[Spoiler warning: this post contains spoilers for Jurassic World: Dominion]
I’m not sure if you’re supposed to be rooting for the dinosaurs in Jurassic World: Dominion, but several times throughout the newest entry in the franchise I found myself far more concerned about the well being of the creatures than anything else. For a movie that’s supposedly about dinosaurs, I could have done with more dinosaurs.
Part of that might be because the main villain in Dominion was locusts. That’s right, locusts. Like big bugs. But we’ll come back to that.
Dominion, which hits theaters everywhere on June 10, is nowhere near the best Jurassic Park movie (that is, of course, Jurassic Park), but nor is it the worst (hello, Jurassic Park III). It struggles with finding a really gripping plot six stories in, especially considering that the actual source material — the 1990 novel by Michael Crichton — told a perfect and concise story.
Still, there’s something that creates a sense of youthful exuberance at the idea of seeing dinosaurs grace the big screen again. The biggest thing working against Jurassic Park: Dominion (other than a plot that hinges on a loose issue with locusts) is the fact that they missed hitting the right notes with that nostalgia. Within the last 175 days, movie goers have been treated to both Spider-Man: No Way Home and Top Gun: Maverick. Each one perfectly tapped into that sense of nostalgia while telling a fresh tale. Neither one should have worked as well as they did, but they knocked it out of the park both for critics and fans.
The return of Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) pulled at the heart strings, and that trio — along with series newcomer Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise) — were the best part of the movie. Goldblum was utterly fantastic, delivering his lines with the timing and cadence that made Malcolm (and Thor: Ragnarok’s Grandmaster) so iconic.
It wasn’t all misses on the nostalgia. Malcolm surreptitiously unbuttoning one more button on his iconic black shirt elicited huge laughs. The worst human character getting eaten by the same dinosaurs as Dennis Nedry while the latter’s Barbasol container rolls on the ground absolutely works.
But back to the locusts.
Since Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, all of the dinosaurs rescued from Isla Nublar that were set to be sold on the black market have now just gone wild. There are Hadrosaurs roaming the countryside, Velociraptors in the woods and Mosasaurs stealing crab traps off of boats in the Bering Sea. This, in turn, leads to underground black market hunting rings and a biotech company CEO — Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) — trying to “help” by creating a safe haven for all the dinos in the mountains of northern Italy.
Suddenly, gigantic and terrifying locusts start destroying crops from Iowa to Texas before migrating across the continent. Dr. Sattler is convinced these locusts have been cross bred with dinosaur DNA and gets Dr. Grant to come with her to the biotech headquarters — where of course Dr. Malcolm works — to get proof.
Oh, I forgot about the clone child and baby raptor.
Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and former Navy-man-turned-raptor-trainer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) are still together and caring for Maisie Lockwood in a small cabin in the woods. Lockwood (played by the fantastic Isabella Sermon) is the DNA clone of her mother, but we find out in Dominion that she isn’t created by her grandfather out of sadness as Fallen Kingdom led us to believe. Instead, Charlotte Lockwood (who apparently helped … found Jurassic Park) made Maisie as a replica of her that she … carried and birthed herself. Try. not to think too hard about it.
When Charlotte realized she had a genetic disease, she was able to “fix” Maisie, giving her a chance at a full life. Dodgson hires black market criminals to kidnap both Maisie and the aforementioned baby raptor (the genetic replica of Grady’s trained raptor, Blue) so that Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong) can study them both.
Of course in the end, we have the T-rex battling a bigger dinosaur that allows our heroes to escape the forest fire caused by burning locusts rages around them (wow, what a sentence). Dr. Wu claims he can mimic the process Charlotte Lockwood used to heal Maisie, therefore killing the horde of locusts, ending the impending ecological collapse and saving the day.
If you’re thinking this all sounds like nonsense, well, it is. Was it still kind of fun? Sure. Jurassic World: Dominion won’t win any awards, but the absolute mayhem of the story made it a good time. Even if it was just to laugh at the absurdity.
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