Jurassic World Dominion tries to turn Jurassic Park into Indiana Jones
polygon.comThere’s a moment late in the new sequel Jurassic World Dominion where a dinosaur fight is about to unfold in front of a whole bunch of people who might each reasonably claim that they’re the main character of the ongoing Jurassic Park series. “This isn’t about us,” says Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill). He’s entirely correct; unlike the similarly late-period sequel to a Steven Spielberg monster movie, the dinosaurs haven’t developed any Jaws: The Revenge-style personal vendettas. The major spectacle of Dominion — what makes it a worthy big-screen experience — comes from watching dinosaurs inhabit the human world, much more so than tracking the fates of any particular humans they happen to encounter. Dr. Grant seems to understand this.
And yet the fact that Grant, nominal hero of the original 1993 mega-hit Jurassic Park, appears in Dominion at all suggests that someone, somewhere believes that the humans of this series matter. More importantly, they’re meant to matter to an audience that cherishes Jurassic Park enough to cheer for dialogue and images that reference it — even though it’s that movie’s Spielbergian craft that makes it a classic, rather than its catchphrases or big moments. (Or something close to craft, anyway. Jurassic Park isn’t exactly Jaws, even though it’s a similarly tense movie with a genuinely compelling human dimension.)
So after sporadic participation in previous sequels, here again are Dr. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), and Dr. Alan Grant (Neill) in his fusty imitation of an Indiana Jones fedora. Here too are Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), and Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the main characters from the now-completed Jurassic World sequel
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