Jurassic World: Dominion

I thought it was pretty great. There are some caveats here (aren't there always with me?) but I'm a bit puzzled by the film's generally poor reception. I wanted two things out of the movie and I got them. I wanted to see the old cast again and I wanted them all to survive. And Alan and Ellie end up together which is just icing on the cake. What specifically more did fans want? I'm wracking my brain to figure that out, and it's like the movie checked all the boxes of what I wanted.

Some will argue any movie that does that is not great cinema and doesn't challenge the viewer. Well, so what? Who says every movie has to?

I mentioned there are caveats to my praise. I saw the Extended Version first, and for all I know it fixed the problems people had with the theatrical one. The other caveat is that even knowing the theatrical version was probably much shorter, I would have found seeing this in the theater a totally unpleasant experience. Me being able to take bathroom breaks and snack breaks at my leisure, along with all of the frenetic action occurring in my apartment, a place I feel safe, rather than a theater, where I feel nervous and exposed, made the movie MUCH easier to enjoy than if I were at the theater.

I thought Alan and Ellie were just the absolute cutest together. The best part of mixing the new and old casts is watching the old cast's reaction to the new wanting to save a baby raptor, and Owen having made a promise to Blue. The audience has been through enough with Owen to understand what he's doing is not just reasonable, but noble. But I loved the old cast's reaction because just based on what they went through in the first three movies, it's idiotic. The casts of the first three movies essentially observed and ran away from dinosaurs. The casts of the second trilogy both lived with AND worked with them, for an entirely different dynamic. It was fun to see what the old-timers made of that.

I was very surprised to see a broken and repentant Henry Wu, mostly because the tie-in cartoons have been painting the dude as evil incarnate. Camp Cretaceous was VERY braggy about how much it tied itself to the Jurassic World continuity. But as far as Wu's portrayal goes, the left hand very much didn't know what the right was doing.

Let me be blunt and fair to the detractors of this movie. Wu being able to solve the ecological crisis at the end of the movie, off-screen and exactly as he planned, is not just narratively unsatisfying. It's a bit badly-written too. I understand that these movies aren't actually about fixing the ecology of the havoc caused by giant locusts. And yet, that easy resolution doesn't feel authentic or credible to the fact that the planet's entire ecosystem was in such grave danger that an extinction-level event was possible.

For the record, not a single one of the black characters got eaten or killed. Just as long as we're keeping score about that sort of thing. I was, and I fully approve of the final tally.

There were a lot fewer human deaths than the other Jurassic World movies. I think there might have been fewer human deaths than the Jurassic Park ones too. Maybe viewers felt that robbed things of some urgency? I felt like while the first Jurassic World was an action movie, and the second a horror film, I got the sense this one was a cross between a spy thriller and travelogue adventure film. Sort of like Jurassic Park meets James Bond 007 and Indiana Jones. And the body count level for those of civilians and heroes tends to be lower than action films and horror films. That's probably all that was.

The underground black market for dinosaurs is interesting because it's very difficult to actually tell who is the real monster in that scenario. Which is probably why they showed all the horrible things they did.

Lewis is a fascinating villain because he strikes me as absolutely dangerously crazy, and he did since his first scene of randomly asking Ramsey if he had a food bar on him, or if that was some other guy. He was SO crazy, it was clever of the movie to put the audience at ill-ease for his solo scenes with characters like Wu and Ramsey calling him out on his crap. Because we don't know exactly HOW crazy he is. Is he homicidally crazy? Will Ramsey push him over the brink there and cause him to murderize him? It's the fact that the guy is so unstable, which is why I'm worried about the "good guys" confronting him alone.

I'm not sure why this got negative reviews, or even if they really should only apply to the theatrical version or not. I just know that contrary to popular opinion, I'm not actually a picky viewer, and I respond well to watching a movie I can just sit down and enjoy, especially if it means revisiting some old friends. I'm silly that way. ****1/2.