The original Jurassic Park, released in 1993, is one of the most memorable films of the past 30 years. Featuring one of the great ensemble casts of the early ’90s, Oscar-winning sound and visual effects, and a gripping plot based on Michael Crichton’s bestselling science fiction thriller, it also ranks among Steven Spielberg’s best movies — which is saying a lot for a director who has E.T., Saving Private Ryan, and Indiana Jones to his name. Jurassic Park moved audiences around the world with humor, horror, and moments of genuine wonder. Who can forget the buildup and anticipation when we first see those magnificent Jurassic Park dinosaurs for the first time? The scene when Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and the other visitors enter the park and come upon the brachiosaurus glistening in the sun and bestriding the land like primordial colossus still has the power to conjure feelings of grandeur after all these years.
Computer-generated imagery (CGI) was a fairly new technology in 1993. In the hands of Spielberg’s creative team, it was stunningly effective in creating genuinely realistic-looking dinosaurs. The authentic-looking appearance of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs, made with both CGI and practical effects, was a key factor behind its equally stunning box office success, which set national and international records for ticket sales that would not be broken until the exceptional theatrical performance of Titanic in 1998. Jurassic Park led not only to CGI becoming an ordinary rather than extraordinary feature of modern movies, but also to more Jurassic Park movies — six of them, to be exact. The first was the 1997 sequel The Lost World, also directed by Spielberg, followed by Jurassic Park 3 in 2001. Audiences could have taken a clue from Spielberg’s dropping out of the series that the franchise had begun to decline, but no matter. Universal Studios continued churning out Jurassic Parks on the average of one per every U.S. presidential term. When diminishing ticket revenues for Jurassic Park 3 indicated that the humans-encountering-resuscitated-dinosaurs concept was beginning to exhaust itself, rather than pivot to other, more original and more creative film possibilities, the studio stuck with the undead dinosaurs and in 2015 gave us the first installment of a new series within the Jurassic Park universe: Jurassic World.
Jurassic World: Dominion is the third and purportedly final installment of the Jurassic World series, the basic premise of which is that the revivified dinosaurs are no longer confined to a park but have broken out and are now living among us all around the world. In case you were not aware of this because you, like me and like Spielberg himself, dropped out of the Jurassic Park franchise after the 1997 sequel, a brief expository news report at the beginning of Jurassic World: Dominion recaps for us what we have missed. It also sets up the story of this episode in the series: After the dinosaurs escaped from the parks, human beings were faced with the choice of trying to live in a modicum of harmony with them, as we manage to do with lions, tigers, wolves, and grizzly bears, letting them live in their natural habitats as we keep our distance from them, or exploiting them like whale hunters and elephant poachers.
The necessity of everyone needing to make this choice allows us to quickly ascertain who are the good guys and bad guys in this dinosaurs-among-us world. The good guys are those like Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who live in a log cabin in the Sierra Nevadas with their adopted daughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon). When they’re not whittling sticks by the fire, they’re training velociraptors. The bad guys are people who try to profit off of dinosaurs. There are the dinosaur poachers who try to capture these creatures and sell them on the global black dinosaur market. There are illegal dinosaur breeders. And, most sinister, there’s the CEO of the Biosyn corporation, Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), who has created a sanctuary for them in the Italian Alps for the ostensible purpose of studying their biological properties but who actually has much darker intentions than merely engaging in the pure pursuit of scientific knowledge.
Because this is a Hollywood movie, these good guys and bad guys must meet at some point in an epic showdown. Director Colin Trevorrow and screenwriters Emily Carmichael and Derek Connolly engineer this for us by making Maisie the biological daughter of Charlotte Lockwood, the daughter of the founder of the original Jurassic Park. Her adoptive parents attempt to keep her from finding out the truth about her parents’ and grandparents’ involvement in the enterprise that has unleashed such problems upon humanity. They don’t like it when she goes into town without their permission, and they warn her from ever crossing a certain bridge, as if she is Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. When she is kidnapped one day and taken to the Biosyn headquarters in northern Italy, Grady and Dearing have a motive to find a way into the Biosyn dinosaur sanctuary themselves.
But there is one more plotline that the Jurassic World: Dominion producers must engineer in order to complete their mission of giving whatever fans this franchise still has their full satisfaction: finding a convincing way to reincorporate the old Jurassic Park standbys Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Alan Grant (Sam Neill), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) into the story. The writers accomplish this by creating a subplot involving a plague of supersized locusts that are devouring crops across the country. The botanist Sattler, who lately has been writing articles on soil science, has reason to believe that Biosyn is behind this breed of mutant locusts — the only crops that the locusts are not destroying are those that are being grown with Biosyn seed. She goes to Utah to track down her old paleontologist friend Grant to see if he will help her investigate. Thanks to a well-placed friend in the CIA, they secure an invitation to Biosyn, where they are at long last reunited with their pal Dr. Malcolm, who has a cushy gig working as the in-house philosopher for Dodgson and the Biosyn corp. Once the principal players have all been brought together, the real action of the story can commence.
The emphasis of Jurassic World: Dominion, however, is all on action, at the unfortunate expense of any compelling development of ideas or characters. For the better part of the 2 hours and 26 minutes of Jurassic World: Dominion’s bloated run time, we have to endure chase after chase after angry-dinosaur chase, as if this particular Jurassic World set of filmmakers believed it was their mission to give us Fast & Furious with dinosaurs instead of any semblance of an engagement with the ideas about biological science and unintended consequences that made the original book and movie fascinating. Jurassic World: Dominion has also quashed whatever possibility there may have been for us to still experience a sense of wonder from its dinosaurs, going all-in on monster terror. Thank heavens for the felicitous presence of Jeff Goldblum in this movie, which otherwise would be next to unbearable. With deadpan lines read and his trademark uhs and ers, he saves the movie from being a complete disaster and makes it at least somewhat entertaining. Whether he can save the Jurassic Park franchise, though, is another question, and one that he may not be entirely interested in helping the studio address for much longer. When his character meets Grady, Chris Pratt’s raptor trainer, Grady exclaims to him excitedly, “You were — you were in Jurassic World, right?” Goldblum, as Malcolm, replies levelly, “Jurassic World? Not a fan.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
