Four years after Isla Nublar was destroyed, dinosaurs roam the Earth and breed without check. That is the premise of Jurassic World Dominion, and it is also the film’s whole idea. What the movie does with that idea is the problem.
Trailer, via Jurassic World.
Colin Trevorrow Spends $531 Million
Dominion is the third Jurassic World film and the sixth in the Jurassic Park franchise. Trevorrow directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Emily Carmichael. It runs 147 minutes. With an estimated net budget of $531 million, it is the second most expensive film ever made.
The money shows in the wrong places. Filming ran from February to November 2020 across Canada, England and Malta, and the pandemic shut production down for months and pushed the release back a year. You can feel that pause in the finished film. It moves like a project assembled in pieces and never quite rejoined.
Owen Grady, Claire Dearing and a Rescue Mission
The plot sends Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) on a rescue mission. They have been hiding Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), a 14-year-old with a unique genetic makeup, at a cabin in the Sierra Nevada. Mercenaries take her and Beta, the hatchling born asexually to Blue, the last Velociraptor Owen trained.
Meanwhile, swarms of giant locusts are destroying U.S. crops. Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) notices that crops grown from Biosyn seeds go uneaten. She brings a locust from West Texas to Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), and they find it was engineered with Cretaceous-period and contemporary DNA. The trail leads to Biosyn Genetics, which runs a dinosaur preserve in Italy’s Dolomites and a genomics operation that is not what it claims.
Dern, Neill and Jeff Goldblum appear together for the first time since the original Jurassic Park. Neill’s turn as Grant is his last in the franchise. That reunion is the film’s best asset and its most misused one.
The epic conclusion of the Jurassic era.
Lewis Dodgson and the Biosyn Conspiracy
Campbell Scott plays Dr. Lewis Dodgson, the Biosyn CEO who orders the abductions of Maisie and Beta and hires Soyona Santos and Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong) to sell dinosaurs on the black market and breed the hybrid locusts. Mamoudou Athie is Ramsay Cole, Biosyn’s head of communications, secretly working with Ian Malcolm (Goldblum) to bring Dodgson down. DeWanda Wise plays Kayla Watts, a former Air Force pilot who helps Owen and Claire.
That is a lot of machinery, and none of it turns. The locust plot is the film’s attempt at a real threat, a corporate scheme that starves people rather than eats them, and it is the most interesting thing on screen. It also gets buried under a rescue mission that keeps stopping so the movie can remind you who these people are.
The cast does what it can. Pratt and Howard have settled into a rhythm that reads as exhaustion, which may be honest. Dern and Neill get the better scenes because they get the quieter ones. Goldblum gets the lines that sound like Goldblum. Scott’s Dodgson is a billionaire with no interior, which is a choice the script makes and then never complicates.
A Franchise That Ran Out of Questions
The Jurassic Park franchise has now spent six films asking the same question: what happens when humans are no longer the apex predators? Dominion is the first one positioned to actually answer it. Dinosaurs are everywhere. The balance is global. The film has no interest in the answer.
Instead it defaults to the shape of a chase. Malta’s dinosaur black market is a set piece, not a world. The Dolomites preserve is a backdrop. The film keeps telling us the planet has changed and keeps showing us corridors.
The 147-minute runtime is the tell. Nothing here needs that long. The locust thread, the Maisie thread, the Biosyn thread and the legacy-cast thread all want to be the movie, and Trevorrow never picks one. The result is a film that is busy without being about anything.
What Dominion Gets Right
There is one real idea buried in Dominion, and it belongs to Sattler. Crops grown from Biosyn seeds go uneaten by the locusts. That is a corporation engineering a famine and selling the cure. It is the only plot in the film that connects dinosaurs to people in a way that costs something.
Everything else is reunion and retrieval. The return of Dern, Neill and Goldblum is genuinely worth the ticket for anyone who grew up on the 1993 film, and their scenes together are the only ones that breathe. But a reunion is not a story. Dominion spends its enormous budget proving that a franchise can bring back every piece it has and still not know what to do with them.
The film premiered in Mexico City on May 23, 2022, and Universal released it in the United States that June. It is the end of the Jurassic era, per its own tagline. It plays like a franchise that ran out of questions before it ran out of money.
Jurassic World Dominion: 3.8 of 10
The Hard Numbers
- Title: Jurassic World Dominion (2022)
- Director: Colin Trevorrow
- Writers: Emily Carmichael, Colin Trevorrow, Derek Connolly
- Runtime: 147 minutes
- Estimated net budget: $531 million, the second most expensive film ever made
- Filming: February to November 2020, in Canada, England and Malta
- Premiere: Mexico City, May 23, 2022
- Score: 3.8 of 10
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