 Some of my friends can vouch for this, but my cinematic experience with said friends was bad enough that we each got free movie passes from it. We were constantly distracted by children running around and going "BA-BA-BA" and such, and yeah, it was irritatingly distracting. I therefore didn't quite get the experience I should have, but luckily for me, my hopes weren't exactly high anyway.
In case any of my readers don't remember, I wasn't too nice about 'JW: Fallen Kingdom', and so much of it had to do with the way it ended. Now, just because I sort of have to spoil the ending of that in order to get into this, I'm gonna say that if you care at all, you may as well back out now, because this is big spoiler territory from everything else, as it's a culmination of the 'Jurassic' generations. Once again, Hollywood says "this is the last one", to which I say "yeah right". If there's one thing I've learned about sequels, it's that the "end" is never the "end" if there's box office money to be had. Anyway, 'Fallen Kingdom' ends with young Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon); a clone (a whole other story) releasing a whole whack of imprisoned dinosaurs into the world because "they're alive". One of the dumbest movie endings in my humble opinion. But (and I even say this in my review), I knew pretty quickly that the road was paved for a new title soon enough. The resulting film is 'JW: Dominion', and I have to admit that I may have liked it a touch better than 'Fallen Kingdom'... a bit! This is mostly because my expectations were low, even if Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) make a comeback to feed my fandom. I mean, that's what got me into my seat, so call me a "sucker". This one takes place about four years after the last one, and as we all know at this point, dinosaurs are living among the human race. As one probably expects, it's not exactly 'The Flintstones', but certain creative (if far-fetched, but hey, this is a 'Jurassic' film) ideas are put into place, but it's mentioned really quickly that the human race isn't exactly surviving. So once again, way to go Maisie. In the meantime, Biosyn Genetics has been granted permission to create a dino sanctuary in Italy's Dolomite Mountains. There, they continue a bunch of their complicated research. Biosyn also wants to get their hands on Maisie for research purposes. In the meantime, Maisie lives with Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), who still works with the Dinosaur Protection Group, and Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), who now works as a dinosaur wrangler, relocating stray dinosaurs. Long story short, Maisie is eventually located and kidnapped, along with the asexually produced Beta - baby to everyone's favourite raptor, Blue. As the trailer shows, Owen promises to get her back for Blue. As for Sattler and Grant, well, Sattler researches swarms of gigantic locusts who are eating crops that Biosyn isn't planting and Grant is there to help. And Malcolm? Well, he works for Biosyn, but soon finds out some hard truths about their experiments, causing him to want to expose CEO, Dr. Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott) - the guy from the first film who gets Dennis Nedry to collect the samples. For yours truly, there was enough fun to this that included some of our old favourite dinosaurs. The T-Rex comes along for another wrestling match against a something and a whatsit, we have Blue to fulfill the raptor aspect, and even one of my old favourites, the Dilophosaurus makes a comeback in a very fitting way. My praise for the film lies in bringing back certain aspects and characters, but my biggest criticism is, not even in the story-telling, but wondering what the hell all these dinosaurs are supposed to be. I haven't heard of more than probably half of the dinos in this, so not every scene was exciting so much as me going "huh?" Like Macolm says in the trailer "why do they always need to go bigger?" (seriously, every 'Jurassic' movie is guilty of it, except maybe 'Lost World', where the T-rex is still the big baddie). I think this is fine for those who are into the whole 'Jurassic' thing. These have pretty well become another 'Fast' franchise that has audiences going in for a fun time rather than some kind of Oscar-seeker of a flick. I can't say I blame them. Every one of these films, for me, has something fun going on in it. But half the fun of these is pointing out how ridiculous things can get. I mean (in the trailer), why is that one guy casually riding a scooter when a T-Rex just snatches him off of it? We have to take these with a grain of salt, and I think my acceptance of that allowed me to enjoy this just a touch more than the last one. BUT... it's still pretty bad. 2/5
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