The recent line of Jurassic films have become something of a family tradition for me now. Since 2015 I’ve treated my mother to seeing them, and as we were exiting the theater for this third installment, we ran into someone who looked like they were in their mid 20’s and they were shocked to learn there were actually three rampaging dinosaur movies before the first Jurassic World. Chalk it up to great marketing or just me feeling incredibly old that day, but even though the World films were never as well received as the original 1992 entry and its followups, they’ve picked up a significant fanbase on their own merits mostly.
Still, that doesn’t mean that Dominion (not to be confused with the Tank Police anime or the New Japan Pro Wrestling event) is unwilling to throw out some nods to older fans. The rampaging dinos from Fallen Kingdom have led to the rise of a mysterious new company “BioSyn” which has developed a special habitat for them in Italy’s northeastern mountains, a proposal to keep them from running amok in human society.
Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Clare Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are doing their part to help in their dino protection organization, also raising in secret Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the daughter of John Hammond’s old partner. When both the child of Owen’s raptor pet Blue as well as Maisie are kidnapped by BioSyn’s henchmen for a mysterious purpose, Claire and Owen make their way to the Dolomites to rescue her.
This gets them also involved with the mission of a returning Ellie Sattler and Alan Grant (Laura Dern and Sam Neill), who are investigating a controversy involving a swarm of mutated football-size locusts gobbling their way through the countryside and BioSyn’s likely connections.
As Grant and Sattler’s man on the inside Jeff Goldblum is his usual quirky and amusing self as Ian Malcolm, working for bioSyn on the surface but in reality is working with another BioSyn scientist (Mamoudou Athie) to foil the scheme of Doc Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), who sees Maisie as the key to his plan.
I’m gonna be real, even though I do appreciate Owen’s character, sometimes I wish these Jurassic films would give Chriss Pratt a little more to chew on. Howard is allowed her moments, but I always felt Pratt’s writing throughout the trilogy was on the more generic side. Nothing too bad or offensive, but I felt he got more personality out of his brief Love & Thunder cameo. (You can make jokes about the upcoming Super Mario movie to your heart’s content, but screw you, I loved that 1993 Mario movie and I’m still holding out hold for this. Maybe Chris will surprise us.) Neill and Dern /do get some fun scenes to themselves as they try to steal some of the giant bug evidence. Isabella Sermon tries her best, but sadly much of the Maisie subplot feels pretty tacked-on, and one of those human elements in monster movies that will make the audience think “when are we going to get to the stomping and chomping?” Don’t worry, there’s plenty of that, with the series’ classic T-rex battling new genetically enhanced dinosaur breeds.
Upgrading Dr. Dodgson, a minor character in the 1992 entry but was a much bigger player in the Michael Crichton books, to the main event heel is an interesting choice and Campbell Scott is certainly slimy enough in the role. His writing unfortunately lacks a bit of color- I’m not asking him to ham it up or be a psycho, but I was hoping for a more charismatic antagonist. He’s nowhere as interesting with the smugglers, and Dichen Lachman has some nice presence as she sics trained velociraptors on our heroes. If nothing else, Owen’s chase scene with the raptors is genuinely thrilling, easily one of the strongest parts of the movie.
Let’s not lie to ourselves, the Jurassic movies have always had a strong element of campiness to them, but I feel these recent movies take that factor into overdrive. Though maybe I’m just forgiving because to me Dominion came off less muddled and dreary than Fallen Kingdom. At worst, this latest chapter in the series is a decent wild dino romp that I’d recommend watching on TBS or when it comes on TV. I don’t think it’s *awful*, in fact I think I liked this more than what many critics are implying. It’s just the epitome of an “airplane” movie. But what was your take on it? Let us know how you felt about it at FAN’s social media spots, as always.