By Geno McGahee
In 1993, JURASSIC PARK was released and it was something different. It was more than a movie. It was an event and it displayed a mixture of CGI and practical effects in a roller coaster ride of a film. In 1997, THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK was released and didn’t do the same business as the original and wasn’t nearly as good. JURASSIC PARK III was put out in 2001 and was the least successful of the three and the least inspired and marked the end of the series, or so we thought.
JURASSIC WORLD brought the series back in 2015 and it was hugely successful, despite it being rather mediocre. The follow up JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM which also made a lot of money. The returning dinosaurs were printing it and making another one was inevitable and JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION was released and I was quite excited to see it. Laura Dern returning as Ellie Sattler, Sam Neill returning as Alan Grant and Jeff Golblum coming back to the role of Ian Malcolm had to be good…right?
Owen (Chris Pratt) and his girlfriend Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) are living in a cabin in the woods with a human clone, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), that they stole from an evil corporation. They are keeping her locked away from society to protect her from the poachers and corporation that wants her back. Unfortunately, the poachers kidnap her and a small raptor, leading Owen to promise to a mama raptor that he will rescue it and return it. Now I know that Owen worked with raptors and they didn’t kill him as they usually do, but those were at the Jurassic zoo thing, not in the wild. This film lost something immediately when the raptor had a connection to Owen. They’re killers! Come on!
The rescue is on and Owen and Claire team up with a pilot, Kayla (Dewanda Wise), to get Maisie and the raptor back. They will have to infiltrate the evil corporation to do it, but first, they must go through some impossible action sequences for about thirty minutes that made this feel nothing like a JURASSIC PARK film. What the fuck are they doing with this one? Owen cannot get hurt. He gets attacked by raptors, in a plane crash, falls through ice…not a scratch. That irritates me. He could be hit in the face by a T-Rex cock at 80 MPH and he wouldn’t have a bruise.
As this happens, we get re-introduced to Sattler and Grant. This is what I was waiting for and it wasn’t very good. Dern was phoning this in and I understand why. The material she’s given isn’t good, but Neill was great and he aged really well. Sattler says “you look the same” to him and that’s what I was thinking.
The duo reunites to go to the evil corporation to take DNA from a giant locust and prove that the company is behind the invasion of a bunch of these huge fuckers. They are being assisted by Malcolm and the trio finds some of the original chemistry they had, but it’s fleeting. They aren’t in this film as much as I thought they’d be as focus shifts right back to Owen, Claire and Kayla.
The dinosaurs begin to take over the film, which you’d think would be a really good thing. The impact of the dinosaurs in the original JURASSIC PARK was something special, but the CGI here isn’t as good as you’d expect and the actors that are working off of these computer creations aren’t interacting well. I know this was a huge budget film, but it feels like a straight to video film the more I sat through it.
The group comes together, the old and the new, and they begin fighting some more dinosaurs and we get a ton of throwback lines and situations to the first. I usually appreciate this stuff, but it seemed very empty and forced in. As much as these dinosaurs are killers, supposedly, it never feels like anyone in this group is in any danger. With a bunch of lead characters, you’d expect a couple to be taken out. I was hoping that Sattler would be eaten by a dinosaur to save the character. The weak performance and bad material tarnished it for sure.
The dinosaurs reclaim the island and they do a speech about living together and saving the world and so on and so forth. I was just happy it was over. I can’t believe I made it through two and a half hours of this, but my love of the original so much that I was loyal to the original characters. They broke my heart.
JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION is a terrible movie that drags on, doesn’t feel like a JURASSIC PARK movie half of the time and the lack of true danger for the main characters kept me out of the film. The fucker went down in a plane crash and he jumped out completely unharmed. Show me one person that crashed in a huge cargo plane without a seatbelt and was able to get out unhurt and then run from a raptor. Name one. I’m waiting…
This film sucked. Avoid it.
