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Summary
- Jurassic World Dominion was a financial success, but it received negative reviews and was the lowest-grossing entry in the Jurassic World franchise. It is seen as one of the worst legacy sequels ever.
- The movie failed to live up to the promises of the Jurassic World trilogy, playing it safe and lazily restoring the status quo. It missed opportunities to explore new ideas introduced in previous films.
- Jurassic World Dominion lacked depth and interest in the present and future of the franchise. Instead, it indulged in excessive nostalgia and retreated into itself, rejecting the potential for a new direction.
In 2022, Jurassic World Dominion brought both the legendary Jurassic Park series and its soft reboot, the Jurassic World trilogy, to a close. Jurassic World Dominion was a hit, and one of only three movies to earn a billion Dollars in 2022. Its trilogy was also one of the most successful franchises of the 2010s, earning upwards of three billion Dollars worldwide. However, its reception was anything but glowing. The trilogy was an exercise in diminishing returns. Jurassic World Dominion, in particular, was both the lowest-grossing Jurassic World entry and the worst-reviewed Jurassic Park movie yet. Dominion also became infamous among moviegoers, who dismissed it as one of the worst legacy sequels ever. The finale is only mockingly remembered today for its excessive nostalgia and locusts.
Jurassic World Dominion’s negative legacy made those who watched it question their perception of it. Fans wondered if they only loved it at that moment. Conversely, some detractors felt vindicated, while others felt they were too harsh on an otherwise passable dinosaur blockbuster. Not helping was how Jurassic World Dominion embodied the kinds of trends that are now despised and ridiculed by the same people who once clamored for them just a few years ago. Now that the blockbuster landscape is at a crossroads and with a paradigm shift being all but inevitable, Jurassic World Dominion has become a time capsule that needs to be analyzed more times than anyone realized.
Meg 2 Outclasses the Jurassic Park Franchise in This Major Way
Meg 2 uses prehistoric beasts to terrifying effect, and it accomplishes this far better than the comparatively tame Jurassic World Dominion.
Jurassic World Dominion Squandered Jurassic World’s Potential
Jurassic World Missed Out on a Chilling and Deadly Dinosaur
Jurassic World featured many never-before-scene dinosaurs that amazed and terrified. But the movies missed out on one that was truly terrifying.
As the conclusion to the Jurassic World trilogy, Jurassic World Dominion failed to live up to its trilogy’s promises. While it tied up Jurassic World’s loose ends and most important arcs, Jurassic World Dominion did so in the most predictable ways possible. To wit: the new main trio’s (Owen Grady, Claire Dearing, and Maisie Lockwood) familial bond was strengthened, while Blue the Velociraptor’s and Owen’s amiable parting of ways was reiterated. Similarly, Jurassic Park’s original stars (Dr. Alan Grant, Dr. Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm) saved the day, Alan and Ellie became a couple, another dinosaur park became a symbol of humanity’s hubris, and the dinosaurs proved yet again that life always found a way. These weren’t inherently bad conclusions to the trilogy’s storylines, but they were the safest bets. These were only possible because Jurassic World Dominion lazily restored the status quo.
Previously, the polarizing but undeniably ambitious Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom upended the status quo in ways Jurassic World hinted at, but never committed to. Fallen Kingdom burned Jurassic Park to the ground, killed most of the dinosaurs, revealed the existence of human clones, and unleashed the surviving dinosaurs onto civilization. These ideas were briefly explored by The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, but Fallen Kingdom was the first to follow through.
Instead of capitalizing on these, Jurassic World Dominion returned to what audiences were most familiar with. The dinosaurs’ escape was quickly brushed aside, the implications of human cloning were glossed over, and the movie focused on the latest doomed attempt to make a dinosaur zoo. The dinosaurs were once again relegated to either being fearsome monsters to run away from or innocent creatures to be adored, rather than acknowledging the threat they posed to the modern world as Fallen Kingdom posited.
Jurassic Park 3 and Jurassic World Dominion Share the Same Big Dinosaur Flaw
Both Jurassic Park 3 and Jurassic World Dominion end on sour notes, but they share another issue in the form of lackluster villains.
Worse, Jurassic World’s own characters—especially Fallen Kingdom’s newcomers Zia Rodriguez and Franklin Webb—were all but buried by Jurassic Park’s returning stars to appease angry fans who demanded more of the same. It got to the point where someone as irrelevant as Dr. Lewis Dodgson from Jurassic Park was inexplicably brought back as the franchise’s final villain. As a villain and the CEO of Biosyn, Dodgson barely stood out. He was just another amoral executive, like The Lost World: Jurassic Park’s Peter Ludlow and Fallen Kingdom’s Eli Mills, but without their originality and satirical purpose.
To hammer in this empty nostalgia, Dodgson even had Dennis Nedry’s faux can of shaving cream on a literal altar in his office. This, despite Nedry’s gory death and the can’s muddy burial blatantly symbolizing where shortsighted greed and scientific arrogance would lead to. To top it all off, Jurassic World Dominion treated Dodgson with so much respect even if he was best remembered for a joke about how nobody cared about him in Jurassic Park.
This wasn’t the first time Jurassic World turned a random background character from Jurassic Park into a key figure (i.e. Dr. Henry Wu), but Dodgson’s return was the series’ most transparently cynical example of doing so. Whatever chances Jurassic World had of using the original series as a launch pad for something new were thrown out for nostalgia’s sake by Jurassic World Dominion. Rather than take a step forward, Jurassic World Dominion caved into nostalgia and retreated into itself.
Jurassic World Dominion Was the Moment Jurassic Park Gave Up
A Dark Jurassic Park Theory Claims Those Aren’t Dinosaurs (& It Makes Sense)
A Reddit theory suggests that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are merely genetic miasma monsters made to look and act like “real” dinosaurs.
Some defended Jurassic World Dominion’s return to its comfort zones by claiming it was a knowing deconstruction of itself, the very concept of legacy sequels, and the entire Jurassic Park franchise. This take wasn’t wholly wrong, since the previous movies were coyly satirical. Jurassic World was aware of how both InGen and Universal Pictures were cynically retreading familiar ground for profit’s sake. The movie makes this clear through the characters’ sarcasm and snarky observations. Although it ended with one of the most egregious examples of fanservice seen in the 2010s (namely the T-Rex’s and Velociraptors’ team-up against the Indominus Rex), Jurassic World still laid the groundwork for something new to come after it. Meanwhile, Fallen Kingdom took this sly self-deprecation seriously by showing how repeating history and trying to control the past only ended in catastrophe. Even if its jarring third act felt like it came from a different, schlockier movie, Fallen Kingdom’s warnings of nostalgia’s dangers were consistent.
Conversely, Jurassic World Dominion deified the past and had no interest in the present and future. This wasn’t because the movie wanted to make a statement about nostalgia or modern franchises’ dead-ended preference for self-indulgence over originality, but because it had nothing to say. Jurassic World Dominion lacked its predecessors’ awareness and interest to be satirical, let alone be a decent story. In brief, Jurassic World Dominion gave up. Jurassic World Dominion was a regressive reaction to Fallen Kingdom’s intensely divisive reception and attempts to push the franchise in a new direction.
This was and still is, unfortunately, the most predictable response to legacy sequels like Fallen Kingdom, Ghostbusters (2016), or Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi. These movies tried to be more than just glorified fan films and remakes, much to the chagrin of their fans. Whether these legacy sequels were good or bad was irrelevant; all that mattered was that they somehow “blasphemed” against whatever a vicious and hateful fandom held sacred. And just like Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Star Wars: Episode IX – The Rise of Skywalker before it, Jurassic World Dominion only existed to perform an unnecessary course correction. Jurassic World Dominion spent most of its time undoing what Fallen Kingdom did, revering Jurassic Park’s stars and legacy, indulging in the spectacle of dinosaur rampages fans claimed they wanted, and remaking the events of the original Jurassic Park in its third act.
Jurassic Park’s Most Iconic Dinosaur May Have A Tragic Ending
Jurassic Park’s most iconic dinosaur, the T-Rex, could see itself struggling to survive in a modern environment, leading to its second extinction.
Fittingly, Jurassic World Dominion’s rejection of depth and reverent nostalgia were best embodied by its infamous locusts. The locusts—which Biosyn created to manufacture and then control a global food crisis—weren’t a problem solely because they stole the dinosaurs’ spotlight. The locusts were just one of the more blatant signs that showed how Jurassic World Dominion cared about Jurassic Park’s iconography and themes in the most superficial way. It could even be said that the dinosaurs were treated so sacredly that they were sidelined for their own sake. In a sense, they were replaced by locusts so they could be spared from the satirical jabs and deconstructions of the previous Jurassic World entries.
Instead of wrestling with the dinosaurs’ symbolic purpose of embodying the follies of corporate greed and playing god, both Biosyn and Jurassic World Dominion treated them as pretty but ultimately disposable afterthoughts. Despite being Jurassic Park’s reason for existing, the dinosaurs were reduced to being sideshow attractions for characters and audiences to gawk at for a bit before getting back to the locusts. To add insult to injury, the locusts were glorified plot devices that could’ve been replaced by an invisible airborne virus. Unlike the dinosaurs who were characters in their own right, the locusts were just artificial narrative stakes with wings. Jurassic World Dominion simply didn’t care to define the locusts as anything more than placeholders that only existed to preserve fans’ perception of the dinosaurs.
Jurassic World Dominion Could’ve & Should’ve Been Better
Jurassic Park Was Never Really About Dinosaurs
Many fans remember Jurassic Park as a thrilling dinosaur film; however, at its heart, the movie is about the chaotic reality of humanity.
The unfortunate thing about Jurassic World Dominion is that it failed as both a sequel and a finale. It walked back on everything its immediate predecessors promised, and it ended its larger, overarching narrative in the weakest ways possible. By risking nothing and playing everything safe, Jurassic World Dominion impressed no one by paradoxically trying and failing to appease everybody. Longtime Jurassic Park fans were just fed up by the time Jurassic World Dominion ended, while Jurassic World newcomers couldn’t connect with its adoration for the series’ “lore.”
The best that could be said about Jurassic World Dominion was that it was a harmless and thrilling time killer. Jurassic World Dominion was well-made, the cast was decent, and the cinematic spectacle of dinosaurs can never truly go out of style. However, the fact that Jurassic World Dominion is arguably best enjoyed when it’s divorced from its Jurassic Park heritage speaks to how empty it is. Jurassic World Dominion could’ve and should’ve been more than just the series’ obligatory conclusion that was too beholden to nostalgia and too scared of the future to do anything worthwhile. Jurassic World Dominion felt as if it just wanted to get things over and done with. This was a sentiment that audiences and critics also had regarding the movie and the Jurassic Park series.
Jurassic World Dominion
Jurassic World Dominion is the third film in the Jurassic World franchise and the sixth film in the Jurassic Park franchise overall.
- Release Date
- June 10, 2022
- Director
- Colin Trevorrow
- Cast
- Chris Pratt2 , Bryce Dallas Howard , Jeff Goldblum , Laura Dern , Sam Neill , BD Wong
- Runtime
- 146 minutes
- Main Genre
- Action
- Studio
- Universal Pictures
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