I feel like I must be honest with you readers, I fell asleep during the last half of watching this movie. I have a vague idea of what happened, but there are some gaps here and there.
As you can probably guess, I was very underwhelmed by this third entry into the Jurassic World series.
But that has mostly been the case with almost every single Jurassic Park sequel, as none of them have really been all that good.
The first Jurassic World film was just a boring rehash of the original, not enjoying really anything new it had to offer. Which was very little. Much like the Ghostbusters Afterlife movie, it wasn’t there to give you something new, but for you to point at and say I remember that, that’s a thing I know!
The second one Fallen Kingdom was it? I remember enjoying maybe the first half of the film, then they killed off all the dinosaurs on the island and set everything in an underground laboratory. What fun.
And that’s when the flood of idiocy started pouring in.
Now we are on the third one and the plot is so idiotic that I had a hard time trying to not only keep up but stay awake during it.
There’s actually two movies going on at the same time in this bloated nonclinical gobbledygook. One of those plots, which I’m calling plot B, involves giant grasshoppers. That’s right, goddamn giant grasshoppers like it’s Night of the Lepus or something.
The other plot, which I’m calling plot A, has nothing to do with plot B. It involves trying to find the clone girl who released the dinos in the last film. She’s been kidnapped and now Owen has to track her down.
Eventually the two plots come crashing together, but it felt like they cut together two different movies. One that featured our returning cast and another featuring our older Jurassic Park characters that we’d much rather be seeing anyway.
Our JP cast do have about the same equal shared screen time, a lot better than the cameo they gave Jeff Goldblum in the last film. But even here he disappears for a bit, returning only towards the end.
The main focus with the JP crew was mostly rectifying Sam Neill and Laura Dern’s characters not being together in Jurassic Park 3. That might have been the worst decision ever made in the franchise. Not only are they not together, but she’s married and has kids.
The whole time I was watching Dominion, I had this idea. Like how cool would it be if our old main characters came back as the antagonists. Like maybe the old crew wants to see the dinos euthanized, while the new crew wishes to rescue them. Having them clash with opposing ideals would have been interesting.
I’m sure I’ve seen that in a sequel before, where our heroes from before return as the villains. The only thing that comes to mind might be one of the Critters sequels.
There’s really only so much you can do with this scenario. Thing about Michael Crichton, he basically already did this plot with Westworld.
Jurassic Park had a fantastic premise, theme park around cloned dinosaurs that break free and run amok.
The issue is trying to expand on that, which is bound to get idiotic, which the Jurassic World films are. They tried copying the first film, but now spinning off to do their own thing it’s just flat out ridiculously dumb.
We don’t really have to wait very long to get into the stupidity as we open with Owen, our bland Chris Pratt character as he plays cowboy, wrangling him up a dino like it’s a horse.
And it also starts off the count of him doing the stupid holding out his hand thing to control the dinosaur.
He must do it like 50 times in this movie, as no one has any guns or is willing to shoot the dinos. Which begs the question, are dinosaurs in the public really that dangerous?
In a park, where they aren’t expecting it maybe they are. Which kind of opens up a can of new worms as why weren’t they expecting the worst to happen, when not only has it happened before but has happened three times previously.
At one point this pointless new character and Bryce Dallas Howard’s character are fleeing raptors in a jeep. What exactly is the danger here?
They’re in a metal car, what danger do these raptors pose? They might scuff up the paint job when you run them over?
The whole “now dinos are released into the wild” is kind of dumb anyway. We have tanks and guns, drones that drop bombs, this issue would not be an issue for very long.
Which might be why they didn’t do much with the plot of having them released into the wild like that last film setup.
Instead we get giant grasshoppers.
I guess I’ll try to go in order the film tries to tell it, so first plot A.
Plot A has our new cast, with Owen taking care of clone girl Maisie Lockwood. It has been four years since she released all the dinos for no real reason.
And speaking of no real reason, Blue, the raptor Owen trained is also living in the woods next to them. But they seem kind of oblivious to it. I thought maybe Owen knew, since he clearly hears them doing that tooting sound they make.
But nope, they just happen to be living in an old van down by the river. “They” meaning Blue now has a baby raptor.
Clair, our other boring leading character and Owen’s love interest, who has about as much chemistry as Laura Dern’s character did with her off screen husband we never met.
The black market has been ripe with selling off captured dinosaurs, Clair acting as an animal rights activist, trying to rescue them from what seems like puppy mills.
Clone girl is also sought after, why I don’t really remember. But she has a price on her head, as does Blue’s raptor baby.
So poachers track her down after a fit of teenage rebellion, as she leaves the cabin and heads into town. If you didn’t think this character was unlikable enough, she isn’t actually kidnapped, she agrees to willingly go with these poachers.
That’s basically the setup for plot A. Owen and Clair now have to track clone girl down and rescue her. Oh also Owen makes a promise to a raptor that he’ll get her baby back too. So fucking dumb. Remember when raptors were menacing, now I guess they work better as plushies. Gotta sell them toys!
I guess I should move on to plot B, the one featuring the riveting plot line of giant grasshoppers.
An evil company named Biosyn, yes, the evil company is called Biosyn is behind the giant locus. They don’t really take any time trying to figure this out. It’s immediately discovered since for some strange reason, the grasshoppers aren’t eating the Biosyn crops farmers own.
Their whole plan to use these grasshoppers to I guess destroy the world’s crops, so only their seed can be used is so damn stupid.
Considering also that they seem to be mainly focused on medical discovery thanks to the clone dinosaurs they’ve put in their own form of Jurassic Park. See, they’re giving us the same shit again, but they’re packaging it in stupid bullshit to get us there.
Laura Dern’s character Ellie Sattler returns as she is called in to investigate the giant grasshoppers that attacked a farm.
She then goes to her old friend Alan Grant for help, as she needs to get into Biosyn to steal a sample of one of the grasshoppers. It so happens that Ian Malcolm is teaching a class at Biosyn… or is he hocking his new book, I can’t remember. It just seems weird that he’d be teaching a class at a genetics company.
It would be like if George R.R. Martin started teaching a college course at Apple. Which I think maybe this company is meant to be like or at least the head of the company is as he was basically Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple or Tim Apple if you’re Trump.
Ian is undercover, trying to find out what Biosyn is working on, slipping Sattler the key to the secret lab area of the facility.
Back to plot A, Owen and Clair go to some black market in hopes to find Blue’s baby. I guess the thinking is if they find the raptor baby, they’ll also find clone girl since they were taken together.
Here is where Clair meets this lesbian poacher or pilot maybe… she’s so pointless I don’t remember not only why she’s in this but what happens to her character. I guess the reason she’s in this is because she can fly them to the destination clone girl is being held.
Why she’s actually helping them also slips my mind. Maybe she’s just into Clair, I don’t know. I also forget why they crash land… Oh that’s right, a giant bird attacks the plane.
One thing I did like was once they get into the new Jurassic Park substitute, they did introduce some new dinosaurs we haven’t seen before. And they weren’t made up dinosaurs like the last two Jurassic World movies.
Though the one with hotdog fingers did look kind of made up. It reminded me of the people from the alternate dimension from Everything Everywhere All at Once where people had hotdogs for fingers.
The other dinosaur they introduced was the allosaurus, something I’ve been complaining about for years for them to have as it’s basically a bigger meaner version of the T-Rex.
And has always been my favorite dinosaur since a kid.
We also get a return of the feathered raptor, which I think they introduced in JP3. After looking it up, there are several types of raptors. JP basically made up their own raptor as velociraptors are pretty tiny. They did later discover a much larger raptor but when making JP they had no idea of the discovery.
I guess now back to plot B.
Clone girl learns that she wasn’t some science experiment, but her weirdo mom just wanted a baby. And I guess the only way was to clone herself?
After learning her origin story, clone girl escapes the laboratory, running into both Sattler and Grant.
The three escape together and… this is when shit starts to get foggy for me as I was half a sleep during this last half.
I had people who managed to stay awake fill me in as to what happened, but giving you a play by play as to what happens would be hard.
So I kind of have to leave the review off here. No spoilers this time.
I did not enjoy this movie one bit. This is the very definition of needing to turn your brain off to enjoy it. Everything just kind of bored me, the action sequences bored me, the characters bored me, the plots to the two separate movies bored me…
Out of the three JW movies, I’d say this is the worst one. At least Fallen Kingdom had the first half of the movie going for it, this doesn’t have anything other than the old cast returning. But they put them in such a boring stupid plot line I couldn’t care less what happened in it.
But out of the franchise as a whole, including the JP sequels I still say maybe JP2 is kind of the worst.
Hopefully this is the end of the Jurassic Park movies, they’ve officially run it into the ground. Only thing left is to set it in space. Which might actually be less stupid than what we already have.
Jurassic World Dominion gets rating of SKIP IT.
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