Jurassic World Dominion Reviews Roundup: What Did the Critics Think?

It's been four years since Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hit theaters, and despite becoming the 16th-highest-grossing film of all time, it received middling reactions from critics and audiences alike. The long-awaited follow-up, Jurassic World Dominion, is finally here and fans are eager to know if it's better than its predecessor. There will likely be some debate among moviegoers, but the new film ultimately won us over due to its fierce nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park. If you're coming just to see the return of Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Alan Grant (Sam Neill ), and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), you won't be disappointed by their amount of screen time. However, Dominion is the longest movie of the franchise, and it's extremely noticeable.

Trevorrow injects just enough superficial dinosaur action to keep things barreling forward but never incorporates them as much as you'd expect. Dominion inexplicably puts bugs at the forefront of its closing film, underscoring that humans are the blight of the planet. The dinos are simply peripheral, trying to carve out their own space. There's a distinct silliness to this outing and more than a few eye-rolling bits. Dern and Neill make for a welcome sight for sore eyes, and a plethora of baby dinos will make you swoon. Trevorrow also ups the ante on spectacle and dino intensity, making for a breezy and frequently entertaining ride. But there's an unescapable manufactured quality, especially when it comes to the cloying closing message of the film.

...But the film's only major fault is Trevorrow's desperation to ensure that viewers get their money's worth. Jam-packed with silliness, spectacle, intrigue, romance and just about everything else, Jurassic World Dominion has regular popcorn-spilling scares, exhilarating, expertly choreographed action set pieces that would earn a tip of the baseball cap from Spielberg himself, and the numerous characters all have plenty to do. With its jocular nods and winks to those characters' histories, the film also gives you the distinct feeling that the actors were having a blast. Viewers who don't take it too seriously should have a blast, too.

This is a very crowded movie — so many kinds of dinosaurs and I'm very bad at tracking them, so my 8-year-old myself is no longer talking to me. They are variously menacing, greedy, bizarre, and kind of cute, but enthusiastic live-action and digital special effects rarely create Spielberg's awe-inspiring moments.

In the world of "Dominion", dinosaurs are not a big deal. The message seems to be that humans need to learn to live with them... Is this a utopia or a dystopia? A vision of ecological harmony or genetically engineered apocalypse? Is it a Covid metaphor or a sign of imaginary fatigue?

It's astonishing how little tension or even momentary menace Trevorrow is able to mine from individual action sequences, how tame even T. rex now seems in its late-franchise dotage. The mix of practical and computer-generated effects used to bring these behemoths to life has evolved by leaps and bounds, but their ability to stir and scare us – much less provoke even a moment's thought – is a thing of the ancient past.

The fact that Jurassic World Dominion is marked by dim-witted decision-making, uneven special effects, and a jagged narrative full of half-hearted ideas and convenient contrivances is par for the course. As with its two immediate ancestors, this beast of a film crashes and smashes with reckless abandon, assuming that its sound and fury is what people paid to see and, therefore, will ably overshadow its Swiss-cheese plotting. As a multiplex event, Trevorrow's latest has the size and scope to overpower one's eyes and ears, but not one's mental faculties, and as a result his mayhem is of a largely empty variety, as noisy as it is unsatisfying.

The generous read on "Jurassic World Dominion" is that it's a metaphor unto itself; the ongoing moral of the film series is that mixing the wrong strains of DNA leads to disaster, and that lesson is writ large in the awkward and clumsy attempt to graft the stars of the original "Jurassic Park" onto the "Jurassic World" movies, a combo platter that only serves to make the latter-day protagonists even less interesting by comparison.