OUR REVIEW:
Can you believe it has been almost 30 years since the first Jurassic Park film came out (way back in 1993)? Does it seem like way too many films have been in our purview for way too many decades (often longer than many moviegoers have even been alive)? Do you ever feel like YOU are becoming a curmudgeonly old dinosaur yourself? (Okay, maybe it’s just me.)
The sixth film in the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World Dominion, hits theaters this weekend. It’s the third movie in the second trilogy after Jurassic World (2015) and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) respectively, and if you feel like you’ve seen all this before you are mostly correct.
Oh sure, the dinosaurs are awesome and the special effects are amazing, but we’ve gotten used to that, maybe so comfortable that we take it for granted. The action sequences are fun and this one has the best dinosaur/motorcycle/truck/plane chase-sequence ever. (It’s worth the price of admission.)
But, as always, meshed in with all the cool dino-stuff is eight-tons of sleep-inducing pseudoscience. And this film also brings back the geniuses from the first movie, Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), all of whom add heaping helpings of sugary nostalgia along with their scientific musings. Just hit me with a full-powered taser-prod.
In an amber-encased nutshell, the story here has dinosaurs living in the civilized, human world in all of the weird ways you might imagine, and especially in illegal ways that unsavory bipeds can make money off of them.
When mutant grasshoppers are unleashed and threaten to destroy the world’s food supply, our heroes, including Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and mercenary pilot Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), risk life and limb to disrupt the evil plan and save their adopted, human-clone daughter (Isabella Sermon) and their pet raptor’s baby… (yeah, it’s complicated.)
Colin Trevorrow once again directed and co-wrote this film and claims this is his last outing with the franchise. He’s a talented filmmaker and it will be good to see him move on, maybe back to something a little smaller like his delightful film, Safety Not Guaranteed.
Jurassic World Dominion is worth seeing, and especially if you are a fan of the series. But I’m good with seeing these dinos on ice for a while. Maybe I’m a little chaos weary. At this point they’ve got nowhere else to go. (Maybe they could fight Machete in space!)
