By the time the third act of Jurassic World Dominion arrives; dragging its bloated carcass behind it like a dying Brachiosaurus; you may find yourself wondering not how the dinosaurs returned, but why you did. Colin Trevorrow’s latest and, one prays, final contribution to the Jurassic franchise feels less like a movie and more like a contractual obligation; one that everyone involved seems to have signed under duress, perhaps while being chased by a CGI raptor/stegosaurus hybrid. Somewhere, buried beneath 147 minutes of soulless spectacle and peanut butter and banana sandwich-sized mutant locusts, is a once-great idea: that dinosaurs and humans might co-exist on the same planet without either party immediately resorting to black-market auctions, corporate espionage, or Chris Pratt smirking at a lizard like it owes him money.
It didn’t have to be this way. Once upon a time, Spielberg gave us a world where dinosaurs were awe-inspiring, not overused as background noise for tech mogul satire. The original Jurassic Park made us believe in the possibility of cinematic magic. Dominion makes us believe in refunds. In this chapter of the saga; if “saga” still applies to a storyline that now reads like a Mad Libs written by an over-caffeinated Reddit thread; our heroes are… well, everyone. Everyone is back. Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum return like beloved professors dragged out of retirement to guest lecture in a class they’ve never heard of. They do their best, bless them, mouthing lines like “genetic power has now been unleashed” with the enthusiasm of someone trying to remember their Wi-Fi password.
Meanwhile, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard have gone full woodsy parental mode, hiding out in a log cabin with their adopted clone daughter (don’t ask) and Blue, the raptor with trust issues. When both child and baby raptor are kidnapped; as they inevitably are; Pratt and Howard set off on a globe-trotting rescue mission that feels like Taken, but with worse dialogue, more feathers, and less Liam Neeson. Let’s talk about those locusts. Not the metaphorical kind, though there are plenty of those too, devouring legacy franchises for profit. I mean actual, biotech-enhanced, hoagie-sized bugs. They’re apparently the real threat here, not the dinosaurs. Yes, the franchise famous for resurrecting Tyrannosaurs has pivoted to insects. It’s like if Shark Week suddenly switched to doodlebugs.
The villain; played with all the nuance of a malfunctioning Siri; is a Steve Jobs-by-way-of-Tim Cook tech mogul who wants to control the food supply. This would be more compelling if he weren’t constantly throwing tantrums and abusing office furniture. It’s hard to fear a man who clearly couldn’t survive a spirited board meeting. The script, co-written by Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael (of Pacific Rim: Uprising notoriety; a sentence that should be a red flag in any pitch meeting), attempts to sew together the new trilogy with the original, as if nostalgia were Gorilla Glue. Characters announce themes as if they were reading aloud from studio notes. At one point, someone literally says, “This is all so ridiculous.” This is what’s known in literary circles as unintentional honesty.
And then there’s the action: chase scenes edited with the rhythm of a seizure, characters teleporting across locations as if the laws of physics were a loose suggestion, and dinosaurs that, for all their high-res pixels, inspire less fear than the average TikTok algorithm. The animatronics occasionally remind you of what real creature effects can do, but most of the film looks like it was rendered on a laptop during a power outage. Jurassic World Dominion isn’t just bad; it’s boldly, defiantly bad. It’s the cinematic equivalent of microwaving a steak: wasteful, joyless, and vaguely insulting to all involved. But perhaps its greatest sin is not its silliness, nor its lazy callbacks, nor even its insect apocalypse. It’s that it is, above all else, boring.
For a movie about chaos theory, it is remarkably formulaic. For a story about the grandeur of life, it is devoid of wonder. For a film with dinosaurs, it somehow lacks bite. So yes, skip this one. Unless you are writing a dissertation on the creative entropy of blockbuster filmmaking, or you have a morbid curiosity about what happens when a franchise eats itself, there is nothing for you here. Let the dinosaurs rest. Let us rest.
