It depends on the signature. and Colin Trevorrow it doesn’t have a signature. It’s difficult to top the essential 1993 Jurassic Park directed by master Steven Spielberg, but it’s not impossible to make a mark on the franchise, something recognizable. Juan Antonio Bayona also demonstrated this in the underrated Jurassic World: The Destroyed Kingdom (and our review of Jurassic World The Destroyed Kingdom attests to this), playing with the horror genre and wrapping up one of the saga’s most authoritative chapters, but Trevorrow does it not. His 2015 Jurassic World was able to make good and intelligent use of the concept of opening the park that the late Hammond dreamed of. Combine excitement and fun in a film that does its best to involve and entertain. But in fact his imprint was missingone or more elements that make the work distinguishable, a successful blockbuster without particular cinematic qualities, of concrete meaning.
A good handyman, Trevorrow, who, however, disappears between fan service and box office needs, especially in this Jurassic World – The Dominion, on paper, the final and epic chapter of the franchise, the sum of past and present of an intellectual property worth billions of dollars and enjoyed by millions of fans around the world. Unfortunately, it misses its purpose – not quite – e.g often takes superficial advantage of the aces in the holereturns to repeat situations already enjoyed and now have a prehistoric flavor and then falls into the tight web of nostalgia.
All together passionate
Four years after the destruction of the island of Nublar and the outbreak of dinosaurs in today’s world, human society is forced to coexist with these creatures. The prologue is designed in the form of a documentary sums up the situation very well and addresses the different fronts on the pitch which are basically two.
In the first, Owen Grady and Claire Dearing grow together into a teenage Maisie Lockwood, the first human clone in history and the central pivot of the story. In the second, Dr. Ellie Sattler joins old partner, friend and colleague Alan Grant and charismatic Ian Malcolm to uncover the plots of a dangerous multinational. The Dominion immediately makes its rather global breath clear as the story progresses from the snow-capped mountains of the northern United States to Malta and then to the Italian Alps. A great film that wants to show in the second act in particular that it is it, but which inevitably has to deal with some of the main points of the plot and the characters on the field. On the one hand, the development of the Grady front takes us straight into the yellow walls of Valletta, a kind of underground underworld where dinosaurs are entertainment and valuable goods, on the other hand, the saddler front becomes alien Mixture of spy film, heist film and comedy which almost never leaves you satisfied or surprised. The chorus character of the protagonists is softened by the choice of subdivision of the narrative arcs, whereby the action is in the service of the “younger ones” while the research is left to the “older ones”.
The pacing remains fast and the film does not suffer from particular moments of fatigue but it’s as if he doesn’t know how to act, what to choose first, what to prioritize and what to think to surprise. And indeed, it almost never manages to excite at full capacity, except for a few well thought out sequences, citing the past here and there and even some cinematic hits like Indiana Jones. The most dynamic and adrenaline pumping part is definitely MaltaMost tiring is the lengthy reintroduction of the protagonists in Act I. It’s certainly nice to see the faces of Laura Dern and Sam Neill back in the saga they helped create, but there’s no real emotion, no curiosity, no total commitment good to them, barring any form of plausibility.
However, the soul of the series and the founder and unique faces of the same remain, as does the legendary Jeff Goldblum, who once again becomes the great protagonist of the scene. Chris Pratt, on the other hand, continues on his way as an all-rounder (there’s a really spectacular dino motorcycle chase) and continues to convince Bryce Dallas Howard in that sense, especially when it comes to recreating the horror and suspense in the public (the lake scene). The Cure of Drama seems no friend of Trevorrow’s pen and Emily Carmichael not even in this film.
A different future
Leaving aside promises of great epicness and a different final chapter, the truth is that Jurassic World – Il Dominio, although actually more globetrotting does not exploit its great potential, gradually reduce it more and more. Indeed, the larger scope and initial concept are resized with List to bring the cinematic status quo to a new starting point, reinventing itself with cunning, to repeat with persistence well-known solutions that it may be time to overcome.
There’s no genre play like Bayona experienced with their brilliant dinosaur-themed re-imagining of Nosferatu in a certain sequence from Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, and, apart from a couple of really riveting sequences (we mentioned them above), The film has little to add to what has actually been said and repeated in the previous five chapters, be it the law of chaos or the necessary coexistence of species. The problem of human cloning is weighed down under the weight of the inadequacy of the commercial medium tout court, which inevitably prefers entertainment or fanservice to the courage to explore the subject in depth, leaving it at that and confronting it unscathed.
At the same time The motivations of some new characters leave the time finding them both in terms of help and danger, but everything falls under the harsh universal demands, the many needs that must be respected, and the too many compromises that must be made, especially for a final chapter like this one. And all in all, the Dominio manages to pull the strings of a three-decade-long saga with a certain mainstream goodness and an obvious underlying coherence, without constant skin and direction changes.
It seems almost a constant of the new Hollywood maxi-budget productions: the ability to disappoint premises, promises and expectations (also look at the new Star Wars course, for example), and the latter Jurassic World is not a species. Perhaps the future will bring new horizons to explore, perhaps bolder and perhaps more original, but the ending of Il Dominio is the ending that was delivered to us, not a fiery and destructive meteorite as we expected but an oncoming stone thrown into the cinematic pond without any particular reverberation.