Jurassic World Dominion (2022)
1.5/4
As I said in a previous article, the top movie I was excited to see this summer was Jurassic World Dominion. Well, I recently got to see it, and while having the entire cast back together does make for some good entertaining moments, overall this was a massively disappointing movie for me.
Before I start this critique, I want to acknowledge that Jurassic Park is not a easy movie franchise to make a compelling sequel in. The original was lightning in a bottle: it had a wow factor that can not easily be replicated, because the cat’s out of the bag. The look of the dinosaurs and the fact that it was the first film with realistic dinosaurs in it is what made it a hit. The audience didn’t really care about anything else, and now that we know what the creatures look like and what they can do, the wonder has gone away, which is why none of the other movies have captured the magic that was in the first movie.
I feel like we got lied to: teasers promised audiences that this movie will be about humans learning to co-exist with dinosaurs. This movie has nothing to do with any of that. It’s about evil corporations doing evil corporate things and how everybody has to gang up on this evil corporation before they do their evil corporate thing that will kill us all. It’s a plot you’ve seen in 100 different movies, and how director Colin Trevorrow and his team went from dinosaurs ruling the world to this I’ll never know.
Also, the film’s big bad guy isn’t even a dinosaur. It’s a huge swarm of giant bugs that’s going to eat all of our crops if we don’t do something to stop them. Unbelievable.
I also want to give a shout-out to Trevorrow for doing something nobody thought humanly possible: making dinosaurs boring. How does he do this? By demoting them completely from villain to eye candy and spending the bulk of the overlong runtime trying—and failing—to make big bugs that fly around and don’t eat people look scarier than the giant dinosaurs going around and eating people. I mean, congratulations, sir: if your goal is to see just how much fun you can suck out of the franchise, job well done.
At the end of the day, Jurassic World Dominion may make a lot of money at the box office because dinosaurs! but to me it’s a high-dyno disappointment and Universal really should consider pushing this franchise into extinction.