Jurassic World Dominion (2022)

They're making another one. They are actually making another one. I genuinely had to sit with that for a moment after the credits rolled on Jurassic World Dominion, because if this film is the standard we're working to, I have absolutely no idea what anybody involved thinks they're doing.

One star. And I thought hard about whether it deserved even that.

The big selling point here, the thing the marketing leaned on with everything it had, was the return of the original cast. Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, back together for the first time in decades. And look, I wanted to feel something about that. I really did. But bringing back beloved characters doesn't magically make a film good. If anything, it does the opposite, because every time one of them appears you're reminded of a franchise that once had genuine wonder and terror, and then you look at what surrounds them now and the contrast is devastating. It doesn't feel like a reunion. It feels like evidence.

The central premise of Dominion is one of the more baffling swings in recent blockbuster history. Dinosaurs now roam the Earth freely, coexisting with humanity across the globe. Which sounds like it could be genuinely fascinating, right? The ecological chaos, the societal collapse, the sheer terror of sharing a planet with apex predators that have been extinct for sixty-odd million years. Except none of that happens. The world has just sort of... adjusted. Everyone's getting on with it. There are no real consequences, no sense of catastrophe, just a vague backdrop that the film barely bothers to use. It's as though someone pitched the most interesting possible version of this story and then immediately abandoned it in favour of something that feels like three different rejected scripts stapled together.

Because that's the other thing: Dominion is both overstuffed and completely, bewilderingly dull. It somehow manages to have too much plot while giving you nothing to care about. Too many characters, too many threads, too many locations, and none of it builds to anything that feels earned or exciting. You'd think with dinosaurs as your canvas you couldn't run out of things to do, but this film finds a way. The pacing drags mercilessly through scenes where people say things to each other in rooms, and the dialogue is the kind of painful that makes you study the carpet for relief.

And the dinosaurs. The actual dinosaurs, the reason any of us ever showed up to this franchise in the first place, barely feel like the focus anymore. They're set dressing. They wander into scenes, do their bit, and wander off again while the human characters talk about things I stopped following around the forty-minute mark. Compare that to Jurassic World, which had its problems but at least remembered that people come to these films to feel something primal and exciting. Dominion doesn't remember that at all.

I've sat through the whole Jurassic World trilogy now, and I wrote about what went wrong in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom too, but this is the worst of the lot by a considerable distance. That's really saying something. A trilogy that never quite took off has now landed face-first in the dirt with maximum fuss and minimum impact.

There are franchises that stumble through sequels but manage to course-correct. There are sequels that justify their existence. Dominion is neither of those things. It's a catastrophic full stop on a run of films that kept promising more than they delivered, and the fact that the answer apparently is to go again, to make yet another one, fills me with a very specific kind of exhaustion. The dinosaurs deserve better. Frankly, so do we.

One star.

Rating: ★  | Year: 2022  | Watched: 2025-04-14

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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