It has been four years since the release of the last Jurassic World movie, and if I am being honest, I did not even watch that one. Growing up, I enjoyed the Jurassic Park movies, even though they came out a little before my time, but the premise holds up. Kids and adults will always love dinosaurs! So it makes sense that these movies would be big draws to the box office. The problem comes from creating new stories around this world. Going into this movie, I had heard that the reviews were just okay, and then when I looked at the run time, I knew I was in trouble.
Jurassic World Dominion has a lot going on. The main through line seems to be that there is a corrupt company based in Italy. They have been collecting dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures that came from the Jurassic World Park that had escaped and made it to the wider world. The company used this cover to create a new breed of locusts, and the locusts have been decimating country sides, and thus ruining the food supply chain. If this continues, there is a huge threat of a worldwide famine and collapse of modern society. So two of the classic Jurassic Park characters, Elle Sattler and Owen Grant, join together to put the corrupt company in their place.
The other story line comes from the new Jurassic World characters. They have a daughter that is a clone from a previous Jurassic World scientist. They need to protect her from the dangerous scientist that want to experiment on her and get her DNA. Of course, she ends up getting captured, and now her parents, Owen and Claire, are on a rescue mission. The people that abducted her are the same ones who unleashed the locusts plague, so the two-story lines converge as their goals slowly start to meld together.
But the most important storyline to the movie is that there are two dinosaurs, the T-Rex and Gigantosaurus, that want to be on the top of the food chain. They must face off against each other and see who the real dominant predator is. This conflict gets pushed off once, but at the end of the movie, this conflict comes to a head once the dinosaurs have all been corralled into the same enclosure to save them from a massive locust fire. Lets be real, who cares about the corrupt company, just show me 100 minutes of dinosaurs fights and let me go home…
There is one main point that the movie is trying to get across, and that is that big business has a strong chance of being corrupt, and if left in the hands of the wrong leader, it could put the world in danger. At this point in the Jurassic universe, there are dinosaurs roaming around the mainland, and the people are having to coexist with them, which seems to be going better than I would have expected. There are of course numerous hiccups, but there is one problem, the one would not normally think of, when thinking about dinosaurs invading the Earth, and those are prehistoric locusts. Which are basically locusts the size of a big rodent, imagine tons of flying opossums going around and eating the crops of the world. So think about the damage all the small locusts can place upon farmland, and amplify that. The problem is that the bugs are not eating the bioengineered crops that one of the big corporations is putting out there. Coincidence? I think not!
So Elle and Alan go and investigate, and as it turns out, the company is corrupt, but the problem is getting out of their control, so now the company that was going to make itself billions is now going to cause the world to collapse, so what do they do? They do what all good humanitarian companies would do, they decide to burn the evidence and flee, and act like nothing happened. Thankfully like in most places, everyone is not all bad, and a scientist is able to help fix the problem before it is too late. It reminds me of Don’t Look Up when the asteroid is coming, and there are some good ideas out there on how to fix the problem, but instead they chose to use the drones from the company that gives the government a bunch of money, and they fail.
I like Chris Pratt, it is hard to beat his comedic performance in Parks and Rec., but as far as his movie performances go, they are fine but not amazing. His movies are big departures from his Parks and Rec performances. On that show, he was the goofy guy that seemed to fail upward, and at the time he was a little doughy. Now he is in superhero/dinosaur trainer mode, so he is in much better shape and not as funny. I did enjoy the performances of Laura Dern, Sam Neil, and Jeff Goldblum, the members from the original cast. Was it necessary to bring them back for this? No, but it seems like it has become the popular choice for these big franchises to bring back some of their main characters. It could just be for fan service, or maybe it is because they know they are out of ideas, and this could distract the viewers from the slop they are being served.
Growing up, I had a special relationship with to the third Jurassic Park, when I was a kid, I had the privilege of having a small TV in my room sometimes, and that small tv that had a screen about the size an iPad, but was as big as microwave, and it weighed probably close to 20 pounds, but under the screen, it had a slot for VHS tapes. One of my best friends would come over, and one time the movie he brought was Jurassic Park 3, which quickly became a favorite of mine, which probably is not hard to believe that an elementary age kid loves a movie about giant dinosaurs eating people. I also have a fond memory of the first Jurassic World. My freshman year in college, Berry decided to put on a movie night in their football stadium, so a whole bunch of people brought out their picnic blankets, and we watched Jurassic World under the stars. One great part about Berry is that is in ruralish Georgia, so light pollution is pretty minimal, so up in the sky, there was a faint trace of the Milky Way shining through, and that was one of the first times I had ever experienced that as well.
Overall, this movie was way too long, two and a half hours. I slowly started to spread myself out on my row of seats, because I could not stand to just sit in my chair the whole time. There was also a period of time where I was getting very close to falling asleep. Eventually some of the action kicked back in, and that helped me survive until the end of the movie. The acting was fine, and the girl who played the clone was probably the best part with her teenage rebelliousness, but the movie did not really have one good through line. It had a few different stories going on, and although they matched up in the end, it was just a lot to handle. It is always fun to see creatures on the screen like dinosaurs fighting it out, but they really took a back seat in this movie, as they tried to force their big business is bad story line. I feel like the best version of this movie would have been to focus on the dinosaurs that had been roaming around the mainland, and the issues they are causing, and maybe give it more monster movie scare vibes like the originals had. There was a good scene in this movie, where the crew is traveling through the mines, and they start to get surrounded by dinosaurs, that was a tense scene, one of the better ones in the movie. The best moral for this story should have been not to buy dinosaurs on the black market, but they ruined that. Also the CGI being bad in such a large tentpole movie like this was surprising, but with all that being said, the crowds did show up, and they did manage to dethrone Top Gun Maverick. I would suggest Top Gun over this film. I give it 2.5 Stars.
Other Movies This Week:
Hustle: Adam Sandler searches for elite NBA talent overseas, but the 76ers are not happy with the prospect he brings back, so he goes on a personal journey to make sure his prospect makes it.
The Poughkeepsie Tapes: A serial killer goes after prostitutes in Poughkeepsie in a faux documentary. At times creepy, and at other times, just a bad weird scary movie.
The Wolf of Snow Hollow: A small town in Utah has a problem on their hands, some murders have been occurring, and the signs point to a werewolf attack, but one incompetent cop believes otherwise, but he is facing his own monster, alcoholism.
New Rankings:
Jurassic World Dominon: 2.5 Stars
Hustle: 3 Stars
The Poughkeepsie Tapes: 2.5 Stars
The Wolf of Snow Hollow: 3 Stars
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