Vera's View: Jurassic World - Dominion (Film Review)

Our new film critic Vera Wang is taking on the latest and most buzzed-about movie titles to hit the big and small screens. Check out her take on Jurassic World - Dominion.

Come one, come all. Let us see what the Great Hollywood Remake Machine has excreted this time. Today we find ourselves graced by the presence of Jurassic World Dominion, the new sci-fi-action blockbuster helmed by writer-director Colin Trevorrow, revolutionary writer of cinematic events Jurassic World and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. 


The third and final installment into the Jurassic World trilogy, Jurassic World Dominion follows Chris Pratt as Generic American Action Hero man and Bryce Dallas-Howard as Scared/Screaming Woman 1, who are suddenly forced from their life of solitude when their foster daughter and resident plot device, Maisie, is kidnapped. We join our plucky pair of heroes as they travel the vast, sprawling vistas of Green Screen One, Green Screen Two, and Green Screen Three to rescue Maisie, save the dinosaurs, and waste the audience’s time and money. 


The movie also features Jurassic Park mainstays Sam Neill as Alan Grant, who totters around on-screen haphazardly and commits to the occasional line, Laura Dern as Ellie Sattler, whose performance phases between being mildly optimistic to downright amnesiac, like she’s not fully sure if she’s hallucinating the whole production, and Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcolm, who tries his best to inject some form of personality into the script; but it’s like giving CPR to a corpse, and he only emerges worse from it.  
 
If you were fortunate enough to escape the sanity-sucking abysses Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, here’s a quick summary: Twenty-two years after Jurassic Park, humans are still greedy, corrupt, and stupid. A shiny new dinosaur park, Jurassic World, has been erected on the Isla Nublar, where its resident scientists have spliced together hybrid dinosaurs Indominus Rex (Jurassic World) and Indorapter (Jurassic World Dominion), both of which (shock horror!) overcome their captors through a betrayal in the command chain and begin terrorizing humans on the island. The writers clearly had authenticity on the brain. It’s now up to our motley crew of protagonists (of which there are far too many) to subdue Dino of the Week, and apprehend Big Bad Corporate Man.  
 
Nestled in this simple premise are subplots riddled with logical inconsistencies and overall poor writing, though other technical flaws like sloppy editing, unconvincing CGI, and atrocious integrations of the green screen must not be understated either. Almost all shots with a visible background (yes, including shots filmed in view of city buildings) looked fake, so much so that I thought I’d been transported into a screening for one of those spoof-movie car commercials. Don’t worry guys, any moment now, a scaly green Fiat with horn attachments is going to come bursting into view, and our beloved characters, Oden, Blaire, and Sam Neill will stare directly into the camera and say, “Coming to a dealer near you- dinosaurs not included.” The actors, so horribly incorporated into the scenery, looked like jpegs being dragged across the screen. Chief of all writing issues, however, is the convoluted plot. Giant locusts, a MacGuffin magical clone girl, an international espionage mission, a mega evil company hell-bent on world domination, biomedical conspiracy heist plans, the rekindling of a three-decade-old romance, identity crises- no, I’m not describing the plot of an offshore Spanish telenovela.
 
All these plot points are executed with the finesse of a two-year-old con artist- too much happening, too poor, and too fast, none of which is helped by the lead actors, who phone in a performance they shouldn’t have accepted, to cash a check they didn’t need.  

Where this leads us is back to the morals of the first Jurassic Park movie, in which Dr Malcolm asserts that the creators of the dinosaurs “were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to see if they should.” Such is the attitude of the writers who engineered the Jurassic World trilogy. Untalented, unfocused, and fraudulent, Jurassic World Dominion continues the legacy of its two predecessors as the cursed lovechild of two lazy writers, and bastard child of a film never meant to be remade. 

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