Film review: Jurassic World Dominion

With perfunctory action set-pieces and an overly convoluted plot, there’s not much to love in this sixth instalment of the Jurassic Park franchise, writes Alistair Harkness
Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) getting up close and personal with an Allosaurus and a Carnotaurus in Jurassic World Dominion PIC: Universal Studios / Amblin EntertainmentOwen Grady (Chris Pratt) getting up close and personal with an Allosaurus and a Carnotaurus in Jurassic World Dominion PIC: Universal Studios / Amblin Entertainment
Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) getting up close and personal with an Allosaurus and a Carnotaurus in Jurassic World Dominion PIC: Universal Studios / Amblin Entertainment

Jurassic World Dominion (12A) *

Directed by: Colin Trevorrow

Starring: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, Sam Neill

“Jurassic World? Not a fan” quips Jeff Goldblum late on in Jurassic World Dominion. The feeling’s mutual. This sixth instalment of the almost 30-year-old dino franchise is a creative low point, even by the dead-horse-flogging standards of the previous sequels to Steven Spielberg’s ground-breaking original.

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Serving as the concluding chapter of both the Chris Pratt-starring Jurassic World reboot saga and the over-all Jurassic Park series, it contrives to bring back Sam Neill’s palaeontologist Alan Grant and Laura Dern’s palaeobotanist Ellie Grant in a cynical effort to boost the legacy appeal of the franchise now that the nostalgic sight of dinosaurs on the big screen has well and truly worn off (a trick that didn’t work for Jurassic Park III and doesn’t work here).

They’re re-united with Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm – who who popped up in the previous instalment – after he invites them to visit the biotech company he’s now working for as a kind of doomsday prophet for profit, running through his chaos-theory prognostications while being mindlessly cheered on by a new generation of scientific disruptors who’ve drank the Kool-Aid of their Steve Jobs/Elon Musk-esque leader Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott). Dodgson’s company, the not-at-all evil BioSyn, has taken on responsibility for tracking and controlling the genetically engineered dinosaurs that now roam the earth, relocating most of them to a biological preserve in his Bondian compound deep within Italy’s Dolomite mountains, where he publicly promises to learn from them to cure disease and help humanity but is really manufacturing new species of locusts to help him control the world’s food supplies. Or something.

A surfeit of plot connects this storyline to Pratt’s dino-whisperer Owen Grady, who’s now living a reclusive existence in the woods with Bryce Dallas Howard’s dino-activist Claire Dearing and the cloned teenage girl, Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) they saved in the previous film. The dinosaurs, while plentiful, are really just fodder for perfunctory action set-pieces that are further undone by co-writer/director Colin Trevorrow’s sentimental penchant for anthropomorphism. There’s very little threat in a movie where even a wild velociraptors can be befriended by promising to rescue its baby.

General release