Miss Flicks

Jurassic World Dominion: Film Review

Jurassic Park is my favourite movie of all time so I’m always excited for a new instalment in the franchise. The critical reactions to Jurassic World Dominion, the third and final instalment in the new trilogy, have been pretty savage but I still hoped that my love for the films would counterbalance all the issues. Unfortunately, that was not the case and I came away disappointed.

Following on from the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) are now parents to the cloned child Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon). When velociraptor Blue’s child and Maisie are kidnapped, Claire and Owen go on a mission to save them and bring them home. This leads them to the corporation BioSyn – run by the shady Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott). Coincidentally, Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill) are visiting BioSyn to uncover the mystery of genetically modified locusts and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) happens to be giving lectures there.

My biggest issue with Jurassic World Dominion is that the dinosaurs are not placed front and centre as they should be. This is a dinosaur franchise, why are they not the stars of the show?! Obviously, there are dinosaurs in the film but they don’t have much of the limelight, there’s no sense of awe and wonder associated with them and they are primarily treated like villains to escape from. The T. rex is the cornerstone of the franchise and she is given very little to do – disappointing. Plus, the deaths have been watered down so we don’t see very much “dino eats human” action. This all happens off-screen so it’s definitely more family-friendly than the original (which terrified me).

There are some cool scenes and moments here and there but the overall story is extremely weak. The decision to go in the locust direction is simply baffling and although it provided a (tenuous) reason for Ellie to be involved, it didn’t work and was quite boring. There is no real reason for Alan or Ian to be there and they feel superfluous to the plot. It gave me a massive thrill seeing the legacy trio back together but they had no genuine impact on the story at all. The plot and screenplay needed to be much much better.

The main characters are separated for a big chunk of the movie so the narrative has to keep switching back and forth between the various plotlines. This kills the momentum and it takes quite a while for it to feel like it’s getting somewhere. The runtime is far too long (two hours 26 minutes) and I’m sure a lot of unnecessary set-up scenes could have been cut out or trimmed down to speed up the pace.

There are a bunch of action set-pieces which you have to suspend your belief for as they are very ridiculous and implausible. Claire outrunning a raptor on foot?! OK! Perhaps it’s for this reason that the Malta chase doesn’t feel quite as thrilling as it should. That can be said for a lot of the movie – I wasn’t excited as often as I expected to be. Also, and I know this is because of the pandemic, but it was quite obvious that a lot of this was filmed in a green screen studio rather than on location.

I didn’t expect to have issues with the cast but here we are. The majority of the actors felt like they were on autopilot and failed to bring life and oomph to the lacklustre script. Dern and DeWanda Wise as Han Solo-style pilot Kayla Watts were the best as they brought energy and personality to their characters. Howard and Pratt have no chemistry and are quite dull and Goldblum seemed like he was in a totally different movie to everyone else.

Jurassic World Dominion is bang average. It isn’t awful but it also isn’t great. It is simply fine – and that is not good enough.

In cinemas now