In the Flesh: Jurassic World: Dominion (Patreon)

“Are you saving these dinosaurs because they need us, or are you saving them to absolve yourself?” asks Claire’s (Bryce Dallas Howard) fellow dinosaur liberation activist after the two free an ailing ceratopsian calf from an illegal breeding facility. That the line is godawful is, after the last two movies, a given. That the delivery is only a little less wooden than brand new oak flooring is equally predictable. What sets this single lifeless, aimless moment — which exists solely so that later Claire can say “I have a contact at such and such a place” — apart from any given scene in either of Dominion’s preceding films and makes it a creature wholly of this trilogy-capping heap of nostalgia bait is that it’s surrounded by eight minutes of pure styrofoam. Nothing in Dominion happens in conversation, or when the characters are emoting to each other, or in some easily visually communicable way. No, instead we must endure an endless procession of scenes too short to tell us anything about the film’s characters and too long and fragmented to permit any sense of immersion to take hold.

The central emotional arc of the original Jurassic Park is as straightforward as it is solid: Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) hates kids, and over the course of the film he learns to appreciate and care for them, to value the nurturing so decidedly absent from the park. What is the emotional throughline of Jurassic World: Dominion? Somewhere, someone involved in the movie’s creation believes that it’s about becoming a parent — but even as a pale third-generation copy of the original’s already dirt simple exploration of that theme, it doesn’t measure up. We see Owen (Chris Pratt, as inert and devoid of charisma as any off the film’s off-brand CGI dinosaurs) and Claire despair over their internationally wanted clone daughter Maisie’s (Isabella Sermon) increasingly rebellious behavior, but they never learn anything about caring for her or helping her find a sense of self. Instead we’re served a nonsensical plot about gene therapy, global famine, and giant locusts. Sam Neill may look hotter than ever in the autumn of his years, and I’ll never turn down an opportunity to see Laura Dern, but their characters bounce aimlessly through the film before reaching their cold, arbitrary romantic conclusion.

That the dinosaurs in Dominion are visually lackluster should come as no surprise at this point. The film’s slipshod CGI had me practically weeping at the memory of Spielberg’s elaborate animatronics and his expert deployment of CGI in dark, rainy scenes where to this day it looks entirely seamless. Then I saw Trevorrow’s puppets, and actually heard the hoary pop of a joint as somewhere a monkey’s paw curled a skeletal finger inward. Sub-Fraggle Rock bullshit. The film’s editing is a bizarre farrago of decisions I’m reasonably confident can only be explained by serious brain damage or massive on-set injuries, as in the justly infamous sequence in which Ellie Sattler and a farmer stand facing in the same direction as the camera cuts jarringly back and forth between them, a bizarre violation of the 360 rule which serves only to make it punishingly plain the two actors aren’t in the same place. Factor in a weirdly Orientalist dinosaur bazaar, half a dozen pointless side characters, and some of the most indifferent blocking and shot composition I’ve ever seen and you’ll wish they’d left the whole colossal fucking fossilized turd in the ground.