Just like how the ‘Park’ trilogy fizzled out to extinction after the exhilarating first instalment – the ‘World’ trilogy has done exactly the same.
The law of diminishing returns indeed.
Granted, the first film in this trilogy, 2015’s Jurassic World, wasn’t the classic that the Steven Spielberg-directed 1993 Jurassic Park was – but it was straight-to-the-point high-octane fun that didn’t outstay its welcome. It did what it said on the licensed tin.
Then Fallen Kingdom was The Lost World of the series, and well, Dominion is the Jurassic Park III – just more epically bloated and twice as long.
Even shoe-horning in the three main stars from the iconic original – doctors Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) – didn’t really bring much to the table. Apart from a touch of nostalgia and a kinda ‘sweet’ full circle story arc.
The good? Lots of big dinosaurs. A few thrilling set-pieces. Campbell Scott’s understated villainous CEO Lewis Dodgson, and DeWanda Wise’s mercenary air force pilot Kayla Watts.
The bad? Too many big dinosaurs. Not enough thrilling set pieces. Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady, Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing and the rest of the cast just going through the motions with quite a drab storyline.
When cloned teenager Maisie Lockwood (the returning Isabella Sermon from Fallen Kingdom) – being secretly sheltered in a remote cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains by Owen and Claire – gets kidnapped, along with velociraptor Blue’s new baby, Beta, they go to try and rescue them.
And with the world’s eco-system changed, with uncaptured dinosaurs living – and hunting – among us, a massive ‘red flag’ emerges when hordes of giant formerly extinct ‘prehistoric’ locusts re-appear, threatening the world’s food supply.
Ellie links this back to Biosyn Genetics, and everything implicates the aforementioned Scott – and eventually it all comes to a head in the confines of his Italian Dolomites mountain range sanctuary headquarters.
Which just happens to house nearly every conceivable dinosaur imaginable, including the
T-Rex, and biggest ever prehistoric predator, the Gigantosaurus. Quite predictably you can work out what comes next.
But while this may sound like Jurassic heaven to some, sadly bigger isn’t necessarily better, with a lot going on. There’s almost too much going. And the first half is pretty darn boring with the yawn-fest ‘locust’ set-up.
There are undoubtedly ‘pockets’ of entertainment – cue Maltese plane escape set-piece with velociraptors chasing Owen on a motorcycle as one – but it just feels a pretty unsatisfactory way to close out the trilogy of such a major franchise.
And quite frankly – for the most part – it ends up being an underwhelming Jurassic mess.
ESP Rating: 2.5/5
Gavin Miller
Showcase Cinema De Lux Peterborough, Out Now
Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Campbell Scott, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Dewanda Wise, Isabella Sermon, Mamoudou Athie, Omar Sy, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda & Bd Wong
Running Time: 2 Hrs 26 Mins
Director: Colin Trevorrow
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