Movie Thoughts: Jurassic World: Dominion (2022)

• Released: June 10th 2022
  
• Directed by: Colin Trevorrow
  
• Running time: 2 h 26 min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

The main characters of both Park and World unite in order to try and stop a mega-corporation from ruining the world and misusing dinosaurs.

My Thoughts

This movie gets a lot of flack for various reasons, and in some respects I get it, but other aspects just leave me question why. Look, I get that it's not a fantastic movie and makes some dumb choices if you think about it for more than a few minutes, but a lot of the other Jurassic movies (except maybe the original) had a lot of these as well. This one isn't special in that regard. 

Heck, if you want to talk stupidity, if anything the last movie had more of that going on. Dominion definitely has some as well, don't get me wrong (Owen just choking a dinosaur like that), but I enjoyed it a lot more fun of this movie. Even the flaws everyone bring up just kinda don't bother me because I had a really good time watching it.

I'll just remind ya'll once again that my Movie Thoughts posts really are more subjective than when I'm actually reviewing something (e.g my book review blog). Most of them I'll still have a fairly critical look at what I'm consuming, but there's also a lot of personal emotions and opinions mixed in. These are my thoughts I have on whatever movies I watched. And, despite me knowing that on a writing level this probably isn't a fantastic movie, I had a really good time watching it. Hence the not-low score. 

If people can't enjoy this movie because of the writing decisions that's totally valid. I do agree that some of the characters have very little purpose, to do or just arcs in general. And it does become a little cluttered with so many characters, having both the core Park and World casts as well as many returning and new other characters. The whole idea of just letting the dinosaurs roam wherever also just kinda comes across as as dumb decision if you just consider for a moment what kind of an impact that'll have on the ecosystem (hint: probably not good). If you know what kind of damage a small invasive species can do to an ecosystem already, just imagine what will happen to this version of Earth now that there's giant fucking killer reptiles everywhere.

But these flaws just...didn't really bother me. I can tune off my mind and have a good time once every while. There are also some aspects to this movie that are better than some others, such as the effects really being good this time with a neat balance between CGI and animatronics/puppets, rather than the over-reliance of CGI the early World movies had. I also like some of the concepts introduced here, such as the dinosaur black market or just the idea that there's dinosaurs roaming around wildly on our current version of Earth.

It's far from a perfect movie, but I had a good time, better than with Fallen Kingdom and maybe even more so than with the first World movie. Obviously, it'll never be as great as the original Park movie, and I haven't seen the two Park sequels recently enough to be able to remember if I liked those or not. But I had fun.