Directed by Colin Trevorrow
Written by Emily Carmichael and Colin Trevorrow
Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Laura Dern, DeWanda Wise
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action, some violence and language
Runtime: 2 hours, 26 minutes
In theaters June 10

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldbum): God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.

Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern): Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth.

I have a lot of love for this franchise. Some of that is nostalgia, some of that is knowing that they can’t possibly try and top the original film in quality, so we might as well have fun with dinosaurs. And so I’ve enjoyed every entry up until this one. Sadly, Jurassic World Dominion suffers fully from Overstuffed Sequel Syndrome, not unlike Spider-Man 3 or The Rise of Skywalker. There are many great and interesting ideas within, but they serve no purpose and go by so quickly (in some remarkably poorly executed sequences) that they might as well not even be there.

Dominion opens with a recap of the status quo after the end of Fallen Kingdom, dinosaurs are just out in the world alongside humans. Things are chaotic, but no one seems to be doing too much about it. While the last act of the previous entry set up a giant beach for the franchise to play in, Dominion quickly reduces it down to a sandbox. Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen (Chris Pratt) are living in a remote cabin as they protect Maisie (Isabella Sermon), the human clone. Blue the velociraptor and her child, Beta, live in the woods nearby. Both humans and dinosaur children are kidnapped and taken to the Italian headquarters of BioSyn, a biotech company. Along with their labs, they have created a dinosaur sanctuary in a secluded valley.

In parallel, Dr. Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) is on the trail of locusts the size of house cats that are decimating crops across the Great Plains. All the crops except the ones sprouted from proprietary BioSyn seeds, that is. She recruits Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to join her on a trip to BioSyn on the invitation of Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldbloom), the company’s resident contrarian. From there, chaos ensues and the World characters form a supergroup with the Park characters as they run around doing various homages to the original movie. Kick in the slowed down part of the theme music, roll credits.

Fallen Kingdom felt like it was made up of a few large sequences that provided exposition to this movie’s core idea: dinosaurs among us. It’s the kind of thing that can easily set your imagination racing with the possibilities for new storylines. There are so many interesting concepts and scenarios to be mined from humans and dinosaurs coexisting (along with the rest of contemporary ecosystems) and out of two and a half hours, we get maybe ten minutes. Concepts like dinosaur black markets (better executed in Fallen Kingdom), dinosaurs as companions or pets, breeding mills, and even people eating dinosaur meat all indicate that there are interesting things left to explore with this franchise.

The main issue with Dominion is that it basically immediately swerves away from those ideas. It isn’t even that Dominion doesn’t explore enough of these to be satisfying. Sadly, it merely hints at most of them and quickly shifts into ‘dinosaurs on the loose in this one specific area they can’t escape from’ in order to set up an extended homage to Jurassic Park. There’s a found footage style Jurassic movie that exists only as B-roll to be used in fake news sequences here. There are so many teases on the periphery of the film, but the pace is so frenetic (and the visual geography so sloppy) that by the time you’re oriented in a sequence, three more interesting things have already passed by.

The first entry in the franchise and the sequels up to this point have mostly used the dinosaurs as a very up front metaphor for corporate greed and especially for science that prefers profit to ethics. With the global scale of Dominion, it would have been appropriate to expand that theme into other things. Fallen Kingdom and an early sequence in this movie touch on animal rights (it would be hard to be mad at anyone for cribbing from Okja), and the long locust plotline barely touches on climate change and the probable impact to the food supply. But these are soft steps in a direction that ends with a bland “we must learn to coexist” message when the film itself is telling us that unregulated tech industry billionaires are responsible for–or refuse to solve–some of the biggest crises facing us. Dinosaurs should eat the rich. Instead, Dominion is the bad kind of indulgently dense. Chris Pratt raising his hand to steady raptors in Jurassic World became an iconic/memeable moment, but it made sense in that film because it was based on years of training with those animals. Here, raising an open hand to any dinosaur seems to stop it in its tracks. To me, it seems this would be at most effective at forestalling your death because they’d bite your hand off instead of going for your head/throat immediately.

This sloppy feel extends to the look and mood of Dominion as well. There are a few moments within larger sequences that are both fun and thrilling, but they are the exception rather than the norm. Ironically perhaps, several of those come towards the end of the final act as Trevorrow fully shifts into lifting things from the original Jurassic Park. Doing such a faithful homage requires the pace to slow down and match Spielberg’s editing tempo, which actually gives everyone on screen and in the audience time to breathe. The World films have been critiqued for not giving its characters identifiable character traits, but in Dominion, things are happening at such a dizzying pace that each person in the large cast is forced to play the same note on repeat whenever they pop up.

This especially affects the female characters, which have been a part of the critiques for the relaunched part of the franchise since the first film. Trevorrow seems to think he is prioritizing these characters, especially Laura Dern’s Ellie Satler, giving this quote to Indiewire, “Laura was never the engine of one of the stories. Sam Neill had Jurassic Park III, where he was the engine, and Jeff Goldblum had The Lost World. I wanted this to be Ellie Sattler’s story.” However, having her character kick off a plotline doesn’t mean that this is her story. Assertiveness was never an issue the character had, even in her Jurassic Park III cameo. What undermines all of this is that the World movies have a strong fixation on motherhood. There’s nothing wrong with motherhood, or having female characters who are moms, in fact, that’s a cool thing for an action franchise. But multiple times in Dominion, the importance of Ellie and Claire as characters is reduced to only being mothers. It might feel different if Blue and Beta were also in more of this movie, showing strong moms across species, but those connections are never made clear. Or if it connected more to Ian Malcolm, since one of his children was a major character in The Lost World. If anything, that makes this motherhood focus feel even more glaring. So much for “woman inherits the earth.”