by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night shortly after 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the sixth and most recent film in the Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment Jurassic Park sequence, Jurassic World: Dominion. (Actually the title does not have a colon – it’s just Jurassic World Dominion – but it looks too weird to me not to have the colon there.) The title comes from God’s injunction to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” But the whole point of the movie is that there was nothing foretold, either through God’s word at the Creation or anything else, that guaranteed human beings perpetual dominion over the Earth. Whatever led to the total obliteration of the dinosaurs – and the current scientific consensus is that it was a one-time collision with an asteroid or a giant meteor that so radically altered Earth’s climate that they could no longer survive – paved the way for the ascendancy of mammals in general and primates in particular. Jurassic World: Dominion opens with a spectacular prologue showing the dinosaurs at war and at play. Director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow bathes it in such a rich autumnal glow I couldn’t help but be reminded of the “Dawn of Man” prologue in Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey and joke, “Where are the ape-men? Where’s the monolith? And where’s Györgi Ligeti’s ‘Requiem’ on the soundtrack?”
Then we get a Lifetime-style chyron reading, “65 Million Years Later,” and 65 million years later we’re in the future envisioned at the end of the last movie in the cycle, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (directed by J. A. Bayona, but with Trevorrow getting a co-writer credit on the script). At the end of Fallen Kingdom dinosaurs are released ontoi the overall world population for the first time – and humanity has to learn to live with them (something we never had to do in reality because, despite the nuttier sorts of creationists who believe humans and dinosaurs coexisted, they never did). Among the things humans have to live with in this brave new world of dino-human cohabitation are auto and plane accidents caused by dinosaurs either attacking human vehicles or just inadvertently getting in their way. Another result hs the burgeoning of a black market in dinosaurs and their organs, centered on the island of Malta (one wonders what the filmmakers had to do to get the Maltese authorities to let them film there when the film depicts Malta as a giant moral sewer reminiscent of Shanghai in Sternberg’s films or Dry Tortuga in William Wellman’s Safe in Hell). At least one of the uses for dinosaurs in this establishment is for them to cut into pieces so their bones can be ground up into a fine powder that’s supposed to be useful as an aphrodisiac or an all-purpose cure – I suspect Trevorrow and his writing partners, Derek Connolly (story) and Emily Carmichael (screenplay), were thinking of the real-life black market in ground-up elephant tusks that, at least according to the ubiquitous fundra-sing ads for the World Wildlife Fund, threaten the very existence of elephants as a species.
The film takes its own sweet time developing a through-line, mainly becaue Trevorrow and his colleagues wanted to create a script that would reunite the leading characters from the original Jurassic Park movie from 1993 – Dr. Alan Grant (San Neill), Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) – with the ones from the two previous films in the Jurassic World wing of the franchise: raptor-wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and his life partner Claire Denning (Bryce Dallas Howard) along with their foster-daughter, Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the girl who at the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom turned the dinosaurs loose on the unsuspecting world because she couldn’t bear to see them obliterated. It turns out that Maisie is the daughter of the late Jurassic World scientist Dr. Charlotte Lockwood, only instead of having her via normal sexual means, Charlotte literally cloned herself because she realized she was going to die of a terminal illness, and she used retroviruses to fix the flaws in her DNA that had rendered her vulnerable to that disease. (This is a real thing in genetic engineering; since retroviruses reproduce by incorporating themselves into the DNA of their host cells, a lot of genetic engineers are big on the idea of deliberately infecting people with retroviruses to fix the flaws in their genome that render them vulnerable to cancer, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, sickle-cell anemia and other genetically determined maladies.)
The villains of the piece are Dr. Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott, actor son of George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst), head of a company called Bio/Syn, and the horrors he has loosed on the world by, among other things, bio-engineering giant locusts with a body length of two feet. These hellish creatures are spreading throughout the world and consuming every food grain relied on by humans either directly or indirectly through animal feed. The man behind the locust project was Dr., Henry Wu (B. D. Wong, openly Gay Chinese-American actor whom I remember having a crush on when he appeared on Law and Order:Special Victims Unit as psychiatrist Dr. George Huang, but he hasn’t weathered the years much better than I have and my main crush object on the original
The two sets of characters finally come together in Dodgson’s redoubt in the Dolomite Mountains in Italy, where he’s set up what he’s billing as a sanctuary for dinosaurs but he’s really studying them to make products he can male money off of. Maisie has been kidnapped by poachers from Owen’s and Claire’s home in the Sierra Nevada mountains, along with Beta, her pet raptor, who like Maisie herself was conceived and grown parthenogenetically. (When any of the adult characters showed physical affection for each other, Charles joked that Maisie would be thinking, “People who reproduce sexually are so gross.”) The sympathetic characters converge on Bio/Syn’s compound, and the entire second half becomes an extended chase scene in which Owen, Claire, Kayla Watts (yet another African-descended authority figure, in this case a convincing action-adventure heroine whose skills include flying the high-tech aircraft the other good guys need to effect their escape), Dr. Grant, Dr. Malcolm and Ellie all make it out of there alive. The escapees include Henry Wu, whom Malcolm wanted to leave behind because he bio-engineered the world-destroying locusts, but he’s persuaded to let Wu come with them because he’s the only one with the knowledge to undo the dire threat to human existence he created.
In the end all the good people get out alive, Dodgson is trapped on his own escape tunnel and is eaten alive by three examples of a particularly obnoxious species of revivified dinosaur with a fan-like head, the fire Dodgson set to destroy the evidence of his crimes consumes all the bad stuff in his lab, and Beta, Maisie’s pet raptor, is reunited with her raptor mom in the Sierra Nevadas. Wu’s anti-locust retrovirus works, though among the last things we see in this movie are great clouds of locusts emerging from croplands and flying in great swarms towards the sky, hopefully to oblivion. The Jurassic World: Dominion Blu-Ray “extras” include an extended version of the film (though not all that extended: according to imdb.com, the theatrical release timed out at 2 hours 27 minutes and the extended version is only about three to five minutes longer than that), an engaging 2019 short called Battle at Big Rock in which an extended and blended family (some of them Black, some Latino) who live in a trailer that gets upended by dinosaurs, and some making-of featurettes.
Among them were interviews with Colin Trevorrow and the special-effects technicians who worked on the film, whose main challenge was improving on the already convincing dinosaur effects in the original Jurassic Park from 1993 (I vividly remember seeing that in a theatre in Horton Plaza and being blown away by the effects – when Steven Spielberg bought the rights to Jurassic Park he had envisioned using a blend of digital effects and traditional stop-motion animation, but the digital scenes were so convincing he used them throughout and created a revolution in filmmaking, as stories that had seemed impossible to film now became possible). Though there is one scene in which the effects are below standard – an odd throwback to the picture-frame matte work that we saw in the original 1933 King Kong (Kong effects wizard Willis O’Brien was incredible at bringing dinosaurs and giant apes to vivid cinematic life,, but he was not always that convincing in blending them with human actors) – for the most part the dinosaurs are absolutely convincing even though the bits of “business” O’Brien and his disciple, Ray Harryhausen, gave their monsters aren’t really pursued here. Trevorrow was also especially proud of having brought together the principal cast members of both the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World “wings” of the franchise. Jurassic World: Dominion emerges as a quite efficient piece of entertainment that makes some feints at social commentary – notably original author Michael Crichton’s moral point, which he pursued in story after story, that no matter how many contingency plans people make to do big schemes, there will always be something that goes wrong, and at least a few residual swipes at greedy capitalists endangering the planet just to make money – but for the most part it’s a well-done movie but not offering anything really special.
