It's taken me six weeks, two viewings and a lot of thinking to get round to writing this review. Admittedly, I was rather overexcited about the whole affair (as @PrinceTobyTort’s Twitter feed will attest), so perhaps I built things up a little too much. Did the film live up to my expectations? No. Were my expectations impossibly high? Probably. Did it improve on second viewing? Definitely.
I should start off by emphasising that I’m a huge fan of the original Jurassic Park film and its sequel, The Lost World, and Michael Crichton’s novels from which they were (very loosely) adapted. I also really enjoyed the first two films in the Jurassic World trilogy. (The less said about Jurassic Park III, the better – although I might say more about it in a future post!)
I love the action-adventure elements of the Jurassic films. Dinosaurs on an island trying to eat people – what’s not to like? Dinosaurs eating lawyers off toilets – even better! I really loved the relationship between Jurassic Park and Jurassic World – the latter film acting as a nostalgic love letter to the former. There were also some delightful structural parallels between The Lost World and Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom, which ensured that I enjoyed Fallen Kingdom much more than a lot of the critics did (not to mention the group of disgruntled academics that I watched it with after a Jurassic Park symposium I had co-organised, some of whom declared that the film had ruined their childhood).
Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that Dominion should have had a parallel relationship with Jurassic Park III (I’m pretty sure that nobody would pay to see that!) but, for me, the film was missing that close connection with the original films that the previous two instalments in the Jurassic World trilogy had forged.
This might seem like a strange assertion, given that Dominion reunited stars Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern and Sam Neill as Dr Ian Malcolm, Dr Ellie Sattler and Dr Alan Grant, with BD Wong reprising his role as the villainous Dr Henry Wu, and the return of Lewis Dodgson, who played a bit-part role in the original Jurassic Park film (‘Dodgson, Dodgson, we’ve got Dodgson here’), now recast as Campbell Scott.
Indeed, there are some nice nods to the original film, including the wonderful moment when new character Kayla Watts gives Ian Malcom a scathing look for having one too many buttons on his shirt undone. (Don’t listen to her, Jeff – you’ve still got it!) And Jeff Goldblum, as ever, is wonderfully eccentric. In fact, one of my favourite sequences is a parallel of the Jurassic Park scene where Ian Malcolm and John Hammond are giving directions to Ellie Sattler over the radio as she makes the brave journey to turn the power back on – only this time, Ian Malcolm is in the bumbling Hammond role. (And watching Laura Dern and Bryce Dallas Howard going to town on a swarm of giant locusts offers a dose of female empowerment that has sometimes been missing from the Jurassic World trilogy).
There are also some nice romantic moments between Ellie and Alan. Yet again, the T. rex saves the day and allows the survivors to escape. Dennis Nedry’s embryo-carrying shaving gel can makes a cameo in Dodgson’s office. We finally get the reappearance of Dilophosaurus, who has not been seen since the first film. And Dodgson’s fate at the frills of the Dilophosaurus offers an appropriate mirroring of his co-conspirator Nedry’s death in the original film. I also enjoyed Dr Henry Wu’s redemption arc – helpfully illustrated by his long hair and cardigan. (No self-respecting villain would ever wear a cardigan or have that haircut – or lack thereof).
With so many established characters making a comeback, I was sceptical about the inclusion of new faces. Dodgson was a necessary evil (if a little underwhelming), but I had my doubts about cargo pilot Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise) and Dodgson’s second-in-command at BioSyn, Ramsay Cole (Mamoudou Athie). But Wise and Athie did a fantastic job of creating intriguing and likeable characters with the screen time they were given and Kayla Watts, in particular, is a great addition to the Jurassic family.
However, one of the main side effects of bringing so many characters together in one film was the lack of opportunity it gave some characters to shine. (Leading men Sam Neill and Chris Pratt didn’t get much to do, for example, although, of course, Jeff Goldblum stole every scene that he was in.) It was also nice to see Daniella Pineda, Justice Smith and Omar Sy reprising their roles of Zia Rodriguez, Franklin Webb and Barry Sembène respectively, although their impact was necessarily limited. Isabella Sermon had more to do as human clone Maisie Lockwood in this film but, while she was effective in the role, I found her teenage attitude a little wearing and I’ve never been a big fan of the human cloning plot.
The biggest issue with bringing so many characters together in one film (even with the impressive 2 hours and 27 minutes run time) was the fragmentary structure of the plot. In an interview for Total Film, writer and director Colin Trevorrow talks about the necessity of the dual-narrative plot which offers ‘a very unlikely structure for a mainstream general audience blockbuster film’ and, personally, I don’t feel that it’s an altogether successful structure for this type of film or audience. I’m all for not dumbing down the blockbuster, but Dominion has so many set-ups and twists and turns, that it’s sometimes hard to keep track. And it doesn’t have the killer opening that the franchise is known for.
In fact, in many ways, Dominion has more of a feel of the Michael Crichton Jurassic novels than either of the actual adaptations of these works. Crichton’s narratives are deliberately fragmented, chaotic and full of incidental characters whose actions affect the plot in catastrophic ways. They’re also heavier on the science and industrial espionage elements than they are on dinosaur content. This is no bad thing in itself – the books are great, but they are very different beasts to Spielberg’s family-friendly, action-adventure blockbusters. The emphasis on BioSyn, Dodgson, human cloning and genetically modified locusts in Dominion could have been straight out of one of Crichton’s novels. In fact, both BioSyn and Dodgson play an important role in Crichton’s Jurassic Park, whilst they are almost erased from Spielberg’s film, to the extent where those who have read Crichton’s novel will have a much better idea of their significance than the faithful fan of the Jurassic Park films.
Jeff Goldblum excepted, there is a certain joylessness to the film. There are very few comedic moments (most of them involving Goldblum), and Chris Pratt, in particular, is robbed of the comic appeal he enjoyed in the earlier Jurassic World films. For much of the film, there’s a shift away from the dinosaur action-adventure we’ve come to associate with the Jurassic franchise. The section of the film set in Malta feels more like a Bond or Marvel movie than a dinosaur adventure, and there’s a certain darkness of tone, violence and nastiness here that justifies the 12A (PG-13) rating. On second viewing, I was a little alarmed at the smallness of some of the child viewers in the cinema. (Fortunately, none of them ran screaming from the room, but there were many, many toilet breaks). As someone who has very fond memories of seeing Jurassic Park at the cinema at the tender age of seven, I’m not convinced that my seven-year-old self would have coped with Jurassic World Dominion.
As a huge fan of dinosaurs and the action-adventure style of the Spielberg Jurassic instalments, my biggest issue with Dominion was the shift in focus away from the dinosaurs and the island aesthetic that they inhabit. Needless to say, I was relieved when the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World casts finally came together for the last forty minutes or so of the film in BioSyn Valley and had to run away from some dinosaurs! Hurrah!
For me, one of the main things that is sorely missing from Dominion is an obvious dinosaur antagonist. Jurassic Park and The Lost World had T. rex and Velociraptor; Jurassic Park III had the Spinosaurus; Jurassic World had the Indominus rex; Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom had the Indoraptor. Who is the villain in Dominion? A swarm of giant locusts. Sure, they’re pretty unpleasant, but they don’t have much personality. There’s no real awe. No sense that, in the words of Robert Muldoon, ‘we’re being hunted’. Add to this a somewhat mediocre human villain in the form of Lewis Dodgson and the Jurassic terror isn’t quite there.
There are lots of thrills and spills in the final act of the film, along with some genuine peril and great dinosaur chases. In fact, there are some great dinosaurs. Despite their lack of centrality to the plot (Blue and Beta’s story feels like a minor subplot that isn’t given the screen time it deserves), dinosaurs are one of the things that the film actually does very well. In addition to bringing back the wonderful Dilophosaurus, and the fan-favourites T. rex and Velociraptor, there are a whole host of new, more accurately rendered dinosaur species (for which palaeontologist consultant Steve Brusatte must be given some of the credit).
Gone are the hybrid dinosaurs from the first two Jurassic World films – that plot has run its course – and in its place we have lesser-known species such as Atrociraptor, Quetzalcoatlus, Giganotosaurus and, in my opinion, the most frightening newcomers, our feathered friends Therizinosaurus and Pyroraptor. (The scene where the Therizinosaurus hunts Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) wonderfully replicates the terror and suspense of the initial T. rex attack in Jurassic Park). There’s more variety and accuracy with the dinosaurs in these films and the changes are convincingly explained by BioSyn’s desire to make accurate replicas of dinosaurs for pharmaceutical research, rather than the theme-park monsters engineered by InGen to wow paying audiences. (In the words of Owen Grady, ‘They’re dinosaurs. Wow enough.’)
There’s even some correction of misinformation from the original film as Alan Grant references the now-defunct idea that Velociraptors disembowel their prey, something that he memorably illustrated in Jurassic Park as he terrorised a child on his dig with a graphic description of a Velociraptor attack. Dominion still uses artistic license, of course, but the film acknowledges and incorporates more recent discoveries in palaeontology and evolutionary biology that have been widely ignored by the Jurassic franchise up to this point for the sake of brand continuity.
So, in all, Jurassic World Dominion is a mixed bag for me. There’s plenty to celebrate. Great new dinosaurs, interesting new characters, the brilliance of Jeff Goldblum, some thrilling dinosaur chases, and around forty minutes of my ideal Jurassic film. But, for me, there’s something missing from Dominion’s DNA sequence. In the shift from InGen to BioSyn, the genetic makeup of the franchise has been inextricably altered. In the attempt to make something fresh and exciting, Dominion has lost some of its Jurassic-ness. It’s not for the seven-year-old girl who was enthralled by Jurassic Park nearly thirty years ago or, even, for the thirty-six-year-old woman who still idolises that film. But, film franchises, I suppose, must evolve to attract new audiences and, like life itself, Jurassic World Dominion finds a way. I’m just not sure that it’s a way I want to travel.
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