With 1990’s “Jurassic Park,” novelist Michael Crichton took a hard look at what was happening in the field of genetic research and warned, via mathematician Ian Malcolm, “Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.”Across six movies and massive advances in visual effects technology, Hollywood has been wrestling with a version of that same craven because-they-can impulse. The original “Jurassic Park” film was the kind of accomplishment whose creation effectively justified its existence: Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster pushed the limits of what movies could depict, while keeping audiences focused on the ethical questions that had concerned Crichton.
Sequels were inevitable, and there, Malcolm’s words rang true as the franchise became guilty of the very thing it pretends to criticize: unleashing dinosaurs on the world with no real purpose other than profit. Each subsequent installment teased some version of the question, “What if dinosaurs ever escaped the island?” But not a one has been up to the task of following through. “The Lost World” came closest. Remember the scene of a renegade T. rex rampaging through San Diego? It chased a bus through the window of a Blockbuster Video store. Those are the kind of consequences the franchise has been promising all along. But the latest cycle, which bears the misleading “Jurassic World” moniker, has kept the action relatively confined.
Director Colin Trevorrow’s 2015 reboot — essentially an amplified remake of the original, just with less compelling characters — took place back on Isla Nublar. The dinos escaped the island in “Fallen Kingdom,” only to spend most of their time terrorizing 11-year-old Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), while leaving the rest of the planet largely unbothered. While lousy, that film at least was directed by Spielberg’s spirit-successor J. A. Bayona. And just before credits rolled, it offered a glimpse of the movie most of us thought we were getting all along: We saw a Monosaurus stalking surfers and a T. rex roaring at a captive lion — king of the beasts meets king of the beasts — while Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) remarked, “Humans and dinosaurs are now going to be forced to coexist.”
At long last, with “Jurassic World Dominion,” it’s time to take Crichton’s concept to its dystopian conclusion. “Dominion” opens with a few clever examples of dinos among us: A Monosaurus upending a fishing boat in the Baltic Sea, Pteranodons nesting on the roof of the tallest skyscraper, etc. But it doesn’t include the impressive five-minute prologue released last fall, in which a T. rex attacked a drive-in movie theater. Instead, “Dominion” spends very little time worrying about how humans get along with these fearsome reptiles, sending most of its characters to another remote dino habitat.
Surprisingly, the greatest threat facing humankind in “Dominion” is devastating swarms of giant locusts, resurrected by the Monsanto-like BioSyn corporation. Yes, locusts. You know what else is resurrected, lifted from “Jurassic Park” like so much prehistoric DNA? The locust problem is an excuse to bring back Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill). For the franchise’s teenage target market, the original is a “classic” movie too old for many of them to have seen. However, for slightly older audiences, this reunion is a gift, recombining the chemistry that worked nearly three decades ago (Goldblum’s also along for the ride).
Back at BioSyn, mad scientist Henry Wu (BD Wong) explains that our best shot at beating the buggers is to reverse-engineer a genetic process used on the aforementioned girl. Turns out Maisie Lockwood was not only the world’s first human clone, but one cured of her mom’s terminal disease via a process that reprogrammed the DNA of every cell in her body. I suspect that Crichton would have approved of this kooky sci-fi twist. He loved to exploit our fear of technology. But that’s not how “Dominion” operates: Instead of interrogating this latest genetic manipulation, the script passes it off as an infallible solution, focusing the rest of its attention on the same thing every previous installment has — namely, likable characters running from dinosaurs, while the bad guys get their hands and heads bitten off.
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