Film review: Jurassic World Dominion isn’t so much a movie as a theme park ride
Sam Neill, Chris Pratt, and Isabella Sermon in Jurassic World Dominion (2022)
★★★☆☆
To produce a mighty book, Herman Melville once wrote, you must choose a mighty theme. Ecological disaster and the extinction of the human race provide the theme of Jurassic World Dominion (12A), but where Melville had to make do with a single great white whale, director Colin Trevorrow gets to play with all manner of mighty monsters: the T-Rex, the Allosaurus and the Giganotosaurus, to mention but a few.
The movie opens with dinosaurs and humans co-existing in a fragile food chain: Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Owen (Chris Pratt) are activists determined to protect dinosaurs against human predators, while Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), CEO of the Biosyn corporation, is harvesting dinosaur DNA to establish a New World Order. Key to his plan is young Maisie (Isabella Sermon), the daughter of Charlotte Lockwood and currently Claire and Owen’s ward, whose ‘perfect’ DNA he covets.
Meanwhile, Ellie (Laura Dern) and Alan (Sam Neill), veterans of the original Jurassic Park movies, team up with Ian (Jeff Goldblum) at Biosyn’s dinosaur sanctuary in the Dolomites, the better to foil Dodgson’s nefarious scheme ...
What follows isn’t so much a movie as a theme park ride, with our heroes stumbling from one dino-peril to another for the best part of two-and-a-half hours. That’s good news if, like yours truly, you’re a fan of prehistoric creatures wreaking havoc, but less so if you prefer your films to have cohesive plots and well-rounded characters.
The visuals are as spectacular as ever, but Jurassic World: Dominion is a film trapped in the amber of its own mythology.
(cinema release)
