There's something fascinating about Jurassic World Dominion I can’t exactly shake out of my head. A culmination of a legacy trilogy and the original Jurassic Park trilogy of the 90s, it's a film promising pay off of not just Owen and Claire, but also the returning Ellie Sattler, Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm, and yet, when the credits rolled, I felt… nothing. Despite promising so much, Jurassic World Dominion delivers on very little, only giving a sprinkle of entertaining setpieces in a film that's bored of itself.

 

We have Colin Trevorow back in the director's chair after the abysmal Fallen Kingdom from JA Bayona, and though Trevorrow seems to have learned lessons from the last installment, he makes his own critical errors in Dominion.

 

For one, he doesn't exactly bring any particular reasons to care for… well, any of our returning characters; Pratt's and Howard's development hinges on the growth of another character and both feel stagnant without Maisie (played by Isabella Sermon). When Maisie is on her own, there's not quite enough there for the audience to latch onto her when she faces the dangers she does. As with the legacy characters, their side of the story feels more interesting, but is hindered by a side character that actively takes development time away from these characters. The script just always feels like it's actively working against itself and eating itself alive. In the end, we don't exactly have any emotional catharsis with any of these characters.

 

Then we have Trevorrow's filmmakimg in general which I can't say has even improved all that much since the first installment. His editing can get very awkward, his delivery of information is choppy and sometimes nonsensical, and it seems he only likes to show his strengths in the film's biggest moments and is in the back seat in its more quiet parts. Though Trevorrow fumbles his script he is at least able to offer up a few entertaining set pieces. It's here that the film is at its best though somehow still I feel they could be better if they just had some emotional hindrance to them.

 

All in all through, Jurassic World Dominion feels oddly… fake. It's interesting; I've only seen Spielberg's Jurassic Park a few times. Each time I have seen it, I feel complete at the end. All the characters feel rounded, the stakes feel real, there's always a sense of wonder as well as white knuckle intensity, but most of all you are getting a master at his craft giving it his all with every crevice of the film. Then we have Jurassic World Dominion which feels like it was made at a lab - grown to appeal to as wide a demographic as possible, while being as safe as possible. It has only threads of the DNA of the movie magic it is trying so hard to replicate.