Movie Review: Jurassic World Dominion

There had to be important multi-million dollar discussions about the future of the Jurassic franchise that started in 1993 with some of the most impressive special effects involving living Dinosaurs ever created in movie history. The discussions had to address the main problem with the entire Jurassic franchise. All of these movies are essentially the same. “There is a Dinosaur resort or reserve of some kind, where someone is a criminal or makes a mistake, and Dinosaurs that are supposed to be secured in high-tech cages, escape. Then people run for their lives”. The upside of the new Jurassic movie “Jurassic World Dominion”, is that in the real world, Dinosaurs are move commonplace, mostly not in cages and not released because someone made a mistake or is a criminal. So while admiring the attempt to at least change the constant-same-story-with-people-running-for-their-lives, unfortunately the story and screenplay here is convoluted, mostly boring and way too long.

In this story, there is a major corporation that creates giant grasshopper insects that threaten to destroy the food chain of the entire world. Why this was done, is not fully explained, which is typical of big budget movies I have seen lately. Why explain what we are doing – just show the special effects because nobody will care anyway. This film reunites the original cast, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neil from the first (and best movie in the series) Jurassic Park, released in 1993 and the latest cast that includes Chris Prat and Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays Claire Dearing. Towards the end of this story they all reunite while trying to find Dearing’s daughter played by Isabella Sermon. The reunion of all these actors seems to signify some kind of a symbolic end of this series, even though that we all know that Jurassic will be back in some form in the future. There is just too much money to be made from showing lifelike Dinosaurs trying to kill people.

I thought that the first 3 quarters of this film did not show nearly enough Dinosaurs and Jeff Goldblum’s part was too small, considering he has been the most interesting character in the entire movie series. The two side stories about the major corporation trying to cause world famine for reasons unknown and the kidnapping of Claire Dearing’s daughter for the most part did not work. Once again, the producers of this movie knew that because of the built-in audience, coming up with a great story was not really necessary. The thinking is, all people want to see are the incredible Dinosaurs and people getting killed and running for their lives. The screenplay is always just an afterthought. This is unfortunate, especially when you consider the huge amount of money involved in a movie franchise this important.

The Rotten Tomatoes for this film are an extremely low 33% and due to the bad story and too long convoluted screenplay I mostly agree with this rating and cannot recommend this movie.