There’s a scene in the latest “Jurasssic” film – Jurassic World Dominion – that seems to sum up everything that’s good and bad about the film. Our hero – or rather one of our several stellar heroes – is racing through the narrow alleyways of Malta with not only bad guys on his tail, but also several modified, lethal dinosaurs.
I mean, wow, right?
When did Jurassic World stop being cautionary tales about arrogant scientists playing God, and turn into a sort of mashup of a Jason Bourne story with digital monsters attached?
Photo: Universal Pictures
Though to be fair to this film, many of these dinosaurs are gigantic, animatronic models. And the puppetry involved is pretty impressive.
You can’t say that Jurassic World Dominion thinks small. There was an entire opening sequence of various dinos of various states of plausibility bashing away at each other back in the first Jurassic Age.
That scene seems to have been relegated to appearance in trailers only, possibly crowded out by everything else.
Well, let’s try and marshal the several plot-lines. You may, or may not, remember that in the last Jurassic World film, young Maisie released the last surviving dinosaurs into the wild.
She then went into hiding with lovable Owen and Claire – Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. They also adopted Owen’s faithful raptor Blue.
Against all odds, Blue’s had a baby, despite – like all these dinosaurs – having no mate. But it seems dinosaurs don’t need a mate to populate the Earth. As eccentric chaos theory academic Ian Malcolm says, life finds a way.
Yes, Ian Malcolm from the first films is back.
Incidentally is there any actor less likely than Jeff Goldblum to be playing a character called “Ian Malcolm”, who sounds like someone who went to school with Boris Johnson?
Anyway, if Malcolm is on deck, can the rest of the initial trio be far behind? Come in Laura Dern as genius scientist Ellie Sattler, and Sam Neill as noble fossil hunter Alan Grant.
They’ve been roped in because people are kidnapping dinosaurs from all over the world – I think I’ve got this right – and selling them at an unsavoury dino slave market in – why not? – Malta.
And worse, they’re being sent to a giant dinosaur prison farm, run by unscrupulous scientists, who are planning to do something ecologically wrong with them.
These dodgy scientists – led, coincidentally, by a scientist actually called Lewis Dodgson – have already kidnapped both Blue’s dinosaur daughter, and young Maisie for their own nefarious reasons.
Meanwhile…. Well meanwhile there’s a lot going on, punctuated by increasingly exotic dinosaurs. Dinosaurs you have some difficulty getting your head around.
There are furry ones, feathered ones, flying ones, gigantic swimming ones – dinosaurs all over the place.
And speaking of all over the place, the plot seems to be several exercises in separating the film’s stars for as long as possible, before finally allowing them to team up.
We’ve got the Jurassic World people - Owen and Claire – chasing after their kidnapped foster child Maisie and her pet dinosaur.
There’s the older Jurassic Park couple Ellie and Alan chasing after rogue scientists somewhere else, and stopping along the way to fall in love again.
Meanwhile in another part of the plot, Ian Malcolm is playing a game of his own, working for the dodgy Dodgson – or is he?
And all the time – lest we forget – there are all manner of gigantic dinosaurs coming at them from all sides. How come there are so many of them, we wonder? I know life finds a way, but really?
Jurassic World Dominion was famous for being about the only film of this size still in production when the world was in lockdown.
Like the first dinosaurs in the first Jurassic Park itself it was a miracle it got made at all. But the producers were never satisfied with what they had.
Everyone in Jurassic World Dominion is perfectly fine – the actors, the digital wizards conjuring up half the dinosaurs, the animatronic wizards creating the other half. It just needed to be scaled back a bit. Bigger so rarely is automatically better.
