147 min | PG-13 | June 10, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Dinosaurs roam the open world for the first time. The original trio reunites to stop a biotech firm harvesting prehistoric DNA. The dinosaurs end up the least interesting thing in their own movie.
Jurassic World Dominion opens with dinosaurs living among humans across the planet. Owen Grady and Claire Dearing hide a cloned girl in a remote cabin while a biotech firm called Biosyn engineers genetically modified locusts that threaten the global food supply. The film promises a world overrun by dinosaurs and then spends most of its energy on a corporate espionage plot about giant bugs. It treats the most provocative premise in the franchise as a backdrop. The result is a capper that forgets what people came to see.
Chris Pratt plays Owen Grady as a stoic cipher who raises his palm at raptors and waits for the script to need him. Bryce Dallas Howard gives Claire Dearing more conviction than the material earns. The legacy cast does the real lifting. Sam Neill plays Alan Grant with weary warmth and Laura Dern plays Ellie Sattler with the curiosity that made her the heart of the original. Jeff Goldblum reprises Ian Malcolm as a string of quips with no scene to anchor them. DeWanda Wise brings genuine charge to the pilot Kayla Watts, and the film keeps cutting away from her to duller people.
Colin Trevorrow directs from a script he wrote with Emily Carmichael. The movie runs two parallel storylines and crosscuts between them until both lose momentum. The action borrows without shame. A motorcycle chase through Malta apes the Bourne films and a rooftop raptor pursuit copies the velociraptor beats Spielberg perfected three decades ago. The dinosaurs register as background texture rather than threats, and the editing buries them in quick cuts that drain the menace from creatures that should command the frame.
Dominion carries two casts, two plots, and no reason to exist beyond closing the ledger. It reunites Neill, Dern, and Goldblum and then strands them in a story about insect agriculture. The idea of dinosaurs loose in the modern world is the strongest the franchise has had since the first film. This movie raises that idea in its opening minutes and then abandons it for a generic thriller about a tech company. The series ends not with extinction but with exhaustion.