Laura Dern lets out a sigh when her character, the paleobotanist Ellie Sattler, finds herself once again in the company of some magically resurrected dinosaurs. “You never get used to it!” she exclaims. The makers of the newest instalment in the Michael Crichton-inspired franchise, Jurassic World Dominion, will be betting that audiences still have the same residual affection for a series that has yet to equal the exhilarating highs of Steven Spielberg’s game-changing original. Jurassic World Dominion will be released seven years after Jurassic World and almost three decades after Jurassic Park.
In a lega-sequel that is so eager to play the nostalgia card that some of its sequences are more or less replays of pre-existing set-pieces, bringing back Dern, Sam Neill’s Alan Grant, and Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm is practically an admission of such. The trio’s welcome return, however, has the unfortunate side effect of highlighting just how wan their successors are in comparison. Chris Pratt’s raptor-whisperer Owen, Bryce Dallas Howard’s dino-liberator Claire, and clone kid Maisie (Isabella Sermon) are shown to be lacking in comparison, and this is despite the fact that the assured DeWanda Wise has joined their group as an out-and-proud pilot.
Dominion begins with the intriguing notion of dinosaurs living and hunting among us, a new reality that is vividly established by having a fishing vessel overturned by a Mosasaurus in the frigid Bering Sea. The film picks off where 2018’s Fallen Kingdom left off. It is a situation that is ripe with opportunities, which are taken use of to the fullest in a gripping action that sees Owen and Claire being pursued through Valletta by a relentless pack of Atrociraptors that have the predilection for rooftop parkour as Jason Bourne does.
Episodes such as this one, as well as another in which a Texas farm is attacked by an ancient swarm of locusts, radically boost the ante in ways that we have never seen before. It is therefore quite frustrating that the second half of Dominion is confined to a controlled facility in the Dolomites. This facility is a refuge for dinosaurs owned by a malicious tech magnate played by Campbell Scott, and it is basically simply a Jurassic Park in everything but the name. It is true that putting all of the players together under one (virtual) roof makes it possible for them to be threatened by the same Giganotosaurus.
This terrifying giant makes the T. Rex appear as little as the newborn raptor Owen is trying to reunite with its mother. However, by limiting the scope of the activities that take place in his movie, director Colin Trevorrow depressingly ends up reducing them to the tried and true as well as the mind-numbingly familiar. On June 10, audiences will be able to see Jurassic World: Dominion in theatres.