  The first four movie all have members of the hero/survivor group get killed off horrifically.  It adds to the tension because it makes it seem like anyone can die.  In both Fallen Kingdom and Dominion only background extras and villainous characters get killed.  It just deflates all of the tension when you know everyone is safe.

As cool as it was to have Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Sadler (Laura Dern) back, they really didn't get a whole lot to do in the movie.  You could pretty much cut Dr. Grant from the film and it almost changes nothing.  They had plenty of screen-time, but didn't get to do anything with it.

I don't like the way this movie was shot or directed.  All of the previous films felt large and grand.  This movie is shot in a lot of tight close-ups, even in the action sequences.  It made the film feel smaller in scope and budget.  This is the finale of the series!  That's not what we should be going for.

Finally, each previous film in the series has had at least one signature sequence that sticks in your head long after the movie ends.  The T-Rex attacking the cars in the first movie, the trailer attack in the second, the pterodactyl sequence in the third, the chaos in the main park in the fourth, and the volcano eruption in the 5th.  Whatever you think about the movies, these were all pretty cool sequences.  Dominion has nothing.  The motorcycle sequence was alright, I guess, but it has nothing on the rest of these sequences.  There is an astounding lack of dinosaur sequences in this dinosaur movie.  

Verdict:

I hated this movie.  It was painful to sit through and typing this up just made me more angry.  There are some unintentionally funny moments and Jeff Goldblum is great, but the rest of this movie is an absolute disaster and a failure in every way.  It makes me wants this series to go extinct for good.

 2/10: Awful