Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

Director: Colin Trevorrow. Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Laura Dern, Sam Neill, Jeff Goldblum, Campbell Scott, BD Wong, Omar Sy. 146 min. Action/Sci-fi.

• I watched this movie around a month ago on opening weekend, and already remember almost nothing of it. That's how bland and repetitive this movie is. Lackluster villains, unnecessary close-up shots of action sequences, and going down a checklist of the original movie's best hits, makes this film difficult to tolerate. The joining of the old (Neill, Dern, Goldblum) and new (Pratt, Howard) casts in this movie creates significant hope, but even that effort falls flat, as story-wise you never know why the old crew was even invited to be in this one, as opposed to some other trio of scientists. There's an underground dinosaur bazaar here that I found somewhat interesting, but that's all I'm giving the below average score for. 
• Case in point: In the 1993 original made by Spielberg, there's the majestic scene where Sam Neill's Alan Grant first sees the brachiosaurus, gets up in the jeep, and pulls off his very dark and opaque sunglasses, upon which we see his wide-eyed shock at the scene in front of him. In this movie, Laura Dern's Ellie Sattler does the exact same thing upon seeing a dinosaur, but this time, her sunglasses are not opaque enough - we can already see her wide eyes behind the glasses, so pulling them off doesn't project the intensity of her amazement when she does. In other words, Trevorrow never understood why or how Spielberg's scene worked. But he still used it in his movie.  
• Curiously, Jurassic Park's sequel trilogy follows the same trajectory as the Star Wars sequel trilogy: the first movie (Jurassic World, and Episode VII - The Force Awakens) was a "maybe", creating some hope that the director (Colin Trevorrow for JP, J.J. Abrams for SW) was onto something. The second movie, a better movie (Fallen Kingdom, and Episode VIII - The Last Jedi) was made by someone else, and then the third (Dominion, Episode IX - Rise of Skywalker) made by the same director as the first, was just horrendous, making you hope they never make a movie of this franchise again. 

MoGo's rating: 4/10

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