Here's What Critics Are Saying About Jurassic World Dominion

Audiences are loving Jurassic World Dominion, handing it an 80% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics not so much. Director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow's conclusion of the modern trilogy about humans and dinosaurs inhabiting the same planet—reuniting Jurassic Park stars Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum for the first time since 1993, alongside Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard—elicits just a 34% critics rating. Here's what they're saying.

• "It doesn't do much more than the bare minimum you'd expect for one of these films, and not all that well," Matt Zoller Seitz writes at RogerEbert.com. The "mishandling" of clone character Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), introduced in 2018's Fallen Kingdom, "is one misstep in a dumpster of a sequel that piles ideas and images and characters and plot twists in a heap and calls it a movie," he writes. Almost every action scene is "indifferently composed and edited," he adds. "And the plotting is abysmal."
• "The only wow factor in Jurassic World Dominion is the awesome depth of its failure," writes Bilge Ebiri at Vulture. It "leaps from subgenre to subgenre with such frantic desperation that it feels like the movie is running from its own lack of imagination" and "can't be bothered to spend much time on anything, perhaps because if the movie ever pauses to take a breath, the audience might realize they're being had." Top among his complaints is that dinosaurs have become "mere background noise" in a film focusing on a plague of giant locusts.

• "Locusts make for a far less effective adversary than a good old-fashioned tyrannosaur," writes David Sims at the Atlantic. But there's more to it than that. Here, the dinosaurs have "become mundane. A nuisance." Yet "if dinos can live among us fairly normally without posing much of a threat, then what is Jurassic World Dominion even about?" His answer: "the creeping hand of capitalistic greed."
• That's perhaps harsh in the eyes of Cary Darling. While the film "takes a while to get going," one chase scene through the streets of Malta "may be the single best piece of action filmmaking in the entire, six-film Jurassic franchise," he writes at the Houston Chronicle. It's "a thrill ride of a scene that is what summer blockbusters are made for." And he describes the "great clouds of giant locusts" as "equally impressive" as the dinosaurs, which "are even bigger now."

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