“I get if people didn’t like it, but if they didn’t like it, I’d want to ask them why they hate fun,” is how Wife described the first movie we saw together in theaters in a year. She is, as you know if you have been following us from the beginning, a superfan of the dino franchise. I am a superfan of anyone who is coming to a Spielberg franchise twenty years later than the rest of the world, so I have dutifully taken her to see the first Jurassic Park at the drive in not once but twice in the last two years, and we’ve taken time out of our otherwise important schedules to rewatch Jurassic Park 2: Jeff Goldblum Edition. During one of our manifold flights in the last two months, I half watched the first Jurassic World movie from three seats over while wrestling my monster to the floor of the airplane while she tried to crawl into someone’s luggage. “I want to see big dinos on a big screen,” Wife said when questioned by my mom, who pointed out rightly that Jurassic World: Dominion has been out for so long that it is now available to watch at home. We had pure intentions. If JW:D were a chalice in a tomb and we had touched it with our bear hands, it is likely the skin on our faces would not have melted off.
What can two parents with the distance of two months from opening night possibly have to say about this movie? JW:D is an exquisite combination of clever and stupid. It was able to satisfyingly bring together the Gang from the first trilogy and mash them up with the new Gang and also add in three NEW (all black) folks, including Detective Pikachu, in ways that credibly worked as long as you didn’t think too hard about how Bryce Dallas Howard managed to army crawl her way through the preserve to find everyone else.
The movie had lots of fan service for the Well Actually crowd, which had been demanding Trexes that scavenge and dinos with feathers and raptors that bite your throat or whatever, while also serving up some red meat to the Cartoonishly Painful Violence crowd, which has been demanding that someone be set on fire before having their entire body torn apart by dinos for years, apparently. As surely as Wife will empathically react whenever someone tosses a glass bottle off screen at unsuspecting partygoers, I find myself figuratively pouring out a glass for all the bystanders who were ferociously ripped apart in this movie. The Nostaliga crowd had lots of moments to be able to laugh knowingly to themselves–about hollow shaving cream cans and electric fencing voltages and wide-rimmed hats that fall on the ground. The only crowd that really gets short shrift in JW:D is the Sequel crowd, which might have been holding out for a nonology instead of the hexology they currently have. (Hexology, importantly distinguished from a sexology.) Despite the fact that this film ends with the Harry Potter problem in which the initiating problem for the series remains unresolved at the end, there doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of momentum for much more story.
Jurassic World: Dominion effectively speaks to a host of cultural anxieties we have, Wife says, around GMOs, climate change, corporate monopolies, and to that I add there are some unintended anxieties it seems to speak to, like genetically implanted kill switches in vaccines. There seems like enough paranoia in this movie to serve both the regular people who like seeing dinos on screen and all the conspiracy theorists who have been waiting patiently for Chris Pratt to make a movie that suggests Silicon Valley is implanting microchips in our mosquitos. Speaking of bugs, Wife felt seen by the hard pivot to bug scares in this movie after having experienced her own trauma finding a bug in our guest bathroom the other day.
So, questions we left with after turning back on our dumb dumb brains are the following: for all of the action in this movie, there’s so so much plot armor for our main gang, but why? It feels like if anything, there was a very good opportunity for Goldblum to sacrifice himself at the research station in order to save the others. He doesn’t end up fulfilling an essential role after he’s given the access codes, and his sacrifice would’ve cemented him as uniquely badass á la Harrison Ford in the Force Awakens. While we’re still talking Goldblum, is the code he ultimately types in randomly correct or is it only correct because his guy on the inside is giving him an assist? Wife suggests that what we’re seeing in the cutaway is our guy in the control room typing in a passcode to mimic Goldblum’s random guesses, “which is poetic, because as a chaotician, he would believe that his random guess has opened the door, yet we the audience see there’s a higher power that’s looking out for him.”
My only other question is really about retcons: it’s nice to see some retcon like feathers on dinos or Bryce Dallas Howard wearing sensible shoes finally, but when Maisie Lockwood clarifies after a big reveal that she was her mother’s “experiment,” and then she’s told “no, you were her daughter,” is it really worth parsing that distinction? I guess I don’t understand how it was easier for Lockwood’s mother to clone herself rather than find someone to be her surrogate or adopt? And even if you decide that cloning was the most logical option, isn’t that necessarily experimental based on the changes to DNA that she precipitates? The whole thing seems kind of messy and really takes some of the air out of the sails of the big reveals in the second Jurassic World movie.
So other than the hair-brained ending, the endless monster fights, and the fact that those cave dinos didn’t seem to have microchip brains like every other dino in the park, this was a perfect movie and if you disagree, Wife wants to know, why do you hate fun?
