Jurassic World Dominion (2022) Review
2/10
Dinosaurs are now living in forests, cities and shipping lanes. Four years have passed. The film opens with a news montage establishing this and then spends two and a half hours in locations where it doesn’t matter. The 2 is for the abandonment. Fallen Kingdom ends on the most interesting premise available to the franchise, this film inherits it, and by the twenty minute mark the plot is about genetically engineered insects damaging crops.
Few franchise films make me as cranky as this one, because it had the good movie in its hands for about five minutes. Dinosaurs loose in the world is the premise this series spent an entire film earning, and somebody decided locusts were a better use of two and a half hours. The 2 is me giving it credit for Malta and for three old faces I was glad to see again.
It also runs to two hours and twenty-seven minutes. That’s longer than the first three films in the series and about forty minutes longer than the material supports. The extended cut released afterward adds a further fourteen and improves nothing.
What it does have is the three original cast members returning, and a sequence in Malta that’s the best action the series has staged since 1993. Neither of those things is enough.
It Throws Away Its Own Premise
The previous film’s last shot is dinosaurs walking into the world, and the series had finally arrived somewhere no entry had been. Everything before it was a contained location with a fence.
The obvious film is what a world containing both looks like. Property, insurance, agriculture, migration, urban policy, what happens to a town with a predator population, who’s liable when something eats a person in a car park.
This film shows a prologue of that and then removes it, relocating the action to a private research facility in the Dolomites, a compound with a fence, exactly what every previous entry was. I got five minutes of the movie I wanted and then got herded back into the pen.
That’s the single worst structural decision in a major franchise this decade. The series set up a new subject, spent a film getting there, and then rebuilt the old one because the old one was easier to shoot.
If you end a book on a premise change, the next book has to be about the new premise. Readers who followed you there will notice immediately if you go back. The temptation is that the old structure is proven and the new one is unsolved, and that’s exactly why the new one is worth writing. A prologue that shows the interesting film and then abandons it’s worse than never raising it. You’ve showed that you knew what the story was.
When you inherit a setup, list what it makes possible before you plan anything. If your outline could have been written before the change, you haven’t used it.
The Locusts
The plot is that a biotechnology company has engineered enormous locusts that consume crops from competitors’ seed but not their own, threatening the global food supply.
That’s a real premise with real stakes and it belongs in a different film. Nothing about it requires dinosaurs, the connection is a single genetic detail, and the resolution involves releasing a modified specimen.
The film knows it’s a problem and tries to solve it by making the locusts enormous and putting them on fire in a field. That’s a good sequence in service of a plot nobody came for. Every time the film cut back to the bugs, I felt it stealing time from the dinosaurs I wanted to watch.
There’s a version of this material that works as agricultural thriller with no dinosaurs in it at all, and the fact that I can say that about the main plot of a Jurassic Park film is the whole review.
Campbell Scott plays the corporate villain as a soft-spoken technology executive with a beard and a philosophy. That’s a recognizable modern type and an odd fit for this series. He’s not wrong about anything in particular and he’s not interesting either.
Malta
The one sustained achievement is a chase through a North African-styled Maltese city with motorcycles, a raptor pursuing on foot through streets and over rooftops, and a plane.
It works because the geography is clear, the threat is specific, and the sequence is built on a single idea: a raptor can run faster than a motorcycle in a straight line and can’t corner as well. That’s the franchise’s original method. A dinosaur with an established capability and an established limitation, and a human exploiting the gap between them. The kitchen scene in 1993 is the same construction.
Everything else in the film is dinosaurs appearing in a location and people running. The Malta sequence has a rule, and once a rule exists the audience can participate. It’s the only stretch where I was having real fun, and it made the rest of the film more frustrating, because it proved somebody on this production knew how to do it.
The Giganotosaurus at the end is the opposite. It’s larger than the tyrannosaur, which is its entire characterization, and the resolution is that two bigger animals fight it. Nobody in the audience has anything to do during that scene.
An action sequence needs one rule the audience learns in the first twenty seconds. Fast in a line, poor at corners, and every beat afterward is legible. Without that you have movement, and movement without rules is noise regardless of budget. Establish the limitation as clearly as the capability. A monster with no weakness generates no tactics and no tactics means no scene, only an outcome.
The best sequences in long-running series usually return to the original method. Find what the first entry did and ask whether you’ve stopped doing it.
Six Leads Is Too Many
The film carries Grant, Sattler, Malcolm, Owen, Claire and Maisie, plus a pilot, a corporate villain, a scientist and a mercenary.
Nobody has enough room. The original trio are given a plot thread about locusts, the newer leads are given a rescue thread, and the two groups don’t meet until well past the halfway point. That’s two films running in parallel, each thinned by the presence of the other.
The merge, when it comes, also achieves nothing. Grant and Owen have no relationship, Sattler and Claire have no relationship, and the two groups proceed to the same exit together having exchanged perhaps four lines of dialogue between them across the whole of the film’s extremely long second half. That’s its own kind of answer.
Laura Dern and Sam Neill are the best thing in it and the film can’t decide what to do with them. There’s real warmth between two people who were together thirty years ago and aren’t now, and it’s given about four minutes. That stings. I was happy to see them, and the script treats them like cameo insurance. Jeff Goldblum is doing his familiar tone and it still works, and Malcolm here has no function. He provides commentary, delivers a speech, and doesn’t affect the outcome of anything. Maisie is the clearest casualty. The previous film ended on a strange idea, a cloned child released into the world alongside the dinosaurs, and this one converts her into an object to be recovered from a facility. She spends most of the picture waiting to be collected.
DeWanda Wise gets the only new character worth having. Kayla is a cargo pilot who flies dinosaurs for money, is entirely unsentimental about any of it, and is the one person in the film whose job explains why she’s there.
A Billion Dollars
It took just over a billion worldwide against a budget around one hundred and sixty-five million, and the reviews were the worst in the series.
That combination is the fact worth thinking about. A film can be widely disliked, can abandon its own premise, can be too long by forty minutes, and can still be one of the highest-grossing releases of its year.
What that tells you about incentives is unambiguous. Nothing about the commercial result penalizes any of the decisions described above, and the next film in the series was commissioned.
It’s also why writing straight about these films matters. The box office measures how many people were prepared to find out, and it says nothing about what they found. It’s perverse that a billion dollars reads to a studio as permission to keep doing exactly this. The later entry, released in 2025, went back to an island with a fence and a small team. That confirms the whole argument. The series has now twice arrived at the world premise and twice retreated from it.
Commercial performance isn’t quality feedback and it’s not intended to be. Treating sales as a review will teach you the wrong lessons about your own work. The useful signal is what readers say about the thing you changed, and that arrives slowly and in small numbers. A work that succeeds despite its problems will produce more work with the same problems. That’s a structural observation about industries and it applies to publishing as much as to film.
Be careful what you conclude from a hit. The most common error is assuming the audience approved of everything in it, when they usually approved of one thing and tolerated the rest.
Should you watch Jurassic World Dominion?
No, apart from the Malta sequence. It gets a 2 because Malta and the returning trio earn it a sliver of credit, and everything else wastes the best idea this series ever had.
It inherited dinosaurs loose in the world, relocated to a compound with a fence, made a film about locusts, and took a billion dollars doing it. That last part is what galls me most, because it guarantees the studio learned nothing.
