What Was The Point Of All This?

It’s downright remarkable how much the dinosaurs are pushed into the background in this film. Yes, there are plenty of dinosaurs in it, but the focus is really not nearly as much about them being part of our world now. We get news reports about them, we see some very neat shots involving the chaos they bring, but once the movie truly kicks into gear, the dinosaurs very much take a backseat to the muddy, multi-pronged plot and the human characters. The plot involves Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) having to save Blue’s baby as well as Maisie Lockwood (Isabelle Sermon), the clone girl from “Fallen Kingdom” who they’ve since adopted, from corporate overlords who wish to use them for financial gain. Owen and Claire have made a makeshift family in the woods in an attempt to keep Maisie safe. They are finally together. This relationship is a big thing within the scope of the overall narrative of this trilogy, and yet them truly being together doesn’t feel nearly as big as it should. The aimless nature of the movie doesn’t do that narrative any favors. 

But the biggest of the big things in this movie involves reuniting the original trio of Ellie (Laure Dern), Alan (Sam Neill), and Ian (Jeff Goldblum) for the first time since “Jurassic Park.” This was the biggest hand that Trevorrow had to play and it was a tantalizing hand indeed. Their storyline involves figuring out how to prove that the locusts were created by genetics corporation Biosyn, a rival to InGen. Ultimately, this rescue mission and the corporate espionage our *checks notes* dinosaur experts are involved in end up at Biosyn’s isolated plot of land where most of the world’s dinosaurs are now being kept. Yes, despite all of the hullabaloo in “Fallen Kingdom,” there is now another isolated location housing dinosaurs that humans can safely avoid. 

Unfortunately, the natural chemistry that existed between these characters in the original 1993 blockbuster classic can’t be recreated. When these characters show up there are glimmers of those wonderful feelings that Steven Spielberg’s timeless film brings, but “Dominion” simply can’t get there. The magic is gone and even the kind of forced, not-at-all-subtle “Will they? Won’t they?” between Alan and Ellie falls pretty flat. Between the dinosaurs taking a back seat in their own movie, and the long-awaited character reunion not living up to its promise, it’s hard not to wonder what could have been. Was this really the big plan from the beginning? Was this the big crescendo everyone had in mind? Was this truly the envisioned endgame?