Jurassic World Dominion (2022)
A lot of people worked very hard on this enormous pile of dinosaur business.
Directed by Colin Trevorrow · Written by Emily Carmichael and Colin Trevorrow · Approximately 147 minutes, theatrical cut
Starring: Chris Pratt · Bryce Dallas Howard · Laura Dern · Sam Neill · Jeff Goldblum · DeWanda Wise
Owner-informed draft. Built from the Letterboxd note dated 21 March 2025, with source checks and provisional expanded analysis. Verdict and advisories remain proposals.
My original two-star explanation was almost a labour-relations statement: the movie is bad, but an enormous number of people worked hard to make it. Those are compatible observations. Respect for the people who build, light, dress, animate, record and assemble a film does not require pretending the result is good.
Jurassic World Dominion inspires that distinction. There is plainly a huge amount of work on screen. The experience still lands as one big pile of shit. The generous future I could imagine was an excellent episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000—a hypothetical rescue by commentary, rather than a recommendation for the film we actually have.
The BBFC release record identifies the globe-spanning ecological-disaster premise and the approximately 147-minute theatrical version. The review does not need an unverified exact production-budget figure to explain the disappointment.
Before you watch
Prolonged dinosaur attacks and pursuit, vehicle crashes and other intense creature threat. A teenage girl is abducted, and captive prehistoric animals are mistreated. The BBFC flags flashing images that may affect photosensitive viewers. The story account corroborates the abduction and animal-treatment context. Injury detail is comparatively restrained; sustained peril may still be intense for younger viewers.
The premise keeps promising a more interesting movie
Dinosaurs living beyond a controlled park should change the relation between the creatures and everyday life. The situation invites practical questions, new kinds of danger and unfamiliar compromises.
The film instead devotes enormous energy to another corporate conspiracy and another restricted facility. The giant locusts provide the immediate ecological threat, while the dinosaurs often become obstacles encountered along the way to dealing with it.
There are individual images and situations with potential. The problem is the film's distribution of attention. It has an enormous new condition to explore and repeatedly moves towards a more familiar arrangement of infiltrating, escaping and exposing somebody's plan.
Everybody is here, so everybody needs something to do
Bringing Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum into the same feature as the newer leads supplies an obvious attraction. It also gives the screenplay more people to move towards the same convergence.
Recognition can provide an initial pleasure, but a returning actor needs a present-tense dramatic purpose. The film often seems more confident about how welcome a face will be than about what another relationship or decision will add.
DeWanda Wise brings a useful directness to Kayla's practical involvement. That relative freshness is a reminder that an ensemble can become interesting through how people behave together, rather than how much history the audience brings to their names.
The broader cast is doing demanding work inside a crowded construction. The disappointment is with the arrangement, not a belief that the people producing its individual parts could not be bothered.
Another escape is not automatically another escalation
The film has chases, crashes, infiltrations and encounters with toothy creatures. Their abundance does not guarantee that the stakes feel as though they are developing. Once a pattern of peril and recovery becomes familiar, a new species can feel like a substitution rather than a fresh problem.
The hand-outstretched relationship to dinosaurs also makes the creatures' danger inconsistent in a dramatically convenient way. The more often an encounter looks manageable through a familiar gesture, the harder the film has to work to make the next animal feel genuinely unpredictable.
There is craft in the imagery and effects. The objection survives acknowledging that craft: a large, busy production can remain dramatically thin. A recommendation should assess the experience that the work produces.
Corny DNA
Future ironic enjoyment is a possibility. The MST3K possibility remains a joke about what a commentary track might do someday. It is not evidence that this viewing was a rewarding bad-movie party. Numerical Corny DNA remains unscored.
Verdict
Hard to recommend — proposed. Crowded plotting, reunion machinery and repetitive peril make this a severe disappointment. Respect for the workforce belongs in the review without becoming a substitute for enjoyment. Curiosity about the returning cast or franchise continuity may motivate a viewing, but those are reasons a person might choose it, not an endorsement from this draft.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the ending and detailed analysis
The conspiracy can end while the larger problem remains
The heroes escape Biosyn's collapse, Dodgson is killed, and Wu develops a way to address the locust outbreak using Maisie's genetic history. The concluding images return to humans and dinosaurs sharing the world. The scene account corroborates that resolution.
The final coexistence images point back towards the premise that initially promised a changed everyday world. They provide an attractive summary of a condition the intervening story has often treated as background to another facility-based adventure.
That is a useful way to locate the disappointment. Solving the conspiracy gives the film an ending, but it does not make the larger imaginative opportunity feel fully explored. The closing reassurance can therefore seem like a promise being renewed after the feature has already spent its chance to fulfil it.
Sources
- Owner's Letterboxd note, watched 21 March 2025; supplied directly and preserved verbatim, including the original budget claim and two-star statement.
- BBFC: director, 147-minute cinema timing, threat advice and flashing-image notice.
- Screenplay credits, principal cast and scene corroboration; contains spoilers.
The article avoids treating the note's $265 million budget figure as a settled verified cost. The original stars are not converted into numerical Corny DNA.