REVIEW: Jurassic World

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Dominion

Film director and victorious fanboy Colin Trevorrow has justified Jurassic World: Dominion and his trilogy by saying it's not just a continuation but a culmination of all the "Jurassic" movies that came before. I suppose it's for each viewer to decide whether Trevorrow and the team he's assembled have pulled that off. We each come to the franchise bringing something personal to the conversation.

As for me though, come the series' twilight moments, I was moved by the way that it made somberness and hope sit next to each other so gracefully. If watching the brachiosaurus tromping across Jurassic Park makes me feel like a kid again, beholding the dinosaurs travailing across the savannah with such dignity took me to a more mature place.

Now that dinosaurs have proliferated across the globe, Owen Grady and Claire Dearing have secluded themselves in their woodland cabin, where they keep their adopted daughter, Maisie, safe from a world that would jump to exploit her and the genetic marvel she represents. Meanwhile, Blue, the raptor Owen raised from infancy, is back, this time with a child of her own. Their haven is disrupted when the bad guys take both Blue's child as well as their own, prompting both Claire and Owen to chase after them, inspiring an adventure that will unite them with some very familiar faces ...

The stakes in this film are at once more personalized and more wide-reaching than it was in films past. Owen and Claire's mission is to rescue their loved ones from the evil corporation, but if they fail, it won't just be their home that is broken. Planet Earth will fall prey to widespread devastation.

How does our evil man on top plan on bringing the world to its knees? Well ... the answer is bugs. He plans on conquering the world with bugs. Giant bugs, mind you, but bugs nonetheless ... On the one hand, genetically modified locusts are technically in line with the series' fear of not just dinosaurs but of biotechnology as a whole. On the other hand, that's not a mosquito silhouette on the franchise poster. Give us what we want, Trevorrow!

Make no mistake, the film follows through on its promise of delivering lots of dinosaurs for the curtain call. We have dinosaurs jumping over buildings, fire raining from the sky, dinosaurs attacking airplanes, etc. This finale goes out of its way to provide high volume and high-stress thrills.

Yet despite the firework show, there's a maturity, even dignity to the world of "Dominion." Owen and Claire have moved on from quarreling lovers trapped in a fiery mating ritual and planted roots in the home they share their daughter. Even the color palette is more somber, more mixed with shadows, than we've seen in previous films. The park is closed for good, and it's a grown-up world now.

The film takes a big bite entertaining a cast this large. "Dominion" blends our current cast with the '93 heroes, while also introducing newcomers played by DeWanda Wise and Mamoudou Athie. All of our players bring their A-game, and there was something deeply moving about seeing all the members of this multi-generational team trusting one another and working together.

When it became clear that the film would blend casts of both generations, the question became whether one set would outshine the other. Each of our heroes get their shining moments, but neither the legacy characters nor the rising stars overshadow the other because this film belongs mostly to Maisie, brought to life with intelligence by Isabella Sermon.

In this landscape, it's Maisie whose journey drives the story. She's the one who wrestles with questions about where she as a living clone fits into this world. Children have always been a central focal point of the series since Dr. Grant was carrying Hammond's grandchildren across Jurassic Park, and so there's something very poetic about this generation's youngest protagonist becoming our guiding star during the franchise's final stretch.

With the filter of mass media, there's always a distillation of complex systems. No single film is going to provide the answer to today's societal hurricanes. Yet Jurassic World: Dominion doesn't end by assuring the audience that the good guys have won, per se, and now there's no more reason to fret over the future. I hope it's no spoiler to say that the series doesn't end comfortably, but it remains an ending full of hope. In that space between the formidability of the future--a future we made in part ourselves--and the human capacity to keep climbing whatever the circumstances, the Jurassic World films find their grace.

Thanks for the ride, Trevorrow.

--The Professor

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