Jurassic World: Dominion tries to be every Jurassic film at once

Five films in, Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World: Dominion wants to close the saga, fold in the 1993 cast for the first time on screen since the start, and graft a corporate-conspiracy thriller about genetically modified locusts onto a franchise built on dinosaurs. The strain shows. So does the ambition.

Four years after Isla Nublar collapsed, dinosaurs share the planet with everyone else. They hunt in the snow, sleep on rooftops, ride freight trains. Dominion sets up that uneasy coexistence and then mostly steps around it. The plot it actually tells is a corporate one: Biosyn, the genomics company that has spent the franchise on the margins, is breeding modified locusts that threaten the global food supply. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) chase a kidnapped child. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) chase the paper trail. The two stories meet halfway through, in the Italian Dolomites.

Trevorrow co-wrote the script with Emily Carmichael and shot a long stretch of the second half on real sets at Pinewood and on location in Malta. The choice to lean on practical staging instead of green-screen wherever possible is the most defensible decision in the picture; the dinosaurs read as weight rather than as glow.

This is a finale that wants to honour the saga it inherited. Dern, Goldblum and Neill are not deployed as cameos. They drive a third of the film, and the writing gives them room to play older versions of the people they were in 1993 rather than mascots wheeled out for fan service. Sattler examines a locust under a hand lens. Malcolm delivers one of his arched monologues to a campus lecture hall. The scenes work because the actors are allowed to act.

The set-pieces are the saga at full volume. The Malta sequence, with raptors leaping across tiled rooftops in a near-continuous take, is the most kinetic stretch of action the Jurassic World films have produced. Michael Giacchino plays the John Williams motifs straight when they are needed and pulls them back when they would crowd the shot.

The film’s deeper problem is structural. Two films are stitched together here, and each gets the screen time the other one needed. The locust plot wants a thriller’s rhythm; the dinosaur plot wants spectacle. The Biosyn campus sequence in the third act is the best argument Dominion makes for its own existence and also the moment its seams are most visible.

Whether the finale lands depends on what a viewer brings to a fifth Jurassic film. As a closer it is generous to a fault. As a single picture it is louder than it is shaped.

Tags: Bryce Dallas Howard, jurassic world, Chris Pratt, Colin Trevorrow, Jeff Goldblum, jurassic park