Jurassic World Dominion: Dragging The Franchise Across The Finish Line

They are rare, but there are some movies that tend to drag for the first half or so, hit a clear line of demarcation, and then suddenly the second half is orders of magnitude more enjoyable. Probably most recently (and most memorably) is Spider-Man: Far From Home where the first half slogs along and even the action is lackluster while the second half (after Mysterio’s bar scene) is among some of the best work Marvel has done. That said, nothing in Jurassic World Dominion reaches the heights of Jurassic Park or Jurassic World, but if someone can sit through between an hour and an hour and a half of boredom, there are some cool moments towards the end of the movie that make it worth a watch.

The story picks up four years after Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom in a world where dinosaurs are now free all over the planet. Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is working to expose illegal dinosaur breeding while Owen (Chris Pratt) helps catch dinosaurs to send them to a sanctuary run by Biosyn. They are taking care of Maisie, the clone from the previous movie, who is now a teenager and wants to (understandably) not spend her entire life living in a two-room cabin in the woods. Maisie is kidnapped by poachers along side the child of Owen’s raptor buddy from the last two entries sending Claire and Owen on a mission to find them and bring them home. Meanwhile Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) discovers swarms of locusts that have ancient DNA and are destroying crops not created by Biosyn across the Midwest. She enlists the help of Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and travels to the Biosyn facility at the request of Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) to prove a nexus between the locusts destroying crops and the locusts that Biosyn are creating.

This whole explanation is the problem with the first half of the picture. The path to success in a movie like this should just be to take a bunch of people, throw them in an environment with dinosaurs, and give them a simple objective. Here, everyone’s motivations are too complex and all the characters have been put through the dinosaur survival wringer at least twice each so they all know how to avoid the dinosaurs for the most part. This causes a distinct lack of dinosaur related action in a movie that is specifically designed to showcase dinosaur related action.

The action that does happen is disproportionately spread out to points in the narrative where characters are unlikely to die, thereby removing any stakes from the sequences. Since all the players are in the movie from the beginning, it is inevitable that there will be a time where everyone, original cast and new cast, shares screen time. Therefore, all the points prior to the inevitable moment where everyone is on screen together lack any sense of tension because the movie is not going to kill anyone off before they get to meet the others. By the time the groups do unite for one big moment, it is also unlikely that anyone will die once everyone meets because every person in the group is a main character.

That said, the interactions between the old cast and the new cast are fun and there are some interesting moments between Alan and Owen and also between Ellie and Claire. It’s not really enough to salvage the movie completely, however it does make the back half of the movie enjoyable. Whether or not it is enough to make sitting through the first half will be up to the viewer and unless the viewer is a massive fan of the franchise, the answer will probably be no.

Jurassic World Dominion is a vast improvement over Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, however similar to Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, that is not crossing a particularly high threshold. The effects are not strong enough to demand a theatrical viewing experience so, unless someone is a diehard fan of the franchise, it is probably worth skipping until it is on Peacock in a few months.

Final Rating: 5/10