Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ on Prime Video, the Third and Final Movie In The New Trilogy Of The Familiar Franchise

Arriving on Prime Video on January 6, 2023, Jurassic World Dominion all but begs one to recall the infamous Jurassic Park scene in which Laura Dern goes elbow-deep into a pile of triceratops shit. Dominion brings Dern back to the franchise, along with her old pals Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill, who collide, in an explosion of stars, with new-trilogy mainstays Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt for a simple story of human-dinosaur relations designed to put a nice, tidy bow (for now, at least) on all this bloated, moronical and generally entertaining nonsense. Of course, this what’s-old-is-new-again-and-what’s-new-is-still-old dinos-amok film was a substantial box office hit, with folks worldwide flocking to theaters for the spectacle, which includes the introduction of a new heckalottofasaurus or whatever. Now, am I saying it’s the cinematic equivalent of going elbow-deep into a pile of triceratops shit? Let’s just say I’m not not saying that.

JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: THE BERING SEA. The deadliest catch is extra-deadly now, because fishermen attempt to pull up a crab pot and a giant mosasaurus leaps from the water to snatch it, capsizing the boat. This scene tells us that, since the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, where dinos escaped their island to worldwide freedom, humans are now trying to coexist with the mega-est of megafauna. The only thing on Earth that’s bigger than dinosaurs is the Biosyn corporation, whose Jobsalike CEO (Campbell Scott) says they’re researching dino DNA to cure cancer and shit, and totally NOT accidentally unleashing supersized locusts upon the world and causing ecological disaster, and not doing a damn thing about it. The Dern character we remember and love, Dr. Ellie Sattler, would like to do something about that, so she tracks down former compadres Dr. Alan Grant (Neill) and Dr. Ian Malcolm (Goldblum), and then they do something about that.

Meanwhile, in the Sierra Nevadas, Claire Dearing (Howard) and Owen Grady (Pratt) live off the grid so nobody can find Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), a human clone who- you know, it’s just not important. Maybe you remember her from the previous movie, maybe you don’t, but it just doesn’t matter in the least. People want her DNA for various nefarious reasons, or maybe they’re not always nefarious, who can tell in this triceratops-shit plot, and those people are Biosyn people. So she’s kidnapped, along with the offspring of Owen’s favorite velociraptor, Blue, who lives in the forest near his and Claire’s cabin. So off they go to rescue their quasi-adopted daughter, and also the baby dino, who’s 49 percent cute, 51 percent scary.

Where exactly do they need to go? I lost track, because just in the first hour, the movie takes us to Alaskan waters, Northern California, Utah, West Texas, Pennsylvania and Malta, where half of a Jason Bourne action movie is dropped into a dinosaur movie, at which point one becomes understandably discombobulated. Eventually the movie settles down and ends up in a Biosyn HQ-lab flanked on all sides by a dinosaur sanctuary, so all the plots can crash into a heap in one place. There are a dozen or so ancillary characters to note, few of whom are important, some of whom don’t even need to be in the movie, and two of whom are worth noting, because Biosyn guy Ramsay Cole (Mamoudou Athie) is a crucial plot device, and because Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise) is a gum-chomping mercenary pilot who makes the morally correct choice to help our heroes and also is a very helpful aide in our comprehension of the action when she screams things like THIS PLANE IS GOIN’ DOWN when the plane she’s piloting is on fire and plummeting toward the ground.

But, you may ask, what about the dinosaurs? Right. You got your dimetrodons, your parasaurolophuses, your dilophosauruses, your stygimolochs, your triceratopses and your baby triceratops, which really needs a Baby Yoda riding it to complete the picture. Those are just on the undercard, though. The middleweights are velociraptors trained to attack whoever is unfortunate enough to have a laser pointer pointed at them, and a vicious feathery pyroraptor. Your headliners are the giganotosaurus, the probable apex of the apexes, therizinosaurus, with claws out to here, and the good ol’ ever-lovin’ T-rex, deathless wonder of the new old new world. You know how so many movies feature Talking Killers, who inevitably and without fail soliloquize when they should be killing, allowing their would-be killees to figure out an escape? This movie is full of Roaring Monsters, which inevitably and without fail pause to roar viciously in the face of their chompees when they should be chomping, allowing the chompees to grab a taser or whatever. So dumb. And yet, this is only like the 10th dumbest thing in this movie.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Bourne Ultimatum, Godzilla vs. Kong, any among hundreds of movies with laboratories with beakers full of colorful liquids in them, One Million Years B.C., When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. Also, director Colin Trevorrow really really wants it to remind us of the original Jurassic Park.

Performance Worth Watching: Here’s your obligatory Goldblum praise, because he pretty much almost doesn’t take any of this seriously, and also enjoys a hilarious scene where he skewers a giant locust that’s on fire and waves it in a giganotosaurus’ face. Honorable mention goes to Wise, who delivers lines like “Quetzalcoatlus. Late Cretacious. Shoulda stayed there” with enough teethgrinding grit to establish her as the movie’s best badass.

Memorable Dialogue: Dr. Ian Malcolm: “Jurassic World? Not a fan.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Jurassic World Dominion is spectacle without sense. You could fracture its logic with a single eyelash, when it flutters down upon being dislodged by your many, many eyerolls in response to this high-order top-shelf lobotomized nincompooped drivel. There is only one giganotosaurus in this movie, but you’d need 100 of them to fill all of its plot holes. The least of which is a scene in which the Dern character responds to a roomful of dead locusts by saying, “Nobody said there’d be bugs.” Do you expect us to believe a character who once went elbow-deep into triceratops shit would be bothered by bugs? And yet, this is only like the ninth-stupidest thing in this movie.

So what, you may ask, is the most stupidest thing in this movie? We could debate it endlessly, but it’s probably a thing that’s in too many Jurassic movies, and that’s the inevitable moment when the characters creep through the dark woods or a dark cave or a dark hallway and hear a noise and someone says WHAT’S THAT and everyone in the movie, and everyone watching the movie, should just yell IT’S A F—ING DINOSAUR, YOU TWIT. Other stupid things: A plot cluttered up with DNA blither-blather involving locusts and clones. Neill’s bored, had-enough-of-this-shit performance. A sequence set on a frozen lake that ignores the most rudimentary physics of thin ice. The two dozen characters nobody cares about. Dialogue that only a carnotaurus could maticate. A barely microwaved Neill-Dern romantic reunion. A high-tech action-thriller detour that couldn’t be any more overdirected if Trevorrow had directed it twice. An underwhelming shrug of a MEH of a final dino battle that asserts the movie’s greatest interest lies not in the monster mayhem we’re paying for, but in the resolution of the stupid-ass clones-and-locusts plot – its biggest disappointment.

And yet, Dominion doesn’t fail to meet expectations, does it? Funny how that happens. The other Jurassic Worlds were equally silly displays of logic-deprived extravaganzaism, and this is no different. It began with Bryce Dallas Howard’s pumps and went from there. I think the one not directed by Trevorrow, Fallen Kingdom, is the best of the three, simply because director J.A. Bayona isn’t so beholden to Spielberg angles and blatant nostalgia. So is watching Dominion the movie equivalent of going elbow-deep into a pile of triceratops shit? Yes, the metaphor holds water, like a well-hydrated and intestinally regular triceratops. By any greater standard, it’s not a good movie; it’s definitely a pile of shit. But we don’t watch these thinking we’re not going elbow-deep into a pile of triceratops shit. At this point, I think we’ve proven that we actually kind of enjoy going elbow-deep into a pile of triceratops shit.

Our Call: The Jurassic franchise is critic-proof at this point. Pointing out its many, many (many!) ludicrousnesses is fun but moot. STREAM IT but be aware, you’re likely to STREAM IT once and never STREAM IT again.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.