Years after the catastrophic volcanic eruption that destroyed Isla Nublar resulting in the evacuation of the Jurassic Park dinosaurs, the ancient beasts have been wreaking havoc across the world as the modern ecosystem struggles to coexist with the reintroduction of its previously extinct forefathers. One thing that did not struggle, however, was corporate greed as Biosyn Genetics, led by Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), is seeking to use the modified DNA technology that resurrected the dinosaurs to take control over the global food supply. But the technology can also be used to create clones, one such clone being Masie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), who is living in hiding with Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Darling (Bryce Dallas Howard); former employees of the Jurassic Park co-founded by the Lockwood family. 

Jurassic World: Dominion is the conclusion of the sequel trilogy to the iconic 1993 Steven Spielberg touchstone, Jurassic Park. Set into motion with the reboot, Jurassic World (2015), Colin Trevorrow returns to bookend the trilogy with his mark for Universal Studios after ceding the reigns to J.A. Bayona who directed the middle feature, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). In this juggling of creative teams, it is not dissimilar to the sequel trilogy of Star Wars, though notably, Jurassic World is missing a crowning achievement which was found in a galaxy far, far away with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (2017), and instead started middling and tumbled lower and lower with each installment. 

Dominion, for the larger portion of its bloated 146-minute runtime, is serving two main plot lines. The first story picks up with the new generation of characters; Owen the dinosaur tamer and Claire the operations manager in their snowy secluded home looking after Maise. It becomes harder and harder to buy Pratt as a leading man and action star with each outing, and the scenes where he is galloping beside a herd of dinosaurs on his horse and lassoing them down are just laughable. He has next to no charisma on screen and seems consistently out of place as he waves his hands to quell the thrashing beast all while maintaining a confused look on his face which evokes no confidence in him for us as the audience as someone who could believably fight their way out of a paper bag let alone wrangle up wild dinosaurs with his bare hands. 

Further, Dallas Howard finds her role of Claire continually chipped away at in the series as she is given less to do each time. She gets to participate in plenty of set pieces, but as far as character depth goes there is very little her for her to latch on to outside of the role of the adoptive mother figure. Even as the romantic interest to Owen, it’s a struggling performance, though that can probably be attributed more to the writing and Pratt’s oblivious nature on screen than to any real fault of the actress. She was dealt a losing hand with few options.   

It is not all the characters that suffer this same fate of inconsequentiality. Masie, despite the poorly written teenager dialogue, actually has a fully realized arc and a place within the story proper. Owen and Claire really only serve the needs of Masie’s involvement in the script and provide an extra set of hands for the set pieces. Sermon, as stated, has some clunky dialogue to contend with but she finds a good balance by not overdoing the scoffs and the dismissive eyerolls which would turn the character into an insufferable caricature of a rebellious teenage spirit. 

The second side of the story turns Dominion into not just a rebooted sequel, but a legacy sequel which finds Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum returning to reprise their roles as Ellie Sattler, Alan Grant, and Ian Malcolm respectively. Maybe it is just the nostalgia, but the presence of this trio makes it glaringly clear that the Jurassic World trilogy is lacking the same spark and magic as the original film. The creative team behind Dominion also do not seem very enthused about the newer cast as they focus the story more on the returning members of the franchise rather than Owen and his crew. This is shown not just in the cumbersome working in of references and Easter eggs to the 1993 blockbuster, but even on the page as with very little reworking, Owen and Claire could be largely written out of Dominion and it would have little impact on the overall arc of the film. Because so much time is spent with the newer cast and in such hollow scenes, it makes the film drag on and really tests the patience of its audience.  

If the bloat was not bad enough, the most egregious thing about Dominion is how it handles the dinosaurs. There is no other way to say it; they look terrible. The total reliance on CGI is the salt in the wound when you consider how well Phil Tippett’s creature work with Spielberg holds up almost 30 years later, and this is after leaps and bounds in effects technology. The artificiality is most evident when the dinosaurs have no human scene partners and it is not just because they are computer-generated, but their entire texture, coloration, and placement in the scene in relation to lights and shadows are jarring, to say the least. To help combat this, many of the dinosaur scenes take place in low-light locales like the underground market or at night which is fine, but it makes the action illegible as the camera zooms wildly never taking a moment to let us get our bearings. This approach to action filmmaking is not unique to Dominion, and while it is an attempt to create the feeling of a hectic frenzy, more often than not, as it does here, it just creates confusion and frustration in the audience. At the end of the day, when it comes to the dinosaurs, the rendering is rough, and the movement is stiff, and simply put it looks cheap. It is hard to say that what is on screen looks like a reported $185mil production. 

The story behind Jurassic World: Dominion plays with some interesting concepts, but the script seems almost wholly unaware of what to do with them. The bloated and sagging script serves no favors to its cast that contend against – with varying degrees of success – the winding nonsense of it all. It suffers from the idea that sequels need to outdo what came before them. You cannot get much bigger than a T-Rex and that late showdown between the T-rex and Giganotosaurus which seems tacked on at the last minute is totally unsatisfying. Not only have we seen this type of resolution before, but because the script was so confused in what it was trying to do, it never bothered to set up a narrative where this showdown would have the catharsis it was aiming for. Dominion, and the entire Jurassic World trilogy, commit the cardinal sin when it comes to reboots and remakes by not understanding what made the source material special, and by relying so heavily on references to what came before it, it just shines more of a light on how empty and soulless this venture was in the first place.