Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

One could argue that there was never any need whatsoever for another Jurassic Park movie after Spielberg’s 1993 original, which, almost thirty years on, is still spectacular. Unfortunately in that intervening three decades, there has been a further five films including Dominion, ranging from surprisingly enjoyable (Jurassic Park III [2001] to almost unwatchable (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom [2018]). The good news for Dominion is that it’s a better film than Fallen Kingdom. The bad news is that it remains utterly needless. Jurassic World: Dominion is the film that its predecessor should have been; dinosaurs now live among us, the balance is fragile, and guess what? An evil company wants to use the current state of things for their own gain, destroying the food chain in the process. There’s also a teenager being looked after by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in the Sierra Nevada mountains who is the cloned granddaughter of Benjamin Lockwood, a key player in the original Jurassic Park project. Her presence for most of the film is irritating to say the least; she causes her own kidnapping in the opening quarter, which leads to much of the ensuing mess. However, Dominion is nowhere near as bad as I’d expected, and although it steals from numerous films (The Mission Impossible, Alien, and James Bond franchises to name but a few) to attempt to put some perspective on the matter, it’s a far superior film than Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019). That is to say, for the final part of another trilogy in a franchise, it sticks to its own rules and doesn’t bow to outside pressure in the way the desperately weak third film in the latest Star Wars trilogy does. That said, it remains completely redundant, and almost biblical in length. At two and a half hours, it outstays its welcome by some distance, in the same way that the franchise has now done for far too long. The only Jurassic Park film that should be released in cinemas in the future are anniversary screenings of Spielberg’s original. 5.6/10