Artnewspress :
What drives the popularity of the Jurassic Park franchise is obvious. The characters are cool, and there is strong thematic messaging about the arrogance of mankind, but the big draw will forever be the dinosaurs. The jaw-dropping wizardry in Steven Spielberg’s original film from 1993 brought the prehistoric creatures to life in a way that audiences had never seen before, and moviegoers have been chasing that extreme high in the sequels ever since.
In that sense (one of many), Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World Dominion is an extreme low point. Gone is the awe and wonder from the moment where Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) see a herd of brachiosauruses for the first time. In the sixth chapter of the series, dinosaurs are little more than living guns and window dressing.
This is a flabbergasting development when one considers that this franchise has gotten to the point where dinosaurs have become a part of ecosystems around the globe, and you wonder why the filmmakers couldn’t develop a story about that world-changing development. And while that’s bad, the actual execution is even worse. Orchestrating two bland, wholly disconnected plotlines, Jurassic World Dominion reduces all of its legacy characters into blank sheets of paper walking through plot developments, resulting in a slog of a film with only a light scattering of memorable moments in its bloated two-and-a-half hour runtime.
The first of these plotlines follows up the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and finds Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) having taken on the responsibility of being the guardians for Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the young girl who we learned was a clone in the previous film. Together they have made a home deep in the woods of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, trying to keep Maisie safe from those who would like to take and study her – but this plan fails as a group of poachers discover her location and kidnap her (oh, and they also take the baby of Owen’s “pet” velociraptor Blue, but that development is ultimately given so little attention it might as well not exist).
