Film Review: Jurassic World: Dominion – 4/10

‘We’re racing toward the extinction of our species…’

You can’t hang the fate of an entire franchise around the necks of a pair of actors as dull as Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. You just can’t. So, it makes sense to bring back legacy characters for this franchise. Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum are much more accomplished actors than everyone else in this piece of shit, and even they can’t save it…

Gee whizz… the plot. Who knows. Some kid has been cloned. There are huge locusts destroying crops. Ellie Satler (Dern) persuades Alan Grant (Neill) to come out of hiding for one last job. There’s no park this time, but dinosaurs are just roaming free on the earth. Although we only hear about that for ten minutes or so before it’s completely abandoned. The whole thing is a total mess.

Imagine having the original cast of Jurassic Park at your disposal, plus as many American dollars that you can spend and coming up with this. Colin Trevorrow – working from his own screenplay with a co-writing credit for Emily Carmichael – has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that he is not the man to head up this franchise. Everything that he got right in the first movie has been utterly undone by an iffy sequel and this disastrous threequel. In that respect, Jurassic World: Dominion brings to mind Halloween Ends – something that absolutely no filmmaker wants to hear. Sure, the dinosaurs look great, and it is momentarily thrilling to get the band back together, but by God, the writing… is so bad. So so bad. The dialogue is excretable throughout, and the amount of coincidences and the continued use of deus ex machina, is quite frankly, an insult to everyone involved. Including me. I feel insulted by this movie.

If we have learnt anything from the later Star Wars sequels, plus David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies, it is that simply bringing back beloved characters is not enough. You need to rebuild a world for those characters to inhabit, and this film catastrophically fails on all counts. A disaster.