The following review may contain spoilers for Jurassic World Dominion. I don't intend to be overly specific or anything, but self-control is not my strong suit. Be warned!
After a slightly prolonged 7 years, the Jurassic World saga has finally drawn to a close with its third and final installment, Jurassic World Dominion. Although the Jurassic Park trilogy had their share of ups and downs, it is probably safe to say that the revival of the franchise had its work cut out for it, and a lot of expectations to live up to. Did it stumble at the last hurdle?
Speaking for myself, I don't really think that there was a last hurdle. The Jurassic World trilogy tripped over the same pitfalls all the way through and came out as a deeply imperfect product as a result. This was largely because of its overreliance on nostalgia and some general formulaic issues. Despite this, I have still found all three of the Jurassic World movies enjoyable on the whole, including this one, but there were still a number of things that brought it down for me.
Having only watched it once, I'm still feeling a little scatterbrained, but I hope that the following paragraphs will still be intelligible enough. Here's a summary of where I think the movie stuck the landing, and where it chickened out.
On the Up Side...
Before really digging into the negatives, I would like to briefly go over some of the things that I liked about Jurassic World Dominion, lest I be taken for a complete pessimist. First, the locations. I was pretty impressed with both the sets and the landscapes that appear in this movie. There's a great diversity of settings in Dominion, and some of them are serious eye candy. Malta was particularly pretty, though it's a little difficult to enjoy when moving through it at a thousand miles an hour.
I was surprised and delighted by Campbell Scott's Dodgson. He's without a doubt the best human antagonist in the trilogy, and plays this sort of twisted Steve Jobs figure in a way that I found highly entertaining. I enjoyed a dark chuckle at the fact that he has been keeping the Barbasol can as some kind of sick trophy of the day he ruined InGen - and at the irony of his death, on the nose though it was. The latest addition to the main cast, DeWanda Wise as Kayla, was also delightful.
I found the locust plot to be an interesting twist on the recurring genetic power theme of the series. Out of everything in this trilogy, I felt this plot thread was the most in keeping with the original spirit of Crichton's novels, which I regard as a positive. I was also pleased with Maisie's plot in this movie, which was frankly much better than the one she was served in Fallen Kingdom. Parts of it were genuinely touching, and felt really "human", something which I found all too rarely in this trilogy otherwise.
Scared of Taking a Breath?
Despite my earlier caveats and my genuine affection for the series, I have come not to praise Dominion, but to bury it. I can think of no better place to start than this: the fact that the movie seems to be afraid of quiet moments. This whole trilogy (particularly its first installment) has depended heavily on nostalgia for Jurassic Park, but it has never seemed to understand just what made that movie so beloved in the first place. It seems like the only lesson that the second trilogy took from the first was that dinosaurs are big, scary, and that chase scenes involving them are lots of fun. While these things were a part of what made the original movie so great, half of the equation is still missing here.
The missing factor is Jurassic Park's focus on character and ideas. Jurassic Park wasn't afraid to slow things down to allow its characters to speak for themselves, to explore the themes of the movie, or even just to bond with each other. The interactions in that movie felt so much more organic; by comparison, those in the Jurassic World series, while sometimes good, are more often a bit cringey and forced. Where they exist at all, they are always less memorable than, for example, the lunch scene or the Petticoat Lane scene from the original movie.
I also came away a little fatigued, wishing that each of the dinosaurs in Dominion had gotten more screen time. Some of the encounters are really "blink and you miss it" bits, which left me wanting by the time it was over. There is an entire stretch in the middle of the movie that just feels like constant dinosaur encounters with no breaks in between. I can't shake the sense that they did not trust the attention span of the audience to deal with anything slower or more cerebral than that. The Jurassic World movies have forgotten that the framing of the action scenes in Jurassic Park was just as important as the scenes themselves; because of this inadequacy, they've never hit the same highs.
Scared of Scares?
There is a related issue which has also been bugging me with this trilogy. Above, I mentioned how "dinosaur fatigue" set in as I watched Dominion. This is not a new problem for me; the Jurassic World series decided from the off that more dinosaurs = better, irrespective of anything else. This mistake has instead let the series down time and time again. The number of species onscreen in Dominion means nothing to me when none of them are really given the time that they need; it just makes them feel like white noise.
This is something else that ties into the Jurassic World series' refusal to let things breathe. Everything has to be non-stop action all the way through. This really leaves no room for suspense, something which was a staple of the first Jurassic Park and, to a degree, its first sequel, The Lost World. With the exception of the "Indoraptor" mansion sequence in Fallen Kingdom, which was quite cool, this quality is largely missing from the last three movies, which seem to have forgotten how to actually scare the viewer.
When watching the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, there is still a sense of awe and danger even thirty years later, a suspense not borne from their presence on screen (which is relatively short compared with the runtime of the movie), but rather defined by the spaces in between, where the next inevitable dinosaur attack inspires a feeling of growing dread. This sense is much more muted in the Jurassic World movies.
Desperate to mine the nostalgia well, but with no intention of emulating the original formula of suspense-filled sci-fi horror, Jurassic World ended up failing to shoot any higher than the level of a middling action movie, a problem its sequels inherited. Jurassic World's dinosaurs are no longer a source of either wonder or terror; they're just there.
Scared of the Future?
This header carries a double meaning. I do think that the Jurassic World trilogy was very reluctant to take risks with its formula, or to break from the conventions of the earlier movies it was aping, but this section is more about my take on the future of the Jurassic franchise and the future of dinosaur media.
Am I scared of the future? No, not even remotely. I think dinosaur media is in a relatively healthy place right now. Dealing with movie monster depictions makes science communication a little more difficult in some ways, but this is not a new problem. When dinosaurs feature in popular media, it still gets people interested in the field, even if the media itself isn't good. With Prehistoric Planet also streaming right now, there's a perfectly good alternative right there, and it didn't exactly get overshadowed by Dominion or anything. By all accounts, it's performed very well.
Dominion has been billed as the final conclusion of its series, but this is probably just corporate advertisement talk. I have no doubt that, after the relative success of the Jurassic World series, it will be back again, and probably be much the same in most ways. I would be happy to eat my words, but I'm at peace with the fact that there will be no more Jurassic movies like the ones I loved as a child. At the very least, the Jurassic World trilogy was still a bit fun, even if it was not particularly good. I might re-watch them from time to time, but for the most part, I'm content in the fact that dinosaur media may now move on to a new era. Let's hope for the best.
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