Jurassic World: Dominion

[HarleyQuinn]

New trailer for Jurassic World: Dominion dropped. Several old faces returning! I am leery of it being another Fallen Kingdom where it teases X but ends up being Y & Z instead.

 

[HarleyQuinn]

4/10

Somehow they managed to make this movie SO BORING and the length was absolutely brutal. The final 45 minutes is what the entire movie should have been but they spent like a good 1 & 1/2+ Hours just exposition dumping and talking about locusts and completely uninteresting stuff to just get the characters to the areas they had to be before the dinosaurs did the carnage (sorta) people wanted (sorta). Hats off to this one guy who was into it but even by the end he wasn't reacting to anything and seemed done with it all.

There were just way too many characters and it was to the film's detriment as it couldn't focus on just 6-7 primary characters and 4-5 dinosaurs. Instead, it tries to include 11+ characters as somewhat key along with 8+ dinosaurs and it just becomes a mess. The "character" of Blue is a complete non-entity in this movie with her baby only serving as a vehicle to move the plot along rather than be anything else. Dern and Neil still had great chemistry. All of the characters were written flat as a pancake, the plot was one of the stupidest things put together for a film IMO, and Campbell Scott was just dreadful in his acting as the big bad CEO type. Clearly patterned after an Elon Musk type but that kind of character had to be more over the top and dare I say hammy.

Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Isabella Sermon had basically nothing to work with, which is a shame because they are all talented actors, and potentially seeing them actually get multiple scenes with Dern/Neil/Goldblum could have been a lot of fun but it never really paid off. It felt less like they were together organically than the script forced them all together.

There were some cool prosthetic-heavy creature scenes that, ironically, made the CGI stand out even worse but the Dilophosaurus scenes were horribly underwhelming for me considering the efforts to use prosthetics and the call-backs to Jurassic Park.

This was the complete opposite of Top Gun: Maverick. This film should have just kept it really simple: Dinosaurs have gotten into the human population. There's chaos and carnage. Biosyn invites Grant/Sattler/Malcolm/Claire to discuss ideas on how to co-exist with dinosaurs and Biosyn learns that Grady & Claire have been keeping Maisie so they go after Maisie while Grant/Sattler/Malcolm/Claire/Grady have to save Maisie and not get killed by rampaging dinosaurs.

Instead, the film got bogged down in the DNA aspect of Maisie and the locusts and how Biosyn wanted to take over the food supply or some non-important bullshit.

 

[SFH]

My actor friend that I've referenced elsewhere on the board saw I was awake on social media posting complaints about the Ozark ending (need to go complain in that thread) and replied it can't be any worse than the Jurassic Park film. I commented back "Ozark hasn't been the same since they killed off Amos." (his character on Ozark). We joke a little more in the comments and then my phone lights up. He says, "SFH it is close to midnight there so I'm not going to keep you up for long but do NOT see this Jurassic Park sequel. It's AWFUL! I walked out before the credits." I offered his criticism means a lot to me since that's what he does for work but I love dinosaurs. I referenced I still have the plastic dinosaur toys from childhood on my entertainment center and he gets really quiet, "ME TOO!!! I was just telling my wife one of the few things I remember about living there was you, dinosaur action figures, and buying dino books at the book fair! But seriously, the trailer was a bait and switch and the movie sucks. You might like it, but I doubt it." We agreed I'd wait until it hits streaming.

 

[RedJed]

Yep, this fucking sucked it hard.

I went in not even reading any early reviews, etc, tried my best to go in with an open mind, but upon rewatching all the JP movies, something clearly stuck out to me.....Fallen Kingdom was a bad entry, in fact for sure the worst up to that point. The only caveat was, "well at least we will get the full blown dinos take over America thing" (kind of a bigger followup than what happened in Lost World at least). Instead what happened was almost exactly what HQ feared in the initial post on this thread. They did a fuckin bait and switch bigtime.....tried to explain what happened after Fallen Kingdom in a not so neatly done prologue and then moved on to a totally different (and unsatisfying) direction. To boot, I can't think of any franchise film that brought back legacy characters so ho-humly. I didn't get much nostalgic satisfaction at all with the interplay between all of the three, and in fact I thought their characters were written so piss poorly that I was shocked they got Dern, Goldblum, and Neill back for this shit.

There was a few times I legit wanted to leave the film and not come back, but I thought, well the third act HAS to pay all of this off. The only thing the third act produced was a reasonable enough amount of nostalgia and call-back to the original film (but yet terribly executed though) in parts but none of this really mattered by the end really.

This was not only the worst finale for a franchise I can recall (Matrix 3 had that nod previously I felt) but the 3D was pretty weak, and really all I got was that there was an action sequence in, I believe, the streets of Malta that was pretty awesome. Otherwise, this was a total big fucking turdburger.