JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION

Stars: Chris Pratt, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Bryce Dallas Howard, Isabella Sermon, Jeff Goldblum, Campbell Scott, DeWanda Wise, Mamoudou Athie, Omar Sy, BD Wong, Dichen Lachman and Justice Jesse Smith.
Writers: Colin Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael; from a story by Derek Connelly and Colin Trevorrow; based on characters created by Michael Crichton.
Director: Colin Trevorrow

Rating: ★ ½

Aside from a fleeting diversion to the Bering Sea, where a deep sea monster balances out the oceanic life ledger by sinking a fishing trawler, the sixth Jurassic franchise film opens in a faux 4:3 ratio. This allows for a montage of evening news clips and CNN types talking about how hard it’s become to live with dinosaurs since they integrated themselves into human society, a promise of things to come that we glimpsed at the end of 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (who names these films??). 

The audience, rightfully expecting an opening that sets hearts pounding from frame 1 (like what Steven Spielberg did with some ferns and a bunch of guys in hi-vis helmets, back in ‘93), is instead napalmed with information concerning the industrialization of genetic science and the government agency controlling the increasingly dangerous problem and blah, blah, blah. It is a clumsy, crappy opening to a summer blockbuster, but it sure sets the tone for the 150 minutes to follow.

Director Colin Trevorrow, once thought the man to forge a new path for all things JP, then segues his already convoluted narrative into, of all things, a big bug movie; genetically mutated locusts, as large and disgusting as house cats, are destroying crops all across America, except those planted by ‘Big Farmer’ conglom BioSyn, a Monsanto-like corporation with designs on global food sector domination. It’s an early bit of stupid plotting (how long before investigators establish that link?), but is by no means the most egregious, indicating Trevorrow and co-writer Emily Carmichael are happy to jettison logic in favour of maintaining momentum.

The problem that faces the writing pair, however, is the number of characters they are going to have to juggle to keep us invested in if they want to see out the film’s hook - uniting the key cast members from both iterations of the Jurassic film eras in a trilogy-encapsulating final chapter. Paleobotanist Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) is called upon to bust open the bug conspiracy, providing an entry point for OG everyman hero Alan Grant (Sam Neill). Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) has let his ethical firewall slide in the intervening years; he’s now consulting for CEO Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott, a fitting physical appropriation for the original “Dodgson!”, Cameron Thor), allowing Ellie and Alan passage into the villainous hi-tech BioSyn lair.

Of the Jurassic World ensemble, we are reunited with dino-whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt, bringing his patented ‘ironic blandness’ in spades) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), now guardians for mopey teen DNA fleshpod, Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon). They live in the woods, sharing the wilderness, often uncomfortably with raptor heroine ‘Blue,’ who has ‘found a way’ to have a calf, called ‘Beta’. When kidnappers take Beta (for her black market value) and Maisie (for her bridging DNA strands), Owen and Claire enlist the aid of JW#1 callback Barry Sembene (Omar Sy), now a French undercover agent, to get them access to Malta's thriving, illegal underground dinosaur marketplace.

Is anyone still reading this? Because it’s exhausting to recall and boring to write, and I still haven’t got to DeWanda Wise’s tough-talking mercenary pilot Kayla Watts; Mamoudou Athie’s naive corporate shill, Ramsay Cole; Dichen Lachman’s cold-hearted black marketeer Soyona Santos, whose chilly, OTT glamour seems more suited to Bond villainy; or an insufferably mopey B.D. Wong, returning to the fold as original JP geneticist, Dr Henry Wu. Worse still, the script allows each support player feeble and time-consuming character arcs and earnest dialogue; at one point, I turned to my equally-dejected movie mate and said, “I wish everyone in this film would just shut up!” 

It is at this juncture that you have every right to ask, “Uh, we are going to have some dinosaurs…in your…in your dinosaur movie review? Hello?”, given that it was exactly the question I whispered to myself as the mighty beasts of prehistory found themselves being shunted into the background of their own film series. New species turn up, including an impressive beast called Giganotosaurus (“The biggest carnivore that ever lived,” says Dr Grant, in one of many ‘Golly Gee!’ dog-whistle moments for the franchise-primed target audience), but Trevorrow mostly just drops them into the path of our heroes, who dodge them with scant regard for their status as ‘alpha predators’. 

This seemingly endless parade of hoops through which to jump is a built-in reference to the plot machinations of the series that demands our heroes travel from point A to point B, dino-dodging the whole time. But even in the much-maligned Jurassic Park III (finally casting off its ‘Worst of the Franchise’ tag), the protagonist’s trek held some degree of menace, some ‘imminent threat’ element that provided an often very basic but undeniable tension and sense of adventure. That never manifests in Jurassic World: Dominion, a bloated 2½ hour plod that is unforgivably dull and irreconcilably misjudged.