'Jurassic World Dominion' Movie Review: Law of diminishing returns at play here

A still from the film

Jurassic World Dominion
Dir: Colin Trevorrow
Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Chris Pratt
Rating: 2.5/5

It's been twenty-nine years since "Jurassic Park," the big screen adaptation of Michael Crichton's sci-fi novel was first released internationally and that storm of curiosity, anticipation, excitement and incessant thrills that Steven Spielberg's film amassed has since petered down over several versions of cash-grabbing, franchise expanding and even technologically superior iterations. After ‘The Lost World' Spielberg took a back seat but the versions kept coming at regular intervals with superior FX and bigger screens. Unfortunately, the subsequent directors never really accomplished the heightened levels of emotion and thrills that Spielberg attained with his sparingly deployed FX and composited CGI. The level of believability and credibility of the resurrected ancient gigantic creatures kept going down over the years.

Dominion, Colin Trevorrow's country-hopping conclusion to the dinosaur saga, brings back Jeff Goldblum's chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm alongside fellow original cast members Sam Neill and Laura Dern reprising Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler. The character of Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), a clone created by John Hammond's business partner to replace the daughter that he lost, is pivotal to this story.

The film opens with Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), head of the activist Dinosaur Protection Group, breaking into a ranch where baby plant-eaters are being neglectfully kept in captivity. She rescues the one which seems to have the least chance at surviving and then she goes back to a cabin in the snowy Sierra Nevada mountains, where she and Maisie are living with the park's former raptor-whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt). The semi-domesticated raptor Blue with asexually reproduced child also hangs around them.

Several other characters add to the intrigue as also, the usual villains - Dr. Lewis Dodgson(Campbell Scott), the CEO of BioSyn and his chief scientist B.D. Wong's Dr. Wu are secretly breeding prehistoric locusts that are genetically coded to devour every food crop, save for BioSyn engineered plants. This assault on the natural food chain is going to prove costly…you expect and of course, the Dinosaurs are just waiting to take back dominion of the world.

Director/co-writer Colin Trevorrow mines for nostalgia by calling in lead players from the original cast but the humour and light-heartedness required to register their presence is missing. For much of the film Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Goldblum and company look rather out of place in this final( I hope) outing. The script is low on depth and conceptual themes never get fully explored. The narrative build-up is rather distracted and feels like it's in disarray. There's no strong story thread to keep you absorbed and interested either. Michael Giacchino's score laden with Arabic-African themes and Editor Mark Sanger do well to camouflage the distension while the FX, CGI, and camerawork keep the doubts regarding the upcoming extinction at bay!