"Jurassic World: Dominion" takes a while to take off but still delivers thrills and terror

Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

There is only one untouchably great “Jurassic Park” movie. We can all acknowledge that, but every installment in the franchise is, at the very least, quite fun to watch. Director Colin Trevorrow did find a way (hehe) to rebrand the series with his gangbusters 2015 reboot “Jurassic World.” After 2018's wonky but thrilling, J.A. Bayona-directed “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” left the island and made a gothic haunted-house horror movie with dinosaurs instead of ghosts, Trevorrow returns for this sixth saga, imagining a world where humans coexist with dinosaurs out of captivity. As the “conclusion of the Jurassic Era,” “Jurassic World: Dominion” is another 2022 legacy sequel marrying the new with the old, but one that alternately wants to give the people what they want and wants to do too much. It never reaches a fan’s Tyrannosaurus-high expectations, nor does it fully deliver on the concept auspiciously promised by its immediate predecessor, but there's enough pleasure (and purpose) in seeing the return of our original trio, as well as several distinct, exciting set-pieces, to earn a solid summer-kickoff recommendation. 

Four years after the destruction of Isla Nublar, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) still have their “thing.” When he isn’t herding dinosaurs and she isn’t rescuing them from containment camps, they’re living off the grid in the Sierra Nevada mountains and protecting the cloned Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), now 14 years old, as if she were their own. When Maisie and the baby of velociraptor Blue are abducted by poachers, Owen and Claire make it their mission to find them somewhere in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains. Meanwhile, paleobotanist and activist Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is investigating a plague of mutant locusts destroying farm crops in West Texas that could be connected to genetics corporation BioSyn and decimating the world’s food supply. She wants to stop BioSyn, but she needs a witness. Enter old flame Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), whom she picks up at a Utah dig, and off they go to meet up with Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who’s teaching at the BioSyn Valley sanctuary run by CEO Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) — yes, we’ve got Dodgson here (and even another Barbasol can). As the paths of two witnessing generations of prehistoric life connect, dinosaurs and evil BioSyn will find a way to interrupt our heroes' goals.

The screenplay by director Colin Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael is an uneven one. How it merges characters from both the "Jurassic Park" and "Jurassic World" movies is contrived, sure, but a bigger misstep is backloading the dinosaurs and initially treating them as afterthoughts. It does admittedly feel like a missed opportunity to not have the dinosaurs (not just their DNA) factoring more into the plot proper about an ecological collapse. Giant locusts, however, do, and those buggers do at least get a startling swarm attack in one of the film’s more Spielbergian sequences involving two terrorized children on a farm. Why narrow the scope of this story when the evolution of these movies seemed to be headed for expansion like, you know, the whole coexistence between humans and dinosaurs?

For all the derision 2001's “Jurassic Park III” receives, it’s a fun, to-the-point ride (the silly Talking Dream Raptor and all). “Jurassic World: Dominion” does not follow that same approach, at least not at first. The opening 45 minutes are spent haphazardly setting everything up, trotting the globe, reintroducing the newer characters and old friends, and coming up with reasons to get them all in the same place. It’s clunky and a bit laborious in cramming in so many tangents and getting us to care (there's even more with Maisie and her backstory). But once Owen and Claire get to Malta (particularly a Mob Eisley Cantina of dino-fighting, selling, and roasting), the film starts taking off and the dinosaurs are literally unleashed. A parallel chase, cutting between Claire on a rooftop to a truck and Owen on a motorcycle being hunted by Atrociraptors, is a thrilling blast that mashes up “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the “Bourne” movies (including that window jump from “Ultimatum”). Other memorable set-pieces include a frightful cavernous-mine escape, a hairy encounter on a frozen-surfaced crash site, and anything involving Claire in peril.

Chris Pratt is fine as Owen, but he’s not really the star here anymore. Arguably, Bryce Dallas Howard runs away with the clearer arc as Claire (and we are done talking about her practical footwear, thank you). Howard does continue to bring her innate warmth and pluckiness to Claire, having to go through quite the wringer from a plane ejection to holding her breath in a swamp to coming face to face with a certain poison-spitting species from the original park. Bringing some understated quirks but no more than two dimensions, Campbell Scott plays Dodgson as a craven, socially awkward Steve Jobs type. New additions include a quietly layered Mamoudou Athie (Netflix’s “Archive 81”) as Dodgson’s assistant Ramsay and a badass, magnetic DeWanda Wise (2021’s “Fatherhood”), who pops with energy and swagger as Owen and Claire’s black ops pilot-for-hire Kayla. 

Getting the 1993 gang back together is easily one of this film’s biggest draws, only to underscore how much these movies needed all three of them again. Laura Dern (first seen in a familiar shirt tied in a knot over a blue tank top), Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum all slide back into their respective roles with ease. Dern and Neill reaffirm their chemistry as Ellie and Alan without any forced “we still got it” winks, and Goldblum gets some choice Ian Malcolm lines and moments (just don’t expect him to unbutton his black shirt this time). They're either even better actors than we thought, or Dern, Neill, and Goldblum truly seem to be enjoying being back in each other's company.

Individually, the action and suspense set-pieces are terrifically devised, and when “Jurassic World: Dominion” sticks to the dino spectacle and the terror, it really cooks. Trevorrow’s handling of the grand finale is a little less cleanly shot and well-lighted this time around, to the point that the live-action actors don’t even seem to be in the same space as the roaring, stomping kings. Nothing will ever match the pinch-me awe of the first time we saw a Tyrannosaurus rex breaking out of its paddock, but the dinosaurs themselves do, however, continue to be a near-seamless melding of practical animatronics and computer-generated effects. On the whole, if you require complete narrative cohesion in your dinosaurs-rule-the-world blockbuster, maybe “Jurassic World: Dominion” won’t be your bucket of popcorn with extra butter. But even if this is an overstuffed and lesser “Jurassic” movie, it’s still a “Jurassic” movie.

Grade: B -

Universal Pictures is releasing “Jurassic World: Dominion” (147 min.) in theaters on June 10, 2022.