Jurassic World: Dominion proves that the once-beloved franchise is ready for extinction

After three decades and six Jurassic Park movies, audiences have been treated to all kinds of adventures—good, bad, brisk, repetitive, you name it. Until Jurassic World: Dominion, I would never have expected one that’s utterly boring. Back in 2015, Jurassic World asked the question: What would happen if dinosaurs became so commonplace that they were no longer exciting? Dominion answers by making even the most unique dinosaur encounters so routine and uninspiring that even the people involved cannot muster the enthusiasm to be frightened.

Colin Trevorrow returns to the director’s chair for the finale of the Jurassic World trilogy, and he seems to have learned nothing—not from the failures and many glaring and legitimate criticisms of the first two, much less from the narrative arc that began with Jurassic Park. Consequently, long-abused fans of the franchise are treated to a meandering retread of the earlier installments’ greatest hits, along with a handful of Spielberg homages peppered in as a vivid reminder of exactly who Trevorrow isn’t as a filmmaker. Meanwhile, the casts of both trilogies unite here to rectify the same lessons about science-run-amuck and indefatigable corporate greed that kickstarted the series back in 1993.

After Fallen Kingdom ended on the same note as The Lost World did in 1997—with dinosaurs escaping to the mainland—Dominion begins with an update on their status: While world governments attempt to contain the beasts, altruistic CEO Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) secured the rights for his company, Biosyn, to capture and protect dinosaurs, and of course protect humanity from them. When swarms of overgrown locusts begin destroying America’s Breadbasket, Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) reaches out to Alan Grant (Sam Neill) to help obtain evidence that Biosyn is responsible for creating the voracious insects—and further, may be using prehistoric DNA for more nefarious purposes. They get their chance to find that evidence when Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), working as a thought leader for the company, invites the duo to tour Biosyn’s high-tech facility, which doubles as a sanctuary for the animals the company has recaptured.

In the meantime, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are living in the Pacific Northwest, raising teenager Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) in secret after she was identified as a clone of Charlotte Lockwood, the daughter of John Hammond’s late business partner Benjamin Lockwood. When poachers capture the offspring of Blue, the velociraptor that Owen successfully trained at Jurassic World, he vows to help recover the animal; but during his pursuit, Maisie is captured as well and taken to Biosyn’s facility. With the help of a roguish pilot named Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), Owen and Claire make their way to Biosyn, where they hope to save both Maisie and Blue’s baby, encountering dangerous opposition—human and dinosaur—along the way.

In other words, Dominion is the story of people going to an animal preserve—or, essentially, another park—and running into dinosaurs at every turn. This may seem familiar to viewers of previous Jurassic films. Determining how Trevorrow and co-writer Emily Carmichael missed one of the easiest lay-ups in modern blockbuster history is a mystery that may never be solved, but the fact that they did does not come as a surprise after two mostly awful predecessors. Literally all they needed to do was put dinosaurs in urban environments and then film what happened. The brief vignettes that actually do this are provocative and interesting, such as when a pack of brachiosaurs interrupt a lumber mill and the workers have to figure out how to lure them away without hurting them (or themselves). Instead, there’s a solid hour of plot about oversized locusts which inevitably leads back to the numbing two-pronged (re-)discovery that Corporations Are Evil, a fact that’s only confirmed after some of the dopiest acts of detective work by the most conspicuous individuals you have ever seen.

Trevorrow’s biggest and yet most baffling accomplishment with the film is to simultaneously express zero confidence in moviegoers’ ability to appreciate the awe-inspiring majesty or fearsomeness of dinosaurs, and then create zero suspense or excitement as he and Carmichael throw the kitchen sink into set piece after set piece. Rumor has it that Spielberg once wanted a Jurassic film to build to scenes involving dinosaurs strapped with rockets, running into battle; Trevorrow doesn’t choose this (quite frankly dumb) option, but there are birdlike dinosaurs that swim in water, velociraptors that can be directed by a laser pointer and, inevitably, an even bigger predator than ever before, this time the Giganotosaurus, which is even more powerful and menacing than the quaint old T-Rex that was so impressive back in 1993.

Trevorrow tries to recreate that T-Rex scene from Jurassic Park with the Giganotosaurus, more potential victims, and more imminent danger; but even when the beast’s jaws are literally chomping down around someone, there is not one second of fear or worry that any of these people in the credit block will meet a deadly fate. I never would have imagined that I’d tire of watching the most photo-realistic dinosaur face offs that money can buy, but the level of human thoughtlessness—on screen and behind the scenes—is so oppressive that the final super-predator showdown feels less like an obstacle to the characters’ escape than it does to the audience’s.

Pratt and Howard possess only slightly more personality on screen than Sermon as Maisie Lockwood, who’s less of a real character than a plot device that would be better served on, say, a television series about dinosaurs and genetic engineering instead of this movie series. Although their collective arc focuses on restoring their family—and in the process, Blue’s—you never particularly get the sense that they care much about one another, much less develop a reason to care about them. Dern, meanwhile, carries the same fire of thoughtful indignation that made Sattler so appealing and essential in the first film, while her character sparks heat with Neill’s that’s missing from Claire and Owen’s relationship.

As clumsily as Trevorrow and Carmichael execute the rekindling of Ellie and Alan’s understated romance from Jurassic Park, Neill embraces the notion of Alan Grant risking becoming a fossil himself, and the duo’s reflections on 30 years of choices—good and bad—unfold with a bittersweetness the rest of the movie doesn’t live up to. Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm, on the other hand, continues to embrace the actor’s late-stage edge-of-self-parody performances, playing his own hits by offering comical doomsday predictions that somehow always sound funny even when they’re heralding the worst possible outcomes.

DeWanda Wise gets good mileage out of her role as a conscience-struck soldier of fortune, but she, Mamoudou Athie, and BD Wong all occupy a lazy, not fully thought-out liminal space in the story working at odds with, and in service of, the established hero characters. Each of them gets a different, “Oh, they’re a good guy now?” moment that occurs so plainly that the audience can’t help but mistrust them all. Then again, it’s important to remember who made the film; the filmmakers’ capacity for misdirection is as meager as their other storytelling skills. Even so, the notion that Wong’s Dr. Wu could earn anyone’s trust at the end of three decades of genetic engineering debacles is laughable—and yet, it’s treated as a profound emotional moment.

And so, Jurassic World: Dominion (hopefully) concludes the Jurassic Park series with, ironically, the exact kind of plodding disaster that its human characters have been helpless to prevent. To reunite the core cast members of both trilogies, now presumably full of insights and wisdom (either or both as actors or characters), and then give the final, introspective voiceover to a character not a single audience member has ever seen except in “archival footage,” offers a final insult to moviegoers who have been decreasingly mesmerized by these films. There are four or five “so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” jokes to make here that would suffice as a perfect encapsulation not only of this film, but of the totality of the franchise, but suffice it to say you would be better served by going outside and using your imagination to explore dinosaur-themed ideas than watching how these people spent the hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal to use theirs.