Review of Jurassic World Dominion (2022) by M1122 — 12 Jun 2022

I am truly mystified. I don’t care to undertake the labour of remembering Jurassic World: Dominion in the detail that would necessitate writing a proper review, so I’ll just say this: I am haunted by how bad this movie is. It’s so inept my jaw was on the floor at times. It’s somehow worse than the sum of its parts - and all of its parts are terrible. Seriously, anyone with a rudimentary film knowledge could point to any facet of this movie’s production and say what doesn’t work about it. I really hate giving a 1/10 - it just looks like I’m review bombing. But I’m not. Truly, my hand is forced by the fact I cannot think of one single thing in this film that worked. This film is miraculously bad. For years, the worst of the huge budget franchise sequels have been so over-marketed, so deliberately “safe”, and so focused-grouped to death that they often have no soul (i.e. a Transformer or Caribbean Pirate). This movie made me realize how good we’ve had it with all that. It had me longing for a Rise of Skywalker or a Justice League. Because this is bad in a way you don’t see very often these days. It’s actually risky to be this bad. It might seriously kill the franchise to be this bad. But what’s keeping me awake at night is: studios know this. Universal knows this. So how did Dominion even get released in this state? How did the producers sign off on anything that was happening here? How does this happen?

Case in point: the one thing you would not expect from a movie with this budget is that it would look cheap. Right from one of the first VFX shots, with hadrosaurs (I think) running in the snow, something is noticeably off - it looks ropey. And it doesn’t get better. This is a $200 million+ 2020s movie that has the best visual effects of 2005. Worse still, even the practical effects - the dino animatronics - look plastic, nowhere near the level of the triceratops in the original movie. That was made 30 years ago. And that’s just the part that money CAN pretty much solve. Baffling.

I’m only going to say one more thing. And it’s for Colin Trevorrow and the other writer, on the very remote off-chance they’re torturing themselves by reading these reviews. And I can’t believe I have to say this, but for reasons unnatural - perhaps supernatural - the studio didn’t, so I will: guys. Jurassic Park is about DINOSAURS. DINOSAURS, guys. NOT insects. Giant flying insects is a different franchise. This one is dinosaurs. Thank you.