Jurassic World Dominion, review: the franchise’s credibility is finally extinct
Almost 30 years ago, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park fulfilled one of the most exciting promises a Hollywood blockbuster has ever made: it brought dinosaurs back to life. The film’s premise was also its chief selling point – technology had finally reached the point at which these prehistoric beasts could be not just be convincingly resurrected, but repackaged as a mass-market thrill ride. On screen, the technology in question was genetic engineering; on set, it was a then-revolutionary mix of animatronics and visual effects.
But that symmetry was what gave Spielberg’s film the edge over Michael Crichton’s source novel, and also what made it a formative cinema-going experience for millions. With every stomp, chomp, crushed goat carcass and blood-curdling click of talon on kitchen tile, its viewers were visitors too.
It would be unfair to expect a sixth Jurassic Park film to have a comparable effect on an audience today. But if you’re traipsing back to a dino-infested nature reserve for the fifth time in three decades, you should at least be able to justify the trip. Jurassic World Dominion tries to do it by following two undercover missions that converge on the same shadowy biotech conglomerate – which for reasons best known to itself has filled its picturesque campus in the Italian Dolomites with rampaging dinosaurs.
The company, called Biosyn, is run by one Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) – the embryo smuggler from the original Jurassic Park, whose famous shaving foam can makes an inevitable cameo appearance. This sinister outfit has secretly engineered a new breed of giant locust which is devouring all crops on Earth that aren’t grown from Biosyn seed – quite why they expected that to go unnoticed is unclear – while also kidnapping Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the cloned child from film number five, in order to study her genetic makeup for related reasons.
Maisie’s abduction brings Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard charging to the rescue, while the mega-locusts attract the attention of Ellie Sattler and Alan Grant (Laura Dern and Sam Neill, both returning for the first time since 2001’s Jurassic Park 3), who use the excuse of visiting Biosyn’s “in-house philosopher” Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) to sneak on site and gather DNA evidence of the plot.
So this is where the Jurassic franchise formula stands in 2022: take one generic film premise (in this case, a corporate espionage thriller) and just have some dinosaurs milling around in it. They chase the heroes around a bit too, in endless effortful riffs on the original’s iconic set-pieces – Goldblum waves a flare at a T-rex, Dern creeps past toothy menaces in access tunnels, and so on. But as far as the story is concerned, the 65-million-year-old former star attractions are humiliatingly surplus to requirements.
Presumably due to the uniform whiteness and straightness of the returning human characters, the glass has been broken on an emergency bisexual: DeWanda Wise’s Kayla Watts, a cargo pilot who joins the mission during a ludicrous detour to Malta. Here, the capital city of Valletta provides a stage for one of the most incomprehensible action sequences in recent memory – a wannabe-Mission: Impossible backstreet pursuit that appears to have been shot from inside a tumble dryer, making it impossible to work out who’s going where, or even how many dinosaurs are on the loose.
Meanwhile, the fun of the Dern-Neill-Goldblum reunion is quickly stifled by the dismal script, which peppers every scene with corny asides and constantly resorts to coincidence to shunt the plot forward. Inevitably, Jurassic World Dominion will make a fortune worldwide, since these films always do. But in credibility terms, it’s an extinction-level event.
12A cert, 147 min; in cinemas from Friday June 10
