Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

After the events in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, dinosaurs have mostly become a part of nature again worldwide.  There are instances of illegal breeding and even giant locusts.  Wait, what?  Giant locusts?  What's this?  Yes, the big issue now is that giant locusts - the size of cats - are wiping out crops that aren't grown with a particular seed brand.  Wow, that's not suspicious.  Now to catch up with all our characters.  Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) is still working as a dinosaur-rights activist.  Owen (Chris Pratt) is a cowboy - maybe a dinoboy - as he wrangles dinosaurs.  Together, Claire and Owen have adopted Maisie (Isabella Sermon), who they have kept sequestered in a forest cabin far from town.  Elsewhere in the world, Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) visits Alan Grant (Sam Neill) at a dig in Utah.  She has been in contact with Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who has invited her to the BioSyn compound in Europe.  Excellent, now our story can begin.

A band of mercenaries have found the remote cabin and absconded with Maisie and Blue's baby raptor.  Oh, yeah, Blue lives in the nearby forest and visits from time to time.  Claire and Owen contact Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) who now works for the CIA.  Of course, he does. He gives them the skinny on where Maisie might be headed and tells them not to get involved.  So, they are on the next flight to Malta.  Duh!  In Malta, programmable raptors chase after Owen as he rides a motorcycle through the streets.  Meanwhile, Claire browbeats Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), a freelance pilot who flies a hunk of junk, into helping recover Maisie.  As she happened to witness Maisie's arrival and departure from Malta, she agrees.  Convenient.  Off to the BioSyn Institute in Europe!

During all this, Ellie and Alan have arrived at the BioSyn Institute and meet Lewis Dodgson.  Dodgson was a very minor character in the original film as the guy who gave Nedry (Wayne Knight) the phony shaving cream can to store dinosaur DNA samples.  Wow, nice callback.  Next, they reconnect with Ian.  Ian suggests that Ellie and Alan go to a restricted level and get a sample of locust DNA.  Okay.  What was wrong with the DNA from the locusts caught earlier in the film?  I must have missed that.  Also, why hasn't Ian gotten it?  Of course, it turns into a fiasco.  Luckily, the number two man at BioSyn, Ramsay Cole, is on their side.  What?  Why didn't HE get the sample?  This is just one clumsy effort to bring back the original trio for a swan song in the series.  And why again are we having giant grasshoppers in a dinosaur movie?

Out of the blue, the movie introduces Maisie's mother, Dr. Charlotte Lockwood (Elva Trill).  Though she died more than a decade ago, it turns out that she was good friends with Ellie and made plenty of home movies that demonstrate how she was a genetic scientist who was deeply involved in the dinosaur project.  Also, she was born with a genetic defect that was going to cut her life short but she really wanted to be a mom so she impregnated herself with a clone of herself - that would be Maisie - but not before correcting the genetic defect.  Well, of course.

Dodgson proves to be a Bond-like villain who had a lair that conveniently self-destructs with alarming ease.  The astonishing incompetence is baffling.

The movie is really odd.  Why are dinosaurs running around in the snowy forests of the northwest?  Reptiles are not fond of the cold.  Are these warm-blooded dinosaurs?  Did I miss that?  More likely, the makers thought it would be cool to have dinosaurs trudging through the snow.  Sigh.  Along that same line, Europe seems like a terrible place to have a dinosaur sanctuary.  There just aren't any remote tropical islands anymore.

The movie hits all the standard tropes of a Jurassic Park/World film.  In many cases, it just repeats some old ones as an homage to the original.  Yeah, okay.  Whatever.  This is a long (2 and a half hours!) movie that has way too many characters and an extremely weak storyline.  Skip.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Since the catastrophe of Jurassic World, the park was completely abandoned and the dinosaurs roam free.  However, a dormant volcano on the island is threatening to erupt, which will kill all the dinosaurs.  Testifying to Congress, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) suggests that nothing be done and the dinosaurs be allowed to go extinct again.  Elsewhere, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) has become a dinosaur rights activist, citing the Endanger Species Act.  Yes, really.  Just when it looks like the dinosaurs will die off and stop the all-too-predictable disasters where dinosaurs eat park visitors, Ben Lockwood (James Cromwell) - a former partner of John "We spared no expense" Hammond - summons Claire and outlines a plan to rescue the dinosaurs, placing them on an uninhabited island with no human interaction.  Claire immediately signs up.  However, in order to rescue the raptors, she will need to recruit Owen (Chris Pratt).  Apparently, they split not too long after the last film but she nonetheless succeeds in dragging him along on her folly.  On the island, Ken Wheatley (Ted Levine) is in charge of a band of mercenaries who are rounding up the dinosaurs.  The task gets notably easier when Claire signs onto the tracking system and provides coordinates for all the dinosaurs.  No sooner has Owen managed to lure Blue the Raptor to him than the double-cross kicks in.  Abandoned in the island's jungle as the volcano erupts, Owen, Claire, and Franklin (Justice Smith) must find a way to escape.  The second half of the film has the bad guys selling the recovered dinosaurs for millions of dollars to international buyers.  Of course, some of the dinosaurs - notably the most dangerous one - escape and wreak havoc.  No, that's not a spoiler.  It was inevitable.

 

Having resurrected many species that had been extinct for millions of years, one can't help but wonder why everyone is so worried about them going extinct again.  They can just be reincarnated again.  On another topic, why don't the mercenaries carry guns than can kill dinosaurs?  They always have guns that just annoy them and tranquilizer darts that work only if the plot requires them to work.  Where's the elephant gun or it's new variant, the dinosaur gun?  Why are they always unprepared for an escaped dinosaur?  It gets old.  By the end of the movie, our 'heroes' have saved the dinosaurs and let them loose somewhere in Northern California.  Among the rescued dinosaurs are a T-Rex and a velociraptor.  That's terrific.  This should work out just peachy.  I'm sure they will live in peace with the local population.  Much better than letting them go extinct again.  Sigh.

 

The movie is full of action, loads of action.  Buckets and buckets of topflight CGI action.  It is also spilling over the brim with stupid.  Oh, so much stupid.  Probably the most egregious error: the island is doomed and the US government has declined to save the dinosaurs.  And it also has declined to even see if anyone else tried to save them.  When a ship full of highly dangerous dinosaurs heads to the US coast, no US Navy, no Coast Guard, no interdiction at all.  Sure, why not.

 

The movie concludes with Dr. Malcolm warning about genetic tinkering and that the genie is out of the bottle.  Jurassic World III: Rise of the Planet of the Dinosaurs opens in 2021.  Skip this one.