Jurassic World Dominion (2022) review

I love movies. Genuinely, they are something that makes me extraordinarily happy. They inspire me, make me see the world in new ways, and want to learn more about people, art, storytelling, and the universe. For as long as I can remember, only one movie has been consistently a part of my favorite movies list, and that is Jurassic Park. As I type this, I am listening to the booming, triumphant theme from John Williams' build to that beautiful climactic crescendo, and it is still able to make me feel the same way as it did the very first time I heard it.

Back when I was a kid, maybe five years old, I remember my parents showing me Jurassic Park for the first time. Deeming it too violent for a five-year old, fairly enough, they only showed me bits and pieces of it, but even without the complete picture, I was hooked. I would watch it again and again, unable to fully comprehend but nonetheless fascinated by what I was seeing. I even watched the behind the scenes footage to get a glimpse of just how the process of this thing I was enamored by was brought to life, because no matter how much my mom tried to explain “no Will, those are not real dinosaurs,” or “no Will, in the context of the movie the dinosaurs were real, but in real life, they were animatronics,” I just wouldn’t get it without seeing it firsthand. It is the movie that sparked my fascination and love of film and storytelling, and is a movie that genuinely means the world to me. Obviously, it is something that makes me very sentimental.

So, it pains me to see just how awful the franchise that the first movie inspired truly is, and Jurassic World Dominion is no exception. I expected this movie to be terrible, I expected it to be the worst movie in the franchise but what I did not expect was for it to be even more pathetic and desperate than Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker.

Like The Rise of Skywalker before it, Dominion shows the death throes of a creatively bankrupt franchise desperately lobbing any nostalgia-bait, spectacle laden nonsense at the screen and seeing what sticks as a reaction to negative feedback from the past two films:

The characters from the last two movies are as well developed and likable as cardboard cutouts? BRING BACK THE CHARACTERS FROM THE FIRST MOVIE! Pull a Halloween Kills and pluck any character possible straight out of the ether, from Alan and Ellie to the guy that gave Dennis Nedry the can to smuggle the embryos out of Jurassic Park! Seriously, that guy who had two minutes of screen time in the first film is the MAIN VILLAIN OF THIS MOVIE! WHAT?!

There is only one or two things to do with the premise at hand? Condense every plot point from the whole franchise into this movie! Hackneyed debate about meddling with nature! Cookie-cutter corporate white-guy villain! Weaponizing dinosaurs! Splicing DNA to create dinosaurs! It’s so boring, tiring, pathetic and done to death. After nearly 30 years, all that these movies are capable of doing is the same thing again and again.

Jurassic World Dominion is the antithesis of everything I love so much about not only Jurassic Park, but movies in general. There is not a single ounce of passion or creativity to be found in Dominion. This entire new trilogy, but this and Fallen Kingdom especially, has more in common with the Fast and Furious franchise than it does with Jurassic Park. Spielberg's film was not an action movie. It was a science fiction movie that was more interested in exploring the ethics of bringing back dinosaurs from extinction, as well as the capitalistic motivations behind the park, and how that mindset led to corners being cut and lives being lost. “Spared no expense” is not meant as a genuine motto of John Hammond, but an ironic statement about how Hammond went all out to make the park flashy and consumer friendly, but had to spare just about every safety expense and cut as many costs as possible behind the scenes to do so as quickly as possible. Where that theme is at the very core of Jurassic Park, it is nothing more than a sloppy paint job on the Jurassic World trilogy. It's a flashy, green screen spectacle with nightmarishly nauseating, implausible, physics-defying, neverending action scenes one after the other until the movie’s boilerplate “script” comes to an end. It’s a hollow product with nothing but a cynical, money-hungry studio behind it.

I can’t be the first person to say this, but this entire trilogy can be summed up in this quote from the first movie:

“I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power you’re using here. It didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done, and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, packaged it, slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and now you’re selling it.”

It goes to show how strong Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park movie is that every single sequel halves in quality with each release, and people still go to see them no matter what. People are desperate even for a tiny crumb of what that first movie gives them that they are willing to go back to this terrible, terrible trainwreck of a franchise that is solely riding on how good the first movie is time and time again.

Forget Ringo Starr, the luckiest man in show business is Colin Trevorrow.