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Jurassic World Dominion

Where to watch.

Rent Jurassic World Dominion on Fandango at Home, or buy it on Fandango at Home.

What to Know

Jurassic World Dominion might be a bit of an improvement over its immediate predecessors in some respects, but this franchise has lumbered a long way down from its classic start.

It's probably time to let this franchise rest, but between some entertaining action and the fun of seeing members of the original cast reunited, Jurassic World Dominion is a decent enough sequel.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Colin Trevorrow

Chris Pratt

Bryce Dallas Howard

Claire Dearing

Ellie Sattler

Jeff Goldblum

Ian Malcolm

Movie Clips

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Jurassic World: Dominion

Twenty-nine years ago, when “ Jurassic Park ” was released, computer-generated and digitally composited effects were still relatively new, but director Steven Spielberg’s team raised them to a new level of credibility by deploying them sparingly, often in nighttime and rainy scenes, and mixing them with old-fashioned practical FX work (mainly puppets and large-scale models). The result conjured primal wonder and terror in the minds of viewers. The T-Rex attack in particular was so brilliantly constructed that it put this writer sideways in his seat, one arm raised in front of his face as if to defend against a dinosaur attack. When there was a break in the mayhem, Spielberg cut to a very quiet scene, letting everyone hear how many people in the audience had been screaming in fright, which of course led to raucous laughter and a release of tension (a showman’s trick). A small girl sitting near this writer regarded his still-terror-contorted body and asked, “Mister, are you all right?”

There’s nothing in “Jurassic World: Dominion” that comes close to that first “Jurassic Park” T-Rex attack, or any other scene in it. Or for that matter, any of the scenes in the Spielberg-directed sequel “The Lost World,” which made the best of an inevitable cash-grab scenario by treating the film as an excuse to stage a series of dazzling large-scale action sequences, and giving Jeff Goldblum’s chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm the action hero job. Goldblum, who reprises his role in “Dominion” alongside fellow original cast members Sam Neill and Laura Dern , turned his “Lost World” performance into a wry-yet-cranky meta-commentary on corporate capitalism.

For that matter, there’s nothing in this new film as good as the best parts of “Jurassic Park III,” “ Jurassic World ,” and “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.” The latter had the most surprising pivots since the original, conjuring Spielbergian magic (think of that shot of the brachiosaur left behind on the dock) and mixing gothic horror and haunted house-movie elements into its second half. “Jurassic Park” creator Michael Crichton’s original inspiration, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , was referenced through the character of Maisie Lockwood ( Isabella Sermon ), a clone created by John Hammond’s business partner to replace the daughter that he lost. 

Maisie is one of many major characters featured in “Dominion,” and her tragic predicament has disturbing new details added to it. But returning franchise director/co-writer Colin Trevorrow (writer/director of “Jurassic World”) and his collaborators are unable to focus on their deeper implications long enough to develop Maisie with the sophistication required for a great or even good science fiction/horror film. 

The mishandling of Maisie is but one bit of scrap in this dumpster of a sequel. The film opens with Claire Dearing ( Bryce Dallas Howard ), onetime park operations manager of Jurassic World turned head of the activist Dinosaur Protection Group, breaking into a ranch where baby plant-eaters are being kept and impulsively deciding to rescue one of them. Then she goes to a cabin in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains, where Maisie is living with the park’s former raptor-whisperer Owen Grady ( Chris Pratt ). The three form a makeshift nuclear family focused on protecting Maisie against parties who want to exploit her for genetic and financial gain. The semi-domesticated raptor Blue lives with them as well, and has asexually produced a child (mirroring Maisie’s relationship to her mother’s genetic material—though so haphazardly that it’s as if the filmmakers barely even thought of the two creatures as being thematically linked). 

There’s also a corporate spy plot (as in most of the other films) involving a thoughtless and/or sinister corporation that talks of magic-and-wonder but is mainly interested in exploiting the dinos and the technology that created them. From “The Lost World” onward, the successors to park founder John Hammond ( Richard Attenborough )—a nice old man who meant well but failed to think through the  implications of his actions—have been actively treacherous Bad Guy types. The heavy in this one is Dr. Lewis Dodgson, a character from the original film who’s been recast and promoted to CEO of BioSyn (‘bio sin,’ get it?). Dodgson hired another recurring “Jurassic” character, B.D. Wong’s Dr. Wu (arguably the true villain of most of these films, though in an oblivious, John Hammond sort of way) to breed prehistoric locusts that are genetically coded to devour every food crop, save for engineered plants sold exclusively by the company. 

Dodgson is the mastermind behind the kidnapping of Maisie and Blue’s child. Actor Campbell Scott uses inventive body language and unpredictable phrasings and pauses to invest the under-written Dodgson with a distinct personality. He turns him into a sendup of two generations of Baby Boomer and Generation X tech-bro capitalist gurus. Dodgson is a man who carries himself like a peace-loving hippie but is really a voracious yuppie who keeps black marketeers and hired killers on retainer. The warm-voiced but dead-eyed way that Dodgson conveys “caring” is especially chilling—like a zombie Steve Jobs . It’s the film’s second most imaginative performance after that of Goldblum, who never moves or speaks quite as you expect him to, and blurts out things that sound improvised. (Chastising colleagues who are moving too slowly for his taste, he snaps, “Why are you skulking?”)

All narrative roads converge at BioSyn headquarters, where Neill and Dern’s Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler have gone to ask Ian Malcolm’s help in obtaining top-secret information that can end the prehistoric locust plague, and where Maisie and Blue’s baby have been brought so that their genetic secrets can be mined as well. Two new characters—Han Solo-ish mercenary pilot Kayla Watts ( DeWanda Wise ) who says she doesn’t want to get involved in the heroes’ problems and then does, and Dodgson’s disillusioned acolyte Ramsay Cole ( Mamoudou Athie )—join the intrigue, and presumably are being introduced as new-generation figureheads who can take over the franchise. Even if the entire film had focused on BioSyn headquarters, the film still might have seemed overstuffed and under-imagined. But Trevorrow turns the movie into a global travelogue, every sequence feeling narratively cut-off from the others in the manner of a substandard spy flick. (There’s even a rooftop chase modeled on one in “ The Bourne Supremacy ,” but with a raptor.)

A long sequence in Malta, where Claire and Owen have gone to rescue Maisie from kidnappers, encapsulates the film’s failures. There are a lot of promising notions in it, including a dinosaur-focused black market (like something out of a “ Star Wars ” or Indiana Jones film) where criminals go to buy, sell, and eat forbidden and endangered species. But it’s undone by a lazy undercurrent of comic-book Orientalism and a seeming inability to even see, much less capitalize on, potentially rich material. Michael Giacchino’s score pours on sinister Arabic-African “exotic” cliches, as if setting up an R-rated prison thriller in which Owen does a “ Midnight Express ” stint in a Turkish prison for hashish possession. 

An action scene that throws Owen and the lead kidnapper into a fighting pit where onlookers wager on dinosaur fights is as indifferently composed and poorly edited as nearly every other action scene in the film—and it becomes depressing once you think about what Spielberg, or his favorite second-unit director Joe Johnston (“Jurassic Park III”), might have done with it. It could’ve been a tiny masterpiece of action, slapstick, and social commentary, with the pit audience initially reacting with outrage when their regularly scheduled dino-fights are disrupted, then gleefully shifting gears by betting on the two humans who are going at each other, making fresh odds and handing off fistfuls of cash while baying for blood. Trevorrow looks at this setup and sees nothing but a hero fighting a henchman in a pit. 

There’s no scene in the film that’s entirely worthless. There’s no question that at this point, the “Jurassic” factory knows how to design and animate prehistoric creatures and integrate them with live-action scenes of actors running, screaming, shooting, setting fires, and the like. And yet the totality feels indifferently assembled, and the stalkings and chases and dino-battles are for the most part bereft of the life-and-death tension that every other franchise entry has managed to summon. And the plotting is abysmal, relying too heavily on coincidence and flukes of timing, retro-engineering personal connections between new and pre-existing characters, and handing the heroes major victories as casually as a hotel desk clerk giving a guest a room key, instead of letting them earn them through ingenuity.  

Trevorrow even manages to recycle, not once but three times, one of the only clever gags in his “Jurassic World”—a comment on the 40-year budgetary and spectacle escalation of the summer blockbuster, in which a great white shark, the creature at the center of Spielberg’s groundbreaking 1975 film “ Jaws ,” gets eaten by a mosasaurus the size of a skyscraper. Every time Trevorrow does something like this, it feels like an even-more-desperate attempt to remind us of how much fun we might’ve had during “Jurassic World,” which wasn’t that great of a film to start with, and that was dining out on reheated cultural leftovers even during its best moments. 

There are also scenes where characters (mainly but not always Malcolm) tie the capitalist rapaciousness of BioSyn to the film you’re sitting there watching. But these don’t have the wit and playfulness that powered similar material in “The Lost World.” They just seem curdled with self-loathing and awareness of how hollow the whole production is. At one point Malcolm chastises himself for taking the company’s money to work as their in-house philosopher/guru even though he knows they’re cynical corporate exploiters, and there’s a self-lacerating edge to Goldblum’s voice that makes it seem as if it’s the actor rather than the character who’s confessing to low personal standards. And there are times where Sam Neill, like Goldblum, seems embarrassed to be onscreen, or at least confused as to what he’s doing in the story—although to be fair, the script never convincingly justifies why Allan, a reluctant action hero in his other two “Jurassic” appearances, would leave the dinosaur dig site where Ellie finds him, other than that he’s from the earlier movies and needed to be here for nostalgia-marketing reasons.

Worst of all, the series again fails to properly explore its most tantalizing question: how would our world change if dinosaurs were added to it? The opening section packs any halfway intriguing or funny thing that “Dominion” might have to say about this topic into a TV news montage—showing, for instance, a little girl being chased on a beach by baby dinos (an homage to “The Lost World”), a couple releasing doves at their wedding only to have one of them get snatched out of the air by a pterodactyl, and pteranodons nesting in the World Trade Center (possibly a reference to Larry Cohen’s “ Q: The Winged Serpent ,” in which an ancient Aztec god nests in the Chrysler Building). Ninety minutes of footage like this, minus any characters or plot at all, probably would’ve resulted in an artistically better use of a couple hundred million dollars than “Jurassic World: Dominion,” which will doubtless be a smash on the order of all the other entries in the franchise, even though it doesn’t do much more than the bare minimum you’d expect for one of these films, and not all that well.

Now playing in theaters.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• Sam Neill as Dr. Alan Grant
• Laura Dern as Dr. Ellie Sattler
• Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm
• Chris Pratt as Owen Grady
• Bryce Dallas Howard as Claire Dearing
• Mamoudou Athie as Ramsay Cole
• Scott Haze as Rainn Delacourt
• Dichen Lachman as Soyona Santos
• Daniella Pineda as Zia Rodriguez
• Isabella Sermon as Maisie Lockwood
• Justice Smith as Franklin Webb
• Omar Sy as Barry Sembène
• DeWanda Wise as Kayla Watts
• Campbell Scott as Lewis Dodgson
• B.D. Wong as Dr. Henry Wu
• Joel Elferink as Jeffrey
• Jake Johnson as Lowery Cruthers
• Kristoffer Polaha as Wyatt Huntley
• Elva Trill as Charlotte Lockwood
• Colin Trevorrow

Writer (story by)

• Derek Connolly
• Emily Carmichael

Cinematographer

• John Schwartzman
• Mark Sanger

Writer (based on characters created by)

• Michael Crichton
• Michael Giacchino

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Jurassic World Dominion First Reviews: A Franchise Finale Full of Fan Service and Dino Action

Critics say the final jurassic film is far from the best, but it does a few things we've never seen before and die-hard fans should enjoy it despite its flaws..

TAGGED AS: Film , films , First Reviews , jurassic park , movie , movies

If you love dinosaurs, Jurassic World Dominion has a lot of them, and if you love the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies, it has a lot of characters from each, as well. The sixth feature installment of the nearly 30-year-old franchise is the biggest and longest, if not among the best, according to the first reviews. Die-hard fans will get a lot of what they want, plus an infusion of globetrotting action, while audiences expecting a smart sci-fi blockbuster will be disappointed. Big and brainless: that sounds fitting for a dinosaur movie, right?

Here’s what critics are saying about Jurassic World Dominion :

Will Dominion please die-hard Jurassic fans?

Jurassic World Dominion is an epic thrill ride and satisfying conclusion to the arc that started almost 30 years ago with Jurassic Park . – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

Dominion is far from a perfect movie. But how low of a rating can you really give to a film that had you grinning from ear to ear from start to finish? – Amelia Emberwing, IGN Movies

Trevorrow has lost sight of what made cinephiles fall in love with Jurassic Park and what’s made that film such a crucial part of our pop-culture discussion nearly 30 years later. – David Gonzalez, Mama’s Geeky

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

Where does it rank in the franchise?

Jurassic World Dominion is an improvement from the last Jurassic World installment. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR

It recovers well from the pitfalls within Fallen Kingdom to deliver a far more entertaining conclusion. – Edward Douglas, The Weekend Warrior

Dominion has more in common with 1993’s Jurassic Park than 2018’s Fallen Kingdom as it revels in the magic of what made the original a success. – Kirsten Acuna, Insider

This [is] the best Jurassic movie since the original in 1993, but that doesn’t mean this one’s not, much like its predecessors, a hot mess. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Of the three Jurassic World movies, Dominion  is the least silly and most entertaining. But that’s not saying much. – Peter Debruge, Variety

It’s far from the worst — that (dis)honor still goes to Jurassic Park III . – Casey Chong, Casey’s Movie Mania

Will dinosaur fans be happy?

Jurassic World Dominion does not disappoint the dinosaur aficionado in all of us. – Christie Cronan, Raising Whasians

There are some peaceful and beautiful moments which will delight anyone who is or was a dinosaur kid at heart. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR

The amount of new and returning dinosaurs is worth the price of admission… Jurassic World Dominion has to have the highest dino-per-scene ratio of the entire franchise. – Kyle Wilson, The Lamplight Review

We’ve gone from 15 minutes of dinosaur footage in the first film, relying on a combination of animatronics and CG, to having full shots of dinosaurs every couple of minutes… Dialing back the dinos doesn’t really appeal to me. I have a feeling that’s the same for kids as well. – Aaron Neuwirth, We Live Entertainment

Unfortunately, a whole lot of the movie’s 2-hour and 26-minute run time isn’t about dinosaurs, but when the prehistoric creatures are on-screen, it’s impossible not to have a good time. – Jamie Jirak, ComicBook.com

Does it rely too much on fan service?

The latest Jurassic movie, for better or worse, does everything it can to spelunk to depths of fan service previously thought unreachable. – Cory Woodroof, Nashville Scene

It is basically one big collection of Easter eggs and shout-outs to the earlier films. – Ard Vijn, Screen Anarchy

Yes, we get nostalgic Easter Eggs and references to the first Jurassic Park , but mercifully fewer than I expected with most of them confined to the third act. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

It’s everything one has come to expect from a Jurassic movie. When I come to one of these movies, I expect plenty of fan service. – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

Are there any surprises in the script?

The first two-thirds, especially the whirlwind first half of this (admittedly overlong) 146-minute picture plays like an overstuffed checklist of stuff we haven’t seen in a Jurassic movie. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Jurassic World Dominion earns brownie points for at last taking a risk in breaking the franchise formula to explore new ways to execute dino mayhem. – Kyle Wilson, The Lamplight Review

The film is a mishmash of regurgitated bits and pieces of what has come before. – Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

Is it great to see the original cast back together?

If you’re coming just to see the return of Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Alan Grant (Sam Neill ), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), you won’t be disappointed by their amount of screen time. – Jamie Jirak, ComicBook.com

[Their] return is as delightful as one would expect after missing them together on-screen for nearly 30 years. – Amelia Emberwing, IGN Movies

The chemistry of Sam Neill and Laura Dern warm the screen like a cozy blanket while also giving relief from the dull teen angst happening at the Grady/Dearing cabin. – Kyle Wilson, The Lamplight Review

I’m ecstatic that the chemistry between the OG3 and the duo of the Jurassic World eras is both natural and magnetic. – David Gonzalez, Mama’s Geeky

Jurassic World Dominion could have easily existed without Owen or Claire at all. Seeing Dern, Neill, and Goldblum back in the saddle again feels far more exciting than anything that Pratt or Howard are called upon to do. – Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

How is the new cast?

DeWanda Wise steals the show with her spunky portrayal of a former Air Force pilot, Kayla Watts. – Casey Chong, Casey’s Movie Mania

My instant favorite character [was] DeWanda Wise as Han Solo, I mean as Kayla Watts. – Nell Minow, Movie Mom

The standout newcomer of the bunch is Wise as Watts. It’s rare to see a woman who is both badass and funny, and her presence on-screen is extremely welcome. – Jamie Jirak, ComicBook.com

The true breakout of the film is DeWanda Wise…a welcomed addition to the cast and adds a level of badass, whit, and charisma missing from the previous two entries. – David Gonzalez, Mama’s Geeky

Mamoudou Athie, in particular, is a true stand-out, delivering a charismatic performance… It’s a shame that it took until the third Jurassic World movie to meet these [new] characters. – Caitlin Chappell, CBR

How is the action?

Most of the first hour becomes a Jason Bourne-type chase sequence across Malta – but with dinosaurs! It’s big, it’s stupid, it’s really fun. – Kyle Wilson, The Lamplight Review

One dino chase, in particular, feels like a moment out of a Mission: Impossible or Bourne movie, which is as thrilling as it sounds. – Jamie Jirak, ComicBook.com

Trevorrow wanted to show us what he can do emulating a Bond-style chase sequence except for the pursuer(s) turn out to be Atrociraptors. – Casey Chong, Casey’s Movie Mania

The action set pieces are some of the best since the original. – David Gonzalez, Mama’s Geeky

What about the visual effects?

The visual effects once again remain one of the franchise’s standouts… The use of practical effects is certainly welcomed for someone who considers the original a masterpiece. – David Gonzalez, Mama’s Geeky

The combination of animatronics and CGI isn’t as seamless as I would expect this time around since Trevorrow and his team [did] a great job in Jurassic World . – Casey Chong, Casey’s Movie Mania

In 1993, Jurassic Park revolutionized visual effects, so it is really surprising, after 30 years of technological evolution, to see several shots in this sixth edition where the live-action and dinosaurs don’t appear to be on the same visual plane. – Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

Is the movie enjoyable if you don’t think too much about it?

This is the essence of a summer movie… Just pass the popcorn and enjoy the chases. – Nell Minow, Movie Mom

I was relieved to see a “new” mega-bucks movie that looked like a mega-bucks movie. – Scott Mendelson, Forbes

Viewers don’t care if these films are good or bad. Audiences just want a fun romp at theaters and Dominion delivers. – Kirsten Acuna, Insider

Man watches dinosaur movie, man notices glaring flaws in dinosaur movie, man still enjoys dinosaur movie. – Cory Woodroof, Nashville Scene

Jurassic World: Dominion opens in theaters on June 10, 2022.

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'Jurassic World Dominion' Review: Messy Franchise Finale Is Streaming Now

The last Jurassic Park movie is all over the place, and you can check it out on Peacock.

Bryce Dallas Howard gets some of the best scenes in Jurassic World Dominion.

I was in a toy store the other day, and I saw a toy for tiny tots: a cutesy dinosaur with a Jurassic Park sticker on it. It struck me that the kids the toy is aimed at probably weren't born when the last Jurassic World film was released, let alone when Steven Spielberg's original '90s classic came out. And that sums up Jurassic World Dominion -- a familiar logo slapped on a toy that makes no sense at all.

Released in theaters in June, Jurassic World Dominion is streaming on Peacock now, having been released Sept. 2 with extra footage. It's the sixth and final film in the franchise (for now) and unites the stars of the original movies -- Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum -- with the stars of the more recent Jurassic World films: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and, er, some other people. It should be the culmination of a series that for decades has delighted fans and inspired people's interest in dinosaurs.

And sure, this hyperactive, overstuffed widescreen blockbuster is certainly a T. rex-size bucket of popcorn. But if you're emotionally invested in these characters, this world of dinosaurs and humans co-existing, then Dominion doesn't know what to do with you.

The last time we saw the Jurassic World crew was 2018. Fallen Kingdom led to the biggest cliffhanger in the whole franchise, finally fulfilling the threat that's hovered over the series since the beginning: The dinosaurs are out! That promised a sixth and final Jurass-equel that would be the biggest and most bananas yet. Forget about reality, dinosaurs rule the Earth! The gloves are off! Look out, humans!

Exit, pursued by a dinosaur.

Except not really. Dominion boasts some cool opening images, like dinosaur cowboys and pterodactyl nests atop skyscrapers. But the film wimps out on that bonkers premise, rowing back the dino-plague to just a few isolated locations and a dark web of breeders, poachers and heavily tattooed cockfighters. Instead, a whole new and unexpected menace is introduced that gives the film a startlingly scary early image, but feels like kind of a sidestep from what should be the main peril. Which is that dinosaurs rule the frickin' Earth.

Co-writer Emily Carmichael cameos as an autograph hunter fangirling over Jeff Goldblum, and you can at least sense the giddy love for the Jurassic series in the whirlwind of action and jokes. But in the hands of co-writer and director Colin Trevorrow that giddiness pinballs all over the place in a script that can't seem to concentrate. It's a Western (with dinosaurs). It's a spy movie (with dinosaurs). It's a Westworld -esque corporate sci-fi conspiracy chiller (with... actually, that bit could've done with more dinosaurs). Dominion tries to be not just a climax to the Jurassic Park series, but also some kind of frenzied culmination of every blockbuster ever. Only with dinosaurs.

No time to dinosaur

The first half is a James Bond film, with globe-trotting undercover agents and shady brokers and a Jason Bourne-esque Mediterranean motorcycle/rooftop chase. Dominion does eventually turns into an actual Jurassic Park movie, with stars dangling precariously in crashed vehicles while a Doyouthinkhesaurus sniffs them out. Bryce Dallas Howard in particular gets a couple of creepily tense scenes. But the whole thing suffers from genre whiplash, struggling to grasp onto the kind of nerve-shredding set pieces that made the original movie(s) so unforgettable. Watch the first Jurassic Park and tell me it would've been improved by a knife fight. 

In the hands of director Steven Spielberg, the first Jurassic Park was a glossy blockbuster full of suspense and action, while underpinned by unforgettable characters. And it also had a sly B-movie sense of gallows humor, like that bit where the snivelly lawyer got eaten on the toilet. Dominion doesn't have either the characters or the sense of black comedy. By this point, the characters are all basically the same heroic good guy, with no selfish or untrustworthy or cowardly characters adding texture and suspense. When all the characters are people we know and supposedly love, the action scenes turn into an unwieldy scrum of a group of eight or nine people shuffling around together, with little sense that anyone can do anything unpredictable or that anything unexpected will happen to any of them. If only the film had the conviction to show the heroes being warped by their experiences, or even the courage to have the core cast get eaten. Anything to add some conflict, some unpredictability, anything.

Kayla Watts, Maisie Lockwood, Claire Dearing, Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ellie Sattler and Owen Grady meet a smiling Giganotosaurus.

The film also doesn't really know how to unite the two generations of Jurassic stars, shoving them into a room together and letting them awkwardly stare at each other. There's a lot of "I read your book!" and an eye-rollingly shoehorned "I knew your mother," but really only Goldblum sparks in these overpopulated scenes. The film just can't think of a compelling reason these people need to meet. Compare it with Spider-Man: No Way Home , another nostalgia play merging former generations of a long-running franchise. No Way Home at least came up with affecting emotional problems and cathartic payoffs for Andrew Garfield and Tobey Maguire. By comparison, even with Laura Dern gamely giving it her best shot, the encounter between Park and World stars is disappointingly inert.

One welcome addition is B.D. Wong, the scientist from the first film who's popped up in enough of these things to become a tragic figure, tortured by his mistakes. He's the closest thing to an actual human person, and carries the original film's themes of scientific folly and hubris on his shoulders. We don't see much of him, though: As if the cast wasn't padded enough with old faces, there's also a ton of new characters. 

DeWanda Wise's swaggering Han Solo-esque rough diamond pilot is entertaining but never going to do anything unexpected, and oddly sidelines Chris Pratt during the action stuff. Meanwhile, there's no need for not one but two icy evil women villains, or a succession of nothing-y henchmen -- especially as they all have a habit of just disappearing from the story.

But then there are the real stars: the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs will never get old. Still, one of the strengths of the first film was the way it set up certain dinosaurs and their traits, leaving us watching through our fingers as we waited for those lethal traits to be employed against our heroes. Whether it was T. rexes seeing movement or velociraptors getting behind you (clever girl), each action sequence was given a nerve-shredding jolt of tension because we knew what the dinosaurs were capable of. In Dominion, dinos are just kind of there. Paleontology fans will no doubt get a kick out of the assorted creatures (especially the ones with feathers) but it's a missed opportunity to layer in suspense for the average viewer.

By this point, dinosaurs from all different paleontological eras are crashing about the place, with spinosauruses and giganotosauruses and tyrannosauruses going nuts at each other. If you learn anything from the Jurassic Park series, it's that mixing eras is madness. And yet Jurassic World Dominion splices nostalgic eras and movie genres and just about any other DNA it can lay its hands on. The result is a primordial soup of a few entertaining scares, but it's 65 million years away from making any sense.

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Jurassic World Dominion review: Is it a satisfying end to the Jurassic saga?

No spoilers here.

Legacy sequels are all the rage these days, but to be fair to Jurassic World , the series has been doing it since before it was cool.

Back in 2015, the first movie brought back Dr Henry Wu (BD Wong) to bridge the gap between the original trilogy and the new one. Dr Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) joined the party for Fallen Kingdom and now with Jurassic World: Dominion , they've completed the set by bringing back Drs Ellie Sattler ( Laura Dern ) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill).

It's a natural progression, rather than a cheap tactic to capitalise on the current trend, and it also serves another purpose. Like Avengers: Endgame and The Rise of Skywalker before it, Dominion acts as the epic finale to not just the Jurassic World trilogy, but the entire saga back to 1993's Jurassic Park .

The stage is set for Jurassic World: Dominion to do something special where all bets are off, given it's the (planned) final outing. And yet the big disappointment you'll feel is that it all ends up being overfamiliar and just another Jurassic movie, albeit an entertaining one.

It's not just the meeting of the two casts that make Jurassic World: Dominion a potentially unique offering either. Set four years after Fallen Kingdom , it opens with the world in an entirely different place after dinosaurs were let loose in the sequel's cliffhanger ending.

The 2019 short Battle At Big Rock and last year's prologue had given us a sense of the new world order, but if you hadn't seen them, an opening news reel sets the scene. While there have been dino attacks, they've largely retreated to natural habitats so it's not like in this world, you'd see a raptor on your way to Asda.

While it might make more logical sense, we are talking about a series where Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) can outrun a raptor. We're happy to have a suspension of disbelief about the Jurassic movies, so a plot about a real-world battle between dinos and humans could have worked – and be more interesting than what Dominion ends up being about.

The movie is split into two strands, with one following Claire and Owen (Chris Pratt) as they try to keep Maisie (Isabella Sermon) safe. In the other, Ellie, Alan and Ian investigate the shady dealings at BioSyn which is now run by another Jurassic Park character, Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott, a recast from the original).

As you'd expect, these two distinct strands eventually come together as heroes from past and present team up to save the day. It takes a while for this to happen though, and when it does, it feels less like a finale to the series and more like another outing where a 'controlled' environment turns out to not be quite so safe.

What also becomes apparent during the extended build-up is that there's one set of characters you prefer, and it isn't the Jurassic World ones. It's not just the emotional nostalgia of seeing Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum back together – their characters are richer and their interplay more engaging.

Even the script seems to like the legacy characters more as Goldblum gets the best lines, especially when he becomes the comic relief in the final third. It's actually a Jurassic World newbie in DeWanda Wise as Kayla Watts who comes the closest to being as strong as the legacy cast.

Bryce Dallas Howard has been giving a good arc and development for Claire across the three movies, but Chris Pratt's Owen has been saddled with bland action-hero stylings, something that continues here. Together, they lack chemistry and it's made more apparent by the re-arrival of Alan and Ellie.

Yes, we've technically known the original trio for three decades, but we've had three movies with Claire and Owen, and we should care more. Perhaps it's because they never really are in danger, unlike in the original Jurassic Park movie. There's so much plot armour in Dominion that even during an 'Bourne, but with dinos' sequence in Malta, you know that they'll both survive with barely a scratch.

As much as the threequel delivers the big-screen spectacle you expect, it's when things are stripped back that it's more effective. Dominion leans into the horror more though to evoke the original movie's terrifying set pieces, with tense sequences in an amber mine and in the forest of the BioSyn sanctuary. (None can hold a candle to that T-Rex sequence though.)

Returning director Colin Trevorrow – who also wrote the script with Emily Carmichael – smartly keeps the fan service subtler than expected as well. There are nods throughout and sure to be more found on repeat viewings, but relatively few 'Hey, you remember this moment, right?' beats.

When Dominion does lean on the past, such as in a recreation of the iconic "don't move" sequence, you remember you're actually watching the culmination of a franchise. There's just nothing particularly surprising about events or a major swing that will be discussed endlessly by fans. It has a sense of finality, but more of an ellipsis than a full stop.

Perhaps that's for the best as we know that this probably isn't the end of the Jurassic saga. We're not even disappointed about that as there are new characters we'd want to see more of, especially Kayla who proves to be a terrific addition to the franchise.

What is disappointing though is that for all the trumpeting about it being the finale of three decades' worth of storytelling, Jurassic World: Dominion never ends up being that impactful. It's entertaining, sure, but ends up feeling too safe and samey for its own good.

Jurassic World: Dominion is out now in cinemas.

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Movies Editor, Digital Spy  Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor.  Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies , attending genre festivals around the world.   After moving to Digital Spy , initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.  

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‘Jurassic World Dominion’ Review: Extinction Rebellion

Things get very hectic in the last episode of this trilogy, which brings back familiar faces (Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, Sam Neill) along with the usual dinosaurs.

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By A.O. Scott

“Jurassic World Dominion” starts with a nod to “The Deadliest Catch”: A marine reptile snacks on king crabs in the Bering Sea before turning its jaws on a trawler and its crew. Yikes! Then a mock newscast swiftly brings us up-to-date on the global catastrophe that began to unfold almost 30 years ago in the first “Jurassic Park” movie. In case you need a refresher, how it started was with Richard Attenborough rhapsodizing about the wonders of life; how it’s going is that the big lizards are everywhere, generally bringing out the worst in people.

It would be nice if those reanimated monsters inspired better movies. The “Jurassic” brand, born in Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel , promises bone-rattling action and sublime reptilian special effects infused with pop pseudoscience and bioethical chin-scratching. The second trilogy, which started in 2015, hasn’t quite lived up to that promise. “Dominion,” directed by Colin Trevorrow, might be a little better than its two predecessors ( “Jurassic World” and “Fallen Kingdom” ), but in ways that underline the hectic incoherence of the whole enterprise.

However: Jeff Goldblum is back, as the “chaotician” Dr. Ian Malcolm, more seductively lizardy than the dinosaurs themselves. Ian is reunited with his “Jurassic Park” frenemies Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). Ellie has been married and divorced and made a name for herself in the field of genetic something or other. Alan is still carrying a torch for her. Yes, he’s in love with her, but what I mean to say is that he literally carries a torch, to light their way through an old amber mine deep in the Dolomites.

That rocky bit of Italy is where the fiercest, biggest ancient predators now live, in a preserve built and supervised by Lewis Dodgson, an evil tech/pharma billionaire played by Campbell Scott. He seems nice enough at first — his company, Biosyn, claims to be protecting the dinosaurs out of the goodness of its corporate heart, and also curing disease, feeding the world and so on — but nobody except a naïve scientist is likely to be fooled. There are too many tells. Lewis’s silver hair is combed flat against his scalp, and he wears collarless shirts and soft jackets in rarefied neutral tones like ecru, pewter and mother-of-walrus. His very speech patterns suggest libertarianism run amok.

As it happens, Lewis has bioengineered a plague of giant locusts, with the help of Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong), another revenant from the earlier “Jurassic Park” movies. Biosyn has also kidnapped Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the cloned avatar of a famous scientist.

To make a very long story as short as I can: For the past few years, Maisie has been in the care of Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who have been with the franchise since “Jurassic World” and who have less and less to do. Well, that’s not quite fair. It’s just that everybody else is more interesting, both the old-timers and the newcomers. Mamoudou Athie and DeWanda Wise are both better than they need to be in cookie-cutter parts. She’s Kayla Watts, a tough, cynical cargo pilot, and he’s Ramsay Cole, a smooth techie minion. They both end up pretty much where you expect they will. Kayla is someone you might hope to see in her own movie.

Pratt and Howard, bless them, are the designated action figures, who do a lot of the running and jumping and fast driving. There is a complicated chase through the narrow streets of a picturesque Mediterranean seaport, which is only tangentially related to dinosaurs but which might remind you, not unpleasantly, of a Jason Bourne movie. Other chases happen in mud, rain, snow and gloom of night, and also along the sleek, curving corridors of a high-tech research facility.

This is a very crowded movie — so many species of dinosaur, and I’m so bad at keeping track of them that my 8-year-old self is no longer speaking to me. They are variously menacing, ravenous, bizarre and kind of cute, but the frenzied live-action and digital special effects rarely produce moments of Spielbergian awe.

Within the world of “Dominion,” the dinosaurs are no big deal. The message seems to be that human beings need to learn to live with them, accepting the occasional pet-mauling or boat-devouring as the price of coexistence. Is this utopian or dystopian? A vision of ecological harmony or of genetically engineered apocalypse? A metaphor for Covid or just a sign of imaginative exhaustion?

Jurassic World Dominion Rated PG-13. Lizard-brain stuff. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Review: Overlong franchise finale ‘Jurassic World Dominion’ falls short of veloci-rapture

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“This isn’t about us.” The words arrive late — much too late — into “Jurassic World Dominion,” an underimagined, overlong goodbye to this phase, at least, of a blockbuster franchise that’s overdue for extinction. The speaker is making an obvious point (it’s about the dinosaurs, stupid), but also, in context, a pretty disingenuous one.

Once upon a Michael Crichton-loving epoch — exactly 29 summers ago, when Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” conquered the box office — these giant prehistoric reptiles effortlessly stirred our collective awe, terror and wonderment. But those days now feel as distant as the Late Cretaceous epoch, and this sixth series installment, ostensibly another Mother Nature cautionary tale, feels awfully human-centric and human-driven. For better and for worse, it is about us.

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What this means, practically speaking, is that you’ll spend much of the movie’s 147-minute running time watching seven or eight co-protagonists running around another mad scientist’s dinosaur farm, where bioethical boundaries are once again crossed and security measures are once again doomed to fail.

Chris Pratt is back as that genial raptor whisperer Owen Grady, as is Bryce Dallas Howard as his dino rights-defending better half, Claire. The more exciting news, if you can call it news, is that Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum are reunited for the first time since 1993’s “Jurassic Park” — a fan-service coup that almost compensates for the dim reality of how little they’ve been given to do.

From a narrative standpoint, the most important figure here is Owen and Claire’s adopted daughter, Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the 13-year-old product of a human cloning experiment whose precious genetic code may hold the key to human survival. And survival is key, now that the dinosaurs have broken past their various man-made barriers and migrated all over the planet.

After the relentless claustrophobia of the previous film, 2018’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” there’s a certain relief in seeing these creatures free to roam the planet they once ruled; witness the majestic sight of a friendly, wrinkly apatosaurus experiencing what appears to be its first taste of snow.

That striking image aside, it’s a grave new world indeed. Fishing boats are capsized by creatures from the deep. Winged pteranodons attack from above without warning, and it’s a pter-rible sight indeed.

A deep-pocketed biotech firm called Biosyn has stepped up to provide the dinosaurs with a high-tech mountain sanctuary, and just in case you thought that might be a good thing, the company is run by an eccentric megalomaniac (a perfectly hissable Campbell Scott) whose name, Lewis Dodgson, will jog every “Jurassic Park” fan’s memory. And if all that weren’t enough, a plague of genetically modified giant locusts has descended on farms and fields, threatening to wipe out most of the world’s food supply.

Maybe it’s my entomophobia talking, but in a movie about dinosaurs, it’s funny that it takes a swarm of oversize insects to induce even the mildest case of the shivers. Still, for a while, “Jurassic World Dominion” holds your attention, and it does so less insultingly than 2015’s franchise reboot “Jurassic World,” a vapid, hugely profitable foray into blockbuster filmmaking for its director, Colin Trevorrow.

After contributing to the script for 2018’s mildly superior “Fallen Kingdom,” Trevorrow is back at the helm for “Dominion” and clearly determined to engineer his own nostalgia-tickling clone of a grandly old-fashioned Spielberg entertainment.

That’s a tall order, but Trevorrow and his co-writer, Emily Carmichael, do an initially serviceable job of keeping the story’s many unwieldy parts in diverting motion. Much of the first half plays like a globe-trotting espionage thriller, as Owen and Claire get swept up in a kidnapping, a raptor-napping, car chases through the streets of Malta and a brief glimpse inside the ever-growing dinosaur black market, which is sadly not called “Dinos ‘R’ Us.”

The genre template is obvious, but for a “Jurassic” arc, it’s almost novel. It also generates the movie’s one remotely thrilling sequence, involving Owen, a couple of friendly-as-they-sound Atrociraptors and a rusty beater of a plane piloted by the whip-smart Kayla Watts (a very welcome DeWanda Wise).

Meanwhile, the movie busies itself getting the original “Jurassic Park” gang back together, staging a tentative romance between scientists Dr. Ellie Sattler (Dern) and Dr. Alan Grant (Neill) under the least romantic possible circumstances (genetically modified giant locusts!), and then shipping them off to Biosyn’s remote facilities for some undercover snooping.

There’s fleeting pleasure in these scenes, especially once John Williams’ original theme kicks in and that merry theoretician of chaos, Dr. Ian Malcolm (Goldblum), shows up, wisecracks at the ready. But this is also where tedium sets in, long before the finish, as all the good guys — which is most of the cast, including Mamoudou Athie as a conflicted Biosyn employee — wind up on a long and repetitive collision course, in which scene after scene plays out with zero wit, tension or surprise.

OK, that’s not entirely true. It is surprising, or at least dispiriting, to see an actor as nimble as Omar Sy ( “Lupin” ) wasted in a few forgettable action scenes. Sadder still is the reduction of a once-proud antagonist, Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong), to a series of self-flagellating “Oh, God. Sorry I unleashed a plague of genetically modified giant locusts” monologues.

For all that, and despite Dodgson’s unambiguous villainy, “Jurassic World Dominion” plays at times like a feature-length biotech promo, anchored by the sight of young Maisie contemplating her own miracle-baby origins and a lot of earnest encomiums about the power of genetic engineering to save us all.

It’s about us, in other words, notwithstanding the movie’s imbecilic “Circle of Life”-style hymn to the wonders of interspecies coexistence. And because it’s about us — well, us and the genetically modified giant locusts — the dinosaurs themselves fade even further into insignificance.

It’s astonishing how little tension or even momentary menace Trevorrow is able to mine from individual action sequences, how tame even T. rex now seems in its late-franchise dotage. The mix of practical and computer-generated effects used to bring these behemoths to life has evolved by leaps and bounds, but their ability to stir and scare us — much less provoke even a moment’s thought — is a thing of the ancient past.

'Jurassic World Dominion'

Rating: PG-13, for intense sequences of action, some violence and language Running time: 2 hours, 27 minutes Playing: Starts June 10 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Review: Dino delight 'Jurassic World Dominion' is the best since the first 'Jurassic Park'

After so many “Jurassic Park” and “Jurassic World” movies spent trying to keep dinosaurs isolated in poorly executed high-tech sanctuaries, it’s nice to see a thunder lizard drop by a drive-in movie theater for a bite.

Director Colin Trevorrow’s “Jurassic World Dominion” (★★★ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters now) is a globe-trotting action adventure that awesomely imagines a world having to come to grips with rampaging dinos big and small living among humans – at least until the movie shifts its focus to yet another sanctuary full of cloned creatures, another shady tech company and another climactic primal showdown.

Although overly familiar, “Dominion” boasts everything you’d ever want in a “Jurassic” film and is the best in the series since the original 1993 movie. (That said, apart from Steven Spielberg's wondrous opener , this is not exactly a high bar.) The plot brings together the original “Park” heroes – a joy to meet again – and the newer “World” crew to essentially wrap up the current trilogy and the franchise so far.

'It's truly remarkable': 'Jurassic World' dads Chris Pratt, Jeff Goldblum on witnessing childbirth

All those warnings in the first “Jurassic Park” about playing with science come to fruition at the beginning of “Dominion,” which deftly uses an internet video to show how life on Earth has been affected by an influx of dinosaurs.

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The new film picks up four years after the beasts escaped the destruction of Isla Nublar (see: 2018’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" ), and returning characters Owen Grady ( Chris Pratt ) and Claire Dearing ( Bryce Dallas Howard ) are now a couple living in the Sierra Nevada as adoptive parents to Maisie (Isabella Sermon), the clone girl who released the dinos into the wild in the previous film. Much to her tween angst, the adults keep her hidden away from people who’d want to capture her for scientific purposes, but she gets kidnapped anyway alongside Beta, the spawn of Owen’s Velociraptor pal Blue.

Meanwhile, evolved dino-locusts are doing a number on crops in the Midwest. Fearing a worldwide famine on the horizon, paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) reaches out to old paleontologist friend – and fellow OG Jurassic Park survivor – Alan Grant (Sam Neill) for help. During their investigation, they get an invite to the remote Italian mountain headquarters of Biosyn Genetics, where dinos from all over the world are taken. Mathematician Ian Malcolm ( Jeff Goldblum ) is the in-house philosopher, and he gives Ellie and Alan the lowdown on the corporation and the morally and ethically questionable practices of its CEO (Campbell Scott).

'Appropriate at the time': Laura Dern, Sam Neill reflect on 'Jurassic Park' romance's age gap

It takes a while, but the parallel story lines in Trevorrow and Emily Carmichael’s screenplay do come together for a “Jurassic” super team-up that’s pretty nifty to see, especially the long-awaited reunion between Dern and Neill’s characters. The coolest new character joining the bunch is Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), a cargo pilot – and fun, swagger-filled twist on the Indiana Jones/Han Solo archetype – who helps Owen and Claire on their rescue mission. If the next trilogy ends up being “Jurassic Space,” let’s hope she’s at the wheel.

If you come to the “Jurassic” movies for the dinos (and let’s face it, that’s a lot of folks), there are plenty of species to be had – 27, in fact. The T. rex is back, naturally, although it gets a large new foe on the block with the debuting Giganotosaurus. Atrociraptors are used as precision killing machines in a spectacular motorcycle chase scene set in Malta – think something out of “Mission: Impossible,” but replacing Tom Cruise with speedy reptiles – and a winged Quetzalcoatlus does a number on Kayla’s plane. The creature effects are all top notch, especially the eerie mega-locust swarms.

Other than a T. rex getting loose in San Diego for a little while in the second “Jurassic Park,” the franchise hasn’t really leaned into dinos wrecking stuff in the real world – and mankind being thrown by having to share the Earth – so those moments early on in “Dominion” feel inventive. Yet the science veers pretty wonky and, while still mostly exciting, the film tends back toward the romping-and-stomping template we’ve seen previously.

In that vein, the new “Jurassic World” is more “Return of the Jedi” than “Empire Strikes Back,” giving fans a comfort-food finale that plays a few fresh numbers, but mainly sticks to the hits.

‘Jurassic World Dominion’ Should Mark the Extinction of the Popular Dinosaur Franchise

Even combining the casts of ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘Jurassic World’ is not enough to save this prehistoric franchise from going extinct.

Bryce Dallas Howard in Universal Pictures' ‘Jurassic World Dominion.’

Opening in theaters on June 10th is the third chapter of the ‘ Jurassic World ’ trilogy and the sixth movie overall in the ‘ Jurassic Park ’ franchise entitled ‘ Jurassic World Dominion .’ Directed by ‘Jurassic World’s Colin Trevorrow , the new film brings returning cast members Chris Prat t, Bryce Dallas Howard , Isabella Sermon , Justice Smith , and Omar Sy back along with ‘Jurassic Park’ actors Jeff Goldblum , Sam Neill , Laura Dern , and BD Wong .

‘Dominion’ takes place four years after the events of ‘ Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ’ and the destruction of Isla Nublar. Dinosaurs now live and hunt alongside humans all over the world. The result is an absolutely incoherent movie lacking any fun or excitement, that completely waists the talents of the returning legacy franchise actors.

The movie begins by showing us the destruction and chaos that living among dinosaurs has caused since the events of the last film. Owen (Pratt) and Claire (Howard) are living in seclusion, raising the cloned Maisie Lockwood (Sermon) as their own daughter, as well as keeping an eye on Blue and her new baby Velociraptor. However, Dr. Lewis Dodgson ( Campbell Scott ) of Biosyn Genetics, has hired a team of mercenaries to hunt down and retrieve Maisie and Blue’s baby. After they are taken, Owen and Claire go on a mission to save the missing children.

Meanwhile, giant locust is destroying the food chain, which will eventually result in the extinction of mankind if something is not done about it. Dr. Ellie Sattler (Dern) discovers the locust’s destruction and realizes that it is somehow connected to Biosyn. She visits her old friend and partner, Dr. Alan Grant (Neill) seeking his help to expose Biosyn. He agrees, and the two head to the company’s secret headquarters but they will need help from the inside to gain access.

Enter Dr. Ian Malcolm (Goldblum), who is a guest lecturer working for Dodgson at his facility, but secretly working with Sattler to expose Biosyn for creating the giant locust. As the two groups converge on Biosyn, they will soon meet for the first time and have to work together to take down Dodgson and save Maisie and Blue’s baby.

Chris Pratt in Universal Pictures' ‘Jurassic World Dominion.’

While I did enjoy the first two Steven Spielberg directed movies in the franchise, ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘ The Lost World: Jurassic Park ,’ I’ve never been a huge fan of the series. ‘ Jurassic Park III ’ did very little to continue the magic of the original two, and I thought the franchise would go extinct after that. Just about fourteen-years later the series returned with ‘Jurassic World,’ which was sort of a fresh start with a new cast but became derivative of the original by about halfway through.

Then came ‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,’ which I thought “jumped the shark” with its introduction of human cloning to the franchise. I was hoping that ‘Dominion’ would ignore that plotline and redeem itself in this “so-called” conclusion to the franchise, but unfortunately it doubled down on it and delivered an even worse movie than the last one. Completely gone is the magic and wonder that we felt the first time we saw dinosaurs in ‘Jurassic Park,’ now replaced with CGI monsters that terrify the human characters but can actually leave the audience nauseated and even bored at times.

I really thought that if they were going to continue the cloning plotline, that they’d find a way to clone Dr. Ian Malcom, so we could have double Goldblum this time around, which would have actually been kind of genius. But alas that did not happen, in fact, Jeff Goldblum’s role is rather small. Not as small as his cameo in ‘Fallen Kingdom,’ but he is relegated back to a supporting character, as he was in the original, and not the lead that he was in ‘Lost World.’ I would have preferred the actor had a larger role, but I understand that the filmmakers wanted to focus on Owen and Claire, and Alan and Ellie’s relationships instead. That being said, Goldblum’s talents were once again wasted in this film.

The same can be said for Laure Dern and Sam Neill, who deserved a better film to mark their return to these characters. Dern has the largest role of the two and does her best to make the most of it but is ultimately crippled by the screenplay’s lack of originality. There are some nice character driven moments between Dern and Neill, and it is sweet seeing the couple from the first film reunite all these years later. But again, like Goldblum (who gives an uninspired nod to his shirtless scene from the original), Dern and Neill are mostly used for fan-service and unfortunately, have their talents wasted too.

(L to R) Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) and Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise) in 'Jurassic World Dominion,' co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow.

Among the new characters, DeWanda Wise gives a strong performance as Kayla Watts, a helicopter pilot who helps Owen and Claire. The actress creates a compelling character that unfortunately would be best served in a different movie. Campbell Scott plays Dr. Lewis Dodgson, who was seen briefly in the first film but was played by a different performer. Scott, who is a veteran actor, is absolutely ridiculous as the movie’s big bad, and plays the role like a terrible Bond villain. Also awful is Scott Haze (‘ Venom ’) as probably the world’s dumbest assassin who also happens to be wearing the worst wig I’ve ever seen!

As for Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, I love them both as performers and they both do their best with the limiting material. Their likability as actors carries them through a lot of the film’s plot holes and most ridiculous moments and you are rooting for them throughout, not just to survive as characters, but you are also hoping that as actors they might be able to save the movie. Ultimately, they can’t, but it’s through no fault of their own.

Pratt’s at his best in the action scenes, but also in the quieter moments with Claire, Maisie, Blue and “Baby Blue,” who is super cute! While Howard had a more pivotal role than in the previous movies and is featured front and center in one of the film’s most compelling sequences.

In the end, the ‘Jurassic’ franchise was bound to go extinct eventually, and ‘Jurassic World Dominion’ seems like the asteroid that will kill this beloved series of films. With an incoherent script by Emily Carmichael and Colin Trevorrow, and uninspired directing from Trevorrow as well, not even the likability of Pratt and Howard, or teaming them with legacy actors Dern, Neill and Goldblum was enough to save this prehistoric mess!

(L to R) Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) and Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise) in 'Jurassic World Dominion,' co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow.

‘Jurassic World Dominion' receives 1.5 out of 5 stars.

Jurassic World Dominion

Jami Philbrick has worked in the entertainment industry for over 20 years and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Moviefone.com. Formally, Philbrick was the Managing Editor of Relativity Media's iamROGUE.com, and a Senior Staff Reporter and Video Producer for Mtime, China's largest entertainment website. He has also written for Fandango, MovieWeb, and Comic Book Resources. Philbrick received the 2019 International Media Award at the 56th annual ICG Publicists Awards, and is a member of the Critics Choice Association. He has interviewed such talent as Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Dwayne Johnson, Scarlett Johansson, Angelina Jolie, Oprah Winfrey, Quentin Tarantino, and Stan Lee.

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