3 Short Paragraphs: Jurassic World Dominion

2022, Colin Trevorrow (Safety Not Guaranteed) -- download

I actually looked forward to this pile of dreck, but much in the same way I did Moonfall. Is it considered "enjoy ironically" even if you genuinely enjoy them while understanding how terrible they are? Its not about mocking them nor turning them into a drinking game, its more just accepting how terrible it was going to be and enjoying watching them through the eyes of a less rigid viewer, with little critical judgement. I choose to hand-wave all the badness away until its over, once I have had my in-the-moment experience. But its not like I can do that with everything that is bad; for example, with most of the Bruce Willis dreck that hits the Direct To circuit, despite them often hitting the Violence or Scifi notes I often enjoy. Even if seeing all the terribleness that Trevorrow provides in this movie, I can see that he and the people involved give a shit, do a good job, and know the art of making movies. And, of course, they have much much more money to throw around.

This is the conclusion to the second series in this franchise, in which we never learn from our mistakes comes to a not-really-truly finality. I mean, each movie has a finality which is ignored so there can be another movie. The Jurassic World franchise started because someone ignored that Jurassic Park was a disaster and recreated it, with More Safety Measures. They failed and dinosaurs ate everyone, and some escaped. The island was shut down. In Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, foolish humans return to the island to save the dinos before a volcanic eruption destroys the island. Instead, just before the island itself blew up, they capture some and bring them to a Evil Rich Guy's estate and things go badly. That should have ended things, but instead some dinosaurs ran away, or swam away from the original island disaster. Now dinosaurs are In The Wild.

Seriously, despite the idea of saving rare wild animals, if they were wandering around the mainland US eating people, crops and livestock, they would be put down. But nope, the conceit of these movies is Saving the Dinosaurs. This one gathers all the mains from the first franchise together with the mains from this franchise, to AGAIN find a place where the dinosaurs have all been gathered "safely", this time a Nature Reserve that has even More Safety Measures. There is a conspiracy by a Rich Evil Guy to capture Clone Girl (sub-plot from previous movie) as well as hide the fact that the giant (like, more than a foot long) locusts are his mistake. Everyone has to combine skills and morals to shut this guy down, and as with all the movies, inadvertently feed him to the dinos. 

They all have their issues, but this one seemed to just be resting on its "its the old gang back together" laurels and didn't have much else going for it. Yeah yeah, dinosaurs are running wild in the US but the movie is more concerned using that idea as just TV news bites in the background, and just spends all its running time recreating scenes from previous movies with flagrant nods & winks. By the time I got to the end of this movie, I was actually wondering if Trevorrow ironically enjoys making these movies, as he even finds a lame way to squeeze in the "I know this, it's UNIX !" scene for the updated audience.  There were some inspired bits, usually focused around concepts not present in any of the other movies, such as the Morocco dino-smuggler market where we finally see that Bad People Eat Dinosaur (I almost wrote dino-snuggler, but that *cough* would be too far for any movie).  In the end, this one sits less with me than the previous two, but maybe in a year, I will do a re-watch like I did for the original three during one of our lockdowns. Maybe during our next lockdown.