It’s strange for a series of movies about dinosaurs to insist, again and again, that people are easily bored by dinosaurs. Yet that’s been a steady drumbeat in the Jurassic Worlds since the 2015 installment, which restaged the T. rex goat-eating scene from the original Jurassic Park — one of the most incredible reveals since the one in Jaws — from the perspective of a blasé teen who turns away to take a call. By the second film, Fallen Kingdom, the Indominus rex, a hybrid created to appease a public hungry for new spectacle, had been iterated into an indoraptor, made in hopes of attracting a new, less fickle market: the military. In Jurassic World Dominion, the new fourth feature in this sequel series, people have gotten so inured to dinos that an escaped sauropod dying by the side of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway mostly generates annoyance at the traffic its causing. The irony is that despite these movies sucking varying degrees of ass, especially the third with its pointless detour into genetically engineered locust plagues, they’ve all reliably grossed over a billion dollars — a testament to the real world’s continued interest in prehistoric menace.
There’s a resentment that runs through these movies, fueled not by a lack of audience attention but by the obligation to keep coming up with new reasons for humans to end up in the proximity of dinosaurs. Creative exhaustion wafts like gasoline fumes off Jurassic World Dominion, which was directed by Gareth Edwards and written by David Koepp. When pharma ghoul Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) approaches mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) about making an illegal trip to dino territory, the proposal is hilariously engineered around the need for set pieces. In order to make drugs that will dramatically decrease coronary disease, Krebs needs blood samples from the biggest land, air, and sea dinosaurs out there: the titanosaur (making its Jurassic series debut), the quetzalcoatlus, and our old buddy the mosasaur. They have the biggest hearts or something? What matters is that Zora and her team — including boat captain and fellow gun for hire Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), Krebs, paleontologist Martin Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and a few others who are clearly marked for death have to get within ten meters of these giant guys to shoot them with a blood-sampling cartridge.
Half of Dominion is dedicated to this unconvincing fetch quest, which does yield a satisfying oceanic tangle with the mosasaur and its newly acquired entourage before heading to an abandoned research island where regular dinos coexist with mutant ones. The other half is dedicated to the Delgado family — patriarch Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), precocious Isabella (Audrina Miranda), teenager Teresa (Luna Blaise), and her boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) — who end up shipwrecked after a dino encounter. The Delgados are filler, there to fulfill the key Jurassic requirement of placing grating children in peril. And the way the film leaps between the two groups as they each make their way across the island drains all momentum from a journey whose aims were already questionable. No one looks to the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies for their in-depth characterization, but the people in Dominion are barely sketches. Zora’s friend died on her last job, a trauma she’s still stuck on and sheds some tears over, but when other team members start getting eaten, she barely blinks (Johansson has such extreme for-the-paycheck energy in the role that her character’s salary negotiations feel like they might as well have been her own). Martin studied under and is basically a Temu Alan Grant, while the unctuous Friend oozes with corporate evil. But the Delgados are somehow worse in their desultory family dramas, with the useless Xavier trying to prove himself to Reuben, and Isabella adopting a baby aquilops, a series of sitcom story lines dropped into the jungle.
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Edwards, a digital effects pro turned filmmaker, went from his low-budget breakout Monsters to Godzilla to Rogue One. Uniting his work is an inability to pretend that he cares all that much about people. (The exception is The Creator, his surprisingly great last film, which deployed tropes to much better effect.) The Jurassic Worlds often give us permission to do the same, hooking us not with the tension of whether its characters will survive a scene but with the hope that they won’t. Still, Dominion, despite referencing and revising beats from the Spielberg original, including a chase that echoes the velociraptor kitchen scene and a remix of the first T. rex attack, never generates energy with its dino encounters. Even its own big bad, the Distortus rex, a massive mutant dino with a set of extra limbs and a bulbous forehead more suited to an extraterrestrial, is underwhelming. The D. rex is introduced in a flashback opening scene and then saved for the final act, but as it looms out of the dark, wreathed in smoke and red light, it just looks like something we’ve seen before. It’s not a novel creation, just a xenomorph crossed with the Godzilla from Evans’s own 2014 monster movie. Audiences may not have run out of enthusiasm for what the Jurassic Worlds are selling, or at least they haven’t yet, but the people tasked with making them sure are out of ideas. Dominion, as though fulfilling its franchise’s own prophecy, really does manage to be boring.
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