Jurassic Finale

Jurassic World Dominion

Director: Colin Trevorrow 

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Isabella Sermon, BD Wong, Campbell Scott

Released: June 10, 2022

Disclaimer: I apologize if I've misspelled any dinosaur names in this review; why do they have to have the most difficult, hard to spell names? 

This  movie has a feeling of finality to it, but I have a feeling that this won't be the last Jurassic Park/World movie we'll see. 

Boy, there are sure a lot of characters in this movie. There's characters from the first two Jurassic World movies, characters from the original Jurassic Park, new characters that make their debut in this movie, and I'm not even counting the dinosaurs! And pretty much nobody dies except for the bad guys. It's almost like the dinosaurs know who not to attack and eat. 

This movie has its fun moments and cool new dinosaurs, but overall, it just felt a little disappointing. I think nothing will ever capture the magic that was the original 1993 Jurassic Park, but I will admit to having fun watching Jurassic World, too. Dominion takes place in real time, four years after the events of Fallen Kingdom, which I barely remembered anything that happened. Luckily I could read my review of it to refresh my memory. 

Basically, after the events of that movie, all the dinosaurs are pretty much roaming the Earth freely, living among all of us. Never have I been so glad that this movie is fiction! We get a fictional news show that starts the movie by telling the audience, "To combat the growing threat of illegal poachers, the U.S. Congress awarded sole collection rights to the global giant Biosyn Genetics." This will be our evil cooperation and the CEO is our "bad guy". The CEO just so happens to be Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), the character that was in the first movie. Honestly, I never would have even realized that if it wasn't pointed out to me on a couple movie review podcasts I listened to. He says they are dedicated to the idea that "dinosaurs can teach us more about ourselves" and hopes to study the dinosaurs' "ancient immune systems for unique pharmaceutical properties." He has created a sanctuary for the dinosaurs in the Dolomite Mountains, located in northeast Italy. The decision to put the dinosaurs in this location is baffling. Wouldn't it make more sense to put them on an island? Who's to say they're not just going to cross over into Switzerland or Austria or other European countries? Hell, I'm surprised a pterodactyl didn't fly all the way to Paris and knock over the Eiffel Tower with its massive wing span. Why not just relocate the five million people that reside in New Zealand to Australia (or wherever they want to go) and put the dinosaurs there? No chance of dinosaurs relocating to neighboring countries (well, the flying ones might be able to...). 

Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) are still a couple, living together in a shack in the middle of the Sierra Nevada mountains where they are the "parents" of Maisie (Isabella Sermon), the clone girl from the previous movie. I put parents in quotes cuz I'm quite sure they never legally adopted her. She's been living with them for the past four years and they're protecting her because they know there are bad people out there looking for her. This poor girl; having to go from that mansion to this little shack. I bet her room in the mansion was twice as big as the shack she's living in now! No wonder she's so resentful towards them. They have a very strict rule about her not crossing the bridge, but of course she does. 

Blue, the not-quite-domesitcated velociraptor has a baby. (And yes, it is actually quite cute seeing the two of them frolicking in the mountain wood together. We see Blue teaching her offspring how to hunt and you think Baby Blue is going to pounce on a rabbit, but then a wolf hunts down the rabbit and then Baby Blue ambushes the wolf, which is much bigger than her, mind you). I was super confused because Blue and Baby Blue (Maisie names the baby "Beta", but Baby Blue is so much better, plus it makes me think of Breaking Bad, heh) are literally living in Owen's back/front yard and he, Claire, and Maisie seemed to have no idea that she was even there. 

It's Maisie who comes across the baby raptor first when she's outside, eating a piece of toast. She holds out the piece of toast, thinking this meat-eating animal wants some carbs and the little raptor snatches it out of her hands. I was seriously worried Maisie was going to lose a hand there. Then Mama Blue shows up, and boy, she's not happy. Luckily Owen shows up (he always seems to show up at the right time; I'm guessing he was viewing this through the windows of his cabin) and puts his hand up to Blue and that seems to be some universal sign to dinosaurs so they don't eat you. Oh, if only Gennaro, Muldoon, Arnold, and Nedry had known about that in Jurassic Park! Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know - Owen trained Blue and is able to "control" her, but he will do this same tactic with two other (much larger) carnivores he comes across and while they don't run off like Blue and her baby do, they do pause so he's able to escape before they have him as an afternoon snack. Owen tells Maisie to go inside because he wants to go searching for Blue's nest. I know he's the Raptor Whisperer, but is that really a good idea? 

Minions working for the movie's bad guy have tracked down Maisie and they kidnap both her and Baby Blue. Owen and Claire are able to get intel that they're being taken to Malta, and we'll come back to them later.

Meanwhile, in West Texas, a huge swarm of ginormous locusts (seriously, they're the size of my cat ::::shudder:::) take out a huge field. One is captured under a bucket and everybody's favorite paleobotonist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is there to inspect it. She brings the caged locust to Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and I thought this was the first time we see them in a scene together since Jurassic Park, but they actually had a scene together in JP3. Now, I remember them both being in that movie, but I forgot they actually have a scene together. Also, I had thought both The Lost World and JP3 was erased from the Jurassic World storyline, but this storyline has me rethinking that. I'm not sure if I read somewhere that the second and third JP movies were erased from the canon or I just made that up myself. But here, in this movie, Ellie tells Alan she got divorced and mentions her kids are now in college. Of course, it's in JP3 where we find out she got married and had two kids. I kinda forgot that her and Dr. Grant were romantically involved in the first movie; they acted more like colleagues than a couple. 

Ellie tells him swarms of the locusts are "decimating crops" and they "started as a few hundred, but could be millions by the end of the summer." Um, from I saw on screen, it looks like they're already in the millions! At the rate the locusts are going, there will be no grain to feed chickens or cattle and "the entire food chain would collapse." None of the crops they're eating are Biosyn seed and Ellie is not shocked that they would "want to control the world's food supply." She wants to go to their facility and get DNA from one of their locust and needs Alan to come with her as a witness. She tells him she got an invite from their "in-house philosopher", Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and he told Ellie there are things there she'd want to see. 

Okay, now back to Owen and Claire. Maisie and Baby Blue have been kidnapped and Blue, who was knocked down an incline, is snarling at Owen who stands her down and tells her they're going to get her baby back, like the dinosaur can understand English. She snaps at him a few more times, then turns and runs back in the woods. 

Like I mentioned, Owen and Claire get intel from the dude who was in Fallen Kingdom that there's going to be a "cash for cargo" exchange in Malta the next day. Apparently there's a black market for dinosaurs in this tiny island country. Who knew. They have people who were recruited by the CIA after the park closed down and Barry (who was in Jurassic World) will be able to help them. I'm not sure if I'm explaining this well enough, but honestly, it doesn't really matter. The scene in Malta is just a fun thrill ride, but doesn't really add anything to the plot, besides the fact they find out they're taking Maisie to the Biosyn lab near the Dolomites in Italy. Also, I'm guessing they chose this particular location to house the dinosaurs because they got filming rights in Malta and that was too cool of a place to pass up to film (and it IS cool), so they just made Italy as the permanent home for the dinosaurs. Still think New Zealand would have made much more sense! 

A cargo pilot, Kayla, who is paid to transport dinosaurs to Biosyn, sees Maisie who is transported over to some evil, sophisticated  European woman named Santos. Kayla just so happens to be in the bathroom of some seedy underground lair where dino fights and illegal sales of dinos occur as the same time as Claire who shows her a picture of Maisie and asks if she's seen her. Kayla just replies she can't get involved and walks away. 

Santos finds out that Maisie's "parents" are in town, so she unleashes these atrociraptors (pretty much the same thing as a velociraptor) who are trained to kill people when they see a laser point at them. Um, do raptors really need to be told who to kill? Owen and Claire are separately being chased by these raptors and this is when Owen finds himself between these two big dinosaurs (they were bigger than a raptor, but smaller than a T-rex) and is able to hold his hands up long enough to give them pause, so he can keep running without getting eaten. The fact that both Claire are Owen are outrunning these super fast dinosaurs is a bit absurd. But soon, Owen gets on a motorbike and Claire, after jumping out a window, lands in a truck that just so happens to be driven by Kayla, so she drives Claire to her cargo plane to take her to Biosyn (Claire found out that's where Maisie is being taken). 

Kayla is about to start the plane, but here comes Owen, on his motorbike, being chased by a raptor. He manages to steer into the back of the plane, with the raptor right on his tail. The bike slides back, knocking the raptor into the water below them. Claire manages to hang onto a strap and grabs Owen before he can also slide down to the open door.  

They are not given clearance to land because the bad guys know Maisie's "parents" are on board. Their ADS (aerial deterrent system) is shut off. Otherwise, when it's turned on, it keeps the airborne life away. Which is a good thing considering there are some giant-ass prehistoric birds flying around like the quetzalocatus. (I swear, where do they come up with these names? Why not just call it what it is - big ass flying dinosaur bird.) It's the same length as the plane which we see as it soars over them, then uses it beak to scrape the top of the plane and smash the front window and take out a couple engines. I did laugh when Kayla tells them what it is and adds, "Late Cretaceous, should have stayed there." 

Kayla only has one ejection seat and it's the one Claire is sitting in, seated behind the pilot's seat. (You would think the pilot seat would have the capacity to be ejected....duh.) Claire is given instructions by Owen to eject and to use the lever if the parachute doesn't come out automatically. He thinks Claire will have the best chance to find Maisie. Claire ejects her seat and a parachute comes out, but is immediately attacked by all the pterodactyls, so she pulls the lever for the extra parachute and lands in a tree. Owen and Kayla crash into a frozen lake. Gee, I wondered if they survived? Well, come back later and find out, but let's see what Alan and Ellie are up to. 

They're on a plane flying to the Biosyn lab with Ramsay Cole who is head of communications. We get some exposition as he tells them that Biosyn bought this land in the '90s for the amber deposits (we all know amber is important to the Jurassic storyline!) and have managed to turn it into a "safe haven for about twenty displaced species". They have the first generation dinos from Isla Sorna, but also have most of the ones from Isla Nublar. He also mentions it took them three years to capture the T-rex. Their laboratory is built completely underfund and if they need to herd the dinosaurs to a specific location, they can send "electric signals" with neuro-implants to their brains. Alan and Ellie think this is cruel, that it sounds like they are shocking them. Ramsay asks them, "Do you know how much voltage was in the electric fences at Jurassic Park?" and Grant looks at him like, Duh, yes, of course I do. Nice little callback to the original movie there (and we'll get a few more of those instances). 

I think this is the first movie since the original where we see Grant, Saddler, and Malcolm all together. While Alan and Ellie are ordering coffee, Ian takes Ellie aside and whispers to her that locusts are part of a project called Hexapod Allies and that she is correct about their intent. He tells her where they keep the giant bugs downstairs and hands her an electronic bracelet that will get them through the secured doors. 

Ramsay asks Alan and Ellie if they would like to tour the facilities by themselves, which seems odd that they would just let the two of them wander off on their own, but it will make sense a little later. He tells them he'll meet them at a certain location in 30 minutes and makes a big show of telling them which elevators NOT to use and if they do, where it will lead them. Why not just say, "Don't use those elevators, they go to a restricted area?" But again, we'll learn later why he's telling them all this. Oh, alright, I might as well just tell you now: Ramsay is on their side and wants them to steal the DNA of the locust so he's pretty much letting them do it and how to do it, but at this point Ellie and Alan (or the audience) don't know this yet. 

So while they're sneaking into the locust area, we see Maisie and a caged Baby Blue are in a room with Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong). Henry tells her they needed Baby Blue to help them study her. I was so confused how Blue had a baby, but Henry explains it by saying when they created her, they gave her monitor lizard DNA and they can produce without a mate. Blue and Baby Blue are genetically identical, which is what they have in common with Maisie and Charlotte. If you remember, Charlotte was the daughter of Charles Lockwood, the guy who was Hammond's partner....they're pretty much characters they retconned into this franchise. Maisie is the clone of Charlotte, who died 13 years ago. They mention she had a genetic disease, which I assumed was why she died, but reading over my Fallen Kingdom review, I mentioned she died in a car crash. Oh, hell, I don't know. 

Maisie (and the audience) are given a bombshell when she (and we) learn that it was not her grandfather who created her, but rather Charlotte herself. In a video Maisie watches from 2007, she sees that Charlotte is pregnant with her. Okay, it seems very narcissitic to have a baby who is an exact replica of yourself (not to mention, super boring and very weird...who wants a carbon copy of themselves?) But Charlotte is touted as some super intelligent scientist who's the first person to ever do this (well, duh) and people act like she's the most brilliant being to walk this earth. I swear they said she died of the genetic disease she had, which is why she changed every cell in Maisie's body so she wouldn't have it. (God, that must have been a bitch to change every single cell in a human body!) 

Henry tells Maisie that he wants to study her and Baby Blue's DNA; that he could "fix a terrible mistake he's made" (meaning the locust). While Henry is chatting with Dodgson (who is not happy that Henry was showing Maisie videos of Charlotte), Maisie gets up and lets Baby Blue out of her cage. How was she able to do that? Because Henry just left his security bracelet lying on a table in plain sight. Great job, Henry. Unless he did that on purpose because he wanted her to release the baby dino! Dodgson sees them escaping and sounds the alarm. This causes the locusts to go crazy and fly all over the place just as Ellie has extracted the DNA. She and Alan are trying to get out, but their security bracelet has fallen. Maisie has sauntered over to the area where they're in and hears them screaming. They manage to get out and Maisie sees them and knows who they are and that they can be trusted because they do not work for Biosyn. While they're all trying to escape, Ramsay finds them. Remember, I already told you that he's on their side and wanted them to get the DNA sample. He's the one who told Ian about Hexagon Allies. He also tells them something we already know: that Biosyn's responsible for the locust epidemic. I thought for sure he was lying and was only trying to pretend he was on their side and we were going to find out he was with Dodgson all along, but nope, he's actually a good guy and does help them along the way. That's why I already told you he was on their side earlier. He tells them to get on a pod that will take them straight to an airfield where there will be a plane ready to fly. 

Okay, let's get back to our other characters and see what's going on with them. Are they all still alive? Of course they are! For now...(no, just kidding...they'll remain alive through the entire movie. None of our heroes will die in this movie). 

Claire is still strapped in her airplane chair, dangling in a high tree. A big-ass dinosaurs that looks like a bird  is right next to her. I had to look this up and it's a Therizinosaurus. It has these long talons and appear to be blind. Even though it's a herbivore (what? with those sharp talons?), even the herbivore dinosaurs are dangerous in this movie, so when Claire removes her seatbelt and falls to the ground, she crawls to the water and stays underwater for as long as she can so I guess the dino can't smell her? But if it's a herbivore, why would it want to eat her? I guess it would still want to kill her if it felt threatened in its territory. When she was underwater, I was hoping there weren't any other dinos or crocs living in that swamp! When she emerges from the water, she goes to a spot where she can see the smoke from the crashed plane. She doesn't know it yet, but Owen and Kayla have (somehow) survived. They hop out of a panel that's on top of the plane and start their trek across the frozen pond, being careful as the ice isn't exactly solid. They do start to run when they see some "weird chicken feather thing" (heh, that's what I wrote in my notes) coming after them. This is a pyroraptor. I know there's scientific proof that dinosaurs had feathers, but it just makes them look so silly! Why couldn't they have just explained they left the feather DNA out of the dinosaurs. So this guy comes after them and it jumps into the water, gliding under the ice and pops up in front of them where the ice has cracked. This is when Owen and Kayla start running. I'm super impressed she can run in her wedge boots on ice. Though I guess when a scary feathered dinosaur is chasing you... Owen falls into the water and the pyroraptor dives after him and this is a super fast swimming dinosaur, but yet Kayla manages to pull Owen out of the water in time. They are still laying on the ice when the dino pops out and he still can't get one of them when the humans are just laying there, vulnerable on the ice. Owen and Kayla get up on a bridge/platform and run towards a pulley/elevator system that they just manage to close as the pyroraptor is just about to get them. This is a clear call back to the first movie when Lex is in the kitchen cabinet and pulls the door shut on the veliceoprator. (And re-reading my Fallen Kingdom, Maisie gets away from the Indoraptor in a similar situation). 

In the elevator, Kayla mentions she has the tracker so they can find Claire and asks Owen, "You really love her, huh?" to which Owen replies, "Yeah." It gave me a chuckle when Kayla replies with, "I get it. I like redheads, too." This reminded me of when I first saw the previews for Jurassic World and just assumed the redhead was Jessica Chastain, not Bryce Dallas Howard. 

As they are in the forest (which looks more like a jungle), looking for the chair (do they really think Claire would still be in it?), we meet another new dinosaur. After they hide from a T-rex who comes across a dead deer, another big dino comes along. Owen thinks it's an Allosaurus, but Kayla tells him it's a Giganotasaurus, which, according to her, is the "largest known terrestrial carnivore." Thank God I'm not a paleontologist cuz I don't know how I would remember all these ridiculous names! (I also suspect I wouldn't enjoy the Jurassic movies if I were one!)

It seems like with each Jurassic movie, they need to have a dinosaur that's bigger and badder than the T-rex, who was pretty prominent in the first two movies, but then after that, it sort of fades into the background. We had the Spinosaurus in JP3, then the manmade Indominus Rex and Indoraptor in the first two Jurassic World movies, and now the Giganotasaurus, which, I have to say, doesn't really make that much of an impact in the movie, which is a bit disappointing. It doesn't even kill anyone, good or bad. The T-Rex and Giga fight, for like, ten seconds, before the T-Rex goes away. One of the humans comments, "You put two apex predators in one valley, pretty soon there's only gonna be one." Foreshadowing, perhaps? Yes, yes it is.  

When Dodgson discovers that Grant and Saddler have take the locust DNA, he stops the pod and they find themselves in the middle of the old amber mines where they discover that many medium size carnivores called Dimetrodons reside. They run to an exit, but it's caged off and they need a passcode to get out. At this point, Malcolm is there, on the other side of the cage and doesn't seem to be fazed or worried. You see, Ramsay had shown Malcolm (who was fired by Dodgson who suspected him of letting his friends steal locust DNA..not exactly sure what his "job" there was) how to get the cave to where his friends are. You would think Ramsay would know about the passcode and perhaps have told Malcolm what the code is, but no, he did not. WTF? So why is Malcolm so calm while cracking jokes and randomly putting in any four digit code? (He tries Miles Davis's birthday). I have no idea. I guess he knows he's in a movie where none of the good guys will die. He doesn't know the code and there's only so much time that his two friends and a fourteen-year-old girl can hold off the hungry prehistoric carnivores. Luckily, Ramsay is seeing this on the video screen and he is able to access the code from where he is so he types the right one in just as Malcolm types in a random one and Malcolm thinks he got it which is kinda funny. 

Now we've met a bunch of new dinosaurs that we haven't seen before, but now it's time to get reacquainted with an old friend. This is a dinosaur that we haven't seen (correct me if I'm wrong here) since the first movie. In my notes, I called it the "Newman dinosaur" because I couldn't remember its real name. This is the dinosaur that kills Newman (Nedry, if you never watched Seinfeld), you know the one that has the neck frill and shoots poison at him. It's called a dilophosorous (apparently its real-life counterpart did not have a neck frill, nor shoot poison) and while a hologram of one is seen in Jurassic World, I'm pretty sure we haven't seen one since the very first movie. Claire comes upon about three of them in a separate facility that's built in the trees and you need to take an elevator to get to. While she is waiting for the elevator, she hears a rustle and soon about three dilophosourouses (I know I totally butchered that spelling!) are surrounding her. One even comes inches from her face and shows its frill. She's literally seconds from having poison spat on her, but out of nowhere, we see a hand grab it around its neck and its Owen, come to the rescue, saving someone from being attacked by a dinosaur for the second time in the film. Kayla tasers it and it and its friends whimper away.   

Maisie and the adults are driving in a Jeep when they see that all the locust have escaped the facility and they have been lit on fire. They realize that Dodgson is burning the evidence. Yeah, he's not doing a very good job, because those massive things don't appear to disintegrate; they just fall to the ground with a thud. The locust starts falling on the Jeep, making them tumble down the hill and, of course, they land right in front of Owen, Claire, and Kayla, so Maisie is reunited with her "parents." But uh-oh, here comes the Giga. We do get a funny moment where both Grant and Owen say, "Don't move." (I thought that was only for the T-rex and I thought that theory got debunked!) Of course, they do move and they start climbing a ladder to the facility up high. There's a steel scaffold between the ladder and as Maisie is climbing the ladder, the Giga puts his jaws right over that scaffolding so she's literally between his jaws. She freezes at first, but Kayla, who is already at the top, encourages her that she can do it and while the Giga rips away the scaffolding, Maisie scurries up the rest of the way. 

So now everyone -except Malcolm- is in the treetop facility, but the Giga its still trying to get to them. I mean, he is tall enough to see them! So in a callback to the first movie, Malcolm uses a stick and one of the fiery (dead) locust as a torch to distract the dino. He throws the torch into the Giga's mouth, and after he's shot with a tranquilizer and tasered in the eye by the people in the treetop, he goes away. 

At this point, the alarms have been sounded and all the dinosaurs are en route to the emergency containment because they have been "signaled" to go there. 

Kayla tells the others there's a helicopter on the main complex. All they need to do is turn the ADS back and and they can fly home. They just need to go to the control room on the third floor, which they do, and Claire recognizes the system as the same one they used at the theme park. 

 

We get a small scene of Malcolm asking Owen about training raptors and he seems pretty skeptical about it, much like everybody else, I'm sure. 

As if we didn't already have enough characters with Owen, Claire, Grant, Ellie, Malcolm, Maisie, and Kayla, here comes Ramsay (and in a few more minutes, Henry will join them) who hears Claire say that she's getting something called "Error 99" and he tells her that means there's not enough power and they need to shut down the primary system, which Claire and Ellie go to do. While they're doing that, Kayla goes to get the helicopter and Maisie tells Owen she knows where Baby Blue is so they and Grant go get her. I'm not exactly sure how Maisie knew where Baby Blue was since the little dinosaur could be anywhere, but they find her and Owen shoots her with a tranq, then straps her to his back so it looks like he's wearing a dinosaur backpack. Before this all happens, the original JP characters (rightfully) are skeptical about this and Owen tells then he made a promise he would bring her home and Ian says the exact thing the audience is thinking, "You made a promise to a dinosaur?" I guess even the script knows this is ridiculous. 

In a predictable play, Dodgson is on a pod, getting ready to escape, when it stops after Claire and Ellie have turned off he power and he gets attacked and killed by a pack of dilophosorouses. 

All our heroes are about ready to get on the chopper ("Get on the chopper!"), but here comes Henry. Seriously, there are way too many characters in this movie! Grant sees him and says, "I remember you" and at first, I'm like, How does he remember this man he met once (I believe they only have one scene together) nearly thirty years ago? But then, the more I thought about it, it does make sense that Grant would remember details about that day. You don't forget a day like that! Henry tells them he can fix the "ecological disaster" he caused and if he can understand how Charlotte rewrote Maisie's DNA, he can spread change from one locust to the entire swarm before it's too late. Maisie agrees to this because it's what Charlotte would have wanted. And that's exactly what happens. 

But first, we need to have one last dino fight between the Giga and the T-Rex! We do get an amusing one-second moment where the T-Rex is clomping along and stops in front of a large circular window so we're getting the Jurassic Park logo for a couple of seconds. The dinos start fighting and it looks like the Giga has gotten the T-Rex as she is knocked down. Kayla shoots the flare to distract the Giga away, but it causes the attention of the Therizinosaurous (or, as I wrote, the "weird chicken dino"). Surprise! The T-rex isn't really dead (we know this because we get a close up of her dilated eye, another callback to the first movie) and she gets up, attacking the Giga and pushes it right into the sharp talons of the ugly chicken dino. 

When they get safely back, Alan and Ellie kiss and now they are officially together. They've been trying to make them a thing for the entire movie, but honestly, I don't really care. Like I said, I totally forget they were even a couple in the first movie. 

We find out that Wu has fixed the locust problem and that Biosyn Valley has been "designated a global sanctuary" where the dinosaurs will "live safe from outside world." I hope they have border patrol! 

We do get a cute moment when Owen lets Baby Blue out of her cage and moments later, Blue comes running up and they go scurrying off together, then Blue comes back and give a slight nod to Owen, as though she's thanking him for bringing back her baby and for keeping his promise. It's so ridiculous that it makes me laugh and cry at the same time, just like that scene in The Goonies when Chunk tells Sloth he's going to live with him now.  

While this movie had its fun and exciting moments, I was mostly disappointed with this final (for now)
movie in the Jurassic franchise. There are dinosaurs out in the world living with the rest of the world and while we get a very small portion of that, it's mostly about...locust? What the huh? And it seemed very convenient only bad guys were killed by the dinosaurs. I don't know what the total death count is, but it seems very small. 

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Jurassic Park
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Richard Attenborough, Joseph Mazzello, Ariana Richards, Wayne Knight, Samuel L. Jackson
Released June 11, 1993
Viewed in theaters: Summer of '93

Oscar nominations:
Best Sound (Won)
Best Sound Effects (Won)
Best Visual Effects (Won)

Without doubt, the score to Jurassic Park (how did John Williams not get nominated for it? Although he still won that year (for Schindler's List) and I'm sure he has a billion other awards, but still...) is super iconic and probably in the top five for most recognizable movie scores ever. So while you read this review, it's only fitting that I set the mood by providing you with said iconic score. Then you can come back and listen to it again while you view the images of cute/cartoon dinosaurs I found on the web! By the way, if for some reason, you have never seen this movie (or read the book!), there WILL BE SPOILERS!

If you stop to think about it, dinosaurs were an impressive species. They lived on this planet for 165-175 millions years. Humans (modern humans, anyway) have only been around for a couple hundred thousand years. We have a long way to go before we even reach the dinosaurs! I'm sure if you have ever taken an anthropology class, you have learned that if the timeline of the Earth (nearly four and a half billion years) was condensed down to the span of a day, humans wouldn't appear until the last minute of that day. We are just a speck in the grand scheme of things, especially compared to the dinosaurs.

Want to hear something that will blow your mind? Dinosaurs were first here between 231 and 243 millions years ago and they went extinct 65 million years ago which means they were on Earth longer than they've been gone!

Not surprisingly, dinosaurs, in some form or other, have been featured in many movies, but none have been more popular than Jurassic Park and its successors (but we all know the original is the best) as it features the most "realistic" dinosaurs, even though we now know that dinosaurs had feathers. I do like that line in Jurassic World where Henry Wu states that their dinosaurs don't look like the dinosaurs of the real world because they use a different genetic code. It's a smart way for the series to acknowledge that the dinosaurs they created wouldn't look exactly like the dinosaurs that once roamed this earth.

I remember this movie being a big thing when it came out. If you were around in 1993 (and old enough to remember), then you remember what a big deal Jurassic Park was. It was THE summer movie of 1993. Hell, it was THE movie of 1993, period. While I'm sure I saw many previews for it, I don't remember them. Maybe I didn't remember them because they never show any of the dinosaurs which would never happen today. True, they can show the dinosaurs in any of the new Jurassic World movies because we know what they look like, but I think that if Jurassic Park came out today, they would have shown the dinosaurs in the trailers.

I honestly don't remember if I had any desire to see it, despite the hype. (Sure, I may find dinosaurs fascinating NOW, but I was never a dino-obsessed kid). However, after my brother saw it with his friends and came home and was raving about it, well, you better believe I had to see this movie. There was no way my brother got to see this amazing movie and I was going to miss it! Uh-huh! So I begged my mom and she took me to see it. I don't remember having to twist her arm too much, so she must have been fine with it. So watching the movie, you would have thought all the jumping I did in my seat was a result of all the scary moments of dinosaurs popping up and attacking. Wrong! I jumped because my mom kept grabbing me every time one of those scary moments happened and that startled me more than anything that was on screen! Not surprisingly, this is one of my most memorable movie theater experiences!

I read the book a few years after I saw the movie. I must have been 15 or 16. My parents already owned the book because it was in our family bookcase. I remember it being very gruesome. Much more than the movie was. I actually re-read the book a couple months ago, and yes, it was as gruesome as I had remembered when I first read it. If they had followed the book faithfully, it definitely would have received an R rating! While the premise of the movie is the same, there are many differences between the book and film.

Tim and Lex (Joseph Mazzello and Ariana Richards) are in the book as John Hammond's (Richard Attenborough) grandchildren, but Tim is the older one. Lex is six or seven, and my God, is she ever f*cking annoying. I was hoping she would get eaten by a dinosaur, then I felt bad and had to remind myself she's only a young kid, but she was still super annoying. Her movie counterpart is much less annoying, although she has a moment of pure stupidity when she decides to take out a huge flashlight and turn it on when the T-rex breaks out of its barriers. Now I understand Spielberg's reasoning for this as you get that cool shot of the T-rex's eye dilating, but from the characters' standpoint, it makes no sense at all. Lex (and Tim! He knew! He told her to shut the light off!) is old enough to know that turning on a light is probably going to attract this huge animal with tons of sharp teeth! Luckily Lex gets her redemption when she is able to turn on the computer systems. ("It's a Unix system, I know this.") In the book, it's Tim who figures out the computers. It also makes me laugh when Lex is excited that the Jeep has an "interactive CD rom!" Whoopty-do!

Another huge difference is that there are a lot of characters who live through the movie, but die in the book or vice versa. Gennaro (the lawyer who is sitting on the toilet when he gets eaten by the T-rex) lives through the first book. It is mentioned in The Lost World novel (which I also read recently) that he died of dysentery on a business trip. I guess Michael Crichton just killed him off since he was already dead in the movie. There is another character in the book (the park's public relations manager) who was with the kids in the Jeep and he gets scared and runs out and gets killed by one of the two T-rexes (yet ANOTHER difference..in the book there is an adult T-rex and a juvenile T-rex and he gets killed by the smaller one). Another character who survives in the novel is Robert Muldoon, the overseer of the velociraptors. You may remember him from the beginning of the film when he yells "SHOOT HER" when one of his men gets attacked by a raptor, then when he calls a raptor a "clever girl" after being ambushed and killed by another one.

Park founder John Hammond, geneticist Henry Wu (BD Wong), and even mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) all notably survive the horrific day on Jurassic Park (along with our other main characters) as Hammond will make a small appearance in The Lost World; Malcolm also comes back in the second movie and makes an appearance in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom; and Wu is in both of the Jurassic World movies. Well, surprise, surprise! They all die in the book! I'm just as surprised as you are! (Well, not really, I already knew about Malcolm's resurrection from the dead and I had a feeling Hammond was going to die). Wu (who has a bigger part in the book...he's only in that scene in the beginning when they're watching the raptor hatch) is killed by raptors and gets a very nasty ending. (He's basically still alive while the raptors are ripping him apart...yikes.) While there are issues with John Hammond in the movie (like the fact that he doesn't think there's anything wrong with cloning dinosaurs and eventually opening a theme park with them), he is absolutely horrible in the book and therefore I knew he was going to die a horrible death. He comments how he wants to make a dinosaur park for all the children to enjoy, then snidely remarks, "All the rich kids, anyway." I mean, he's probably right. The park that was open for ten years that we saw in Jurassic World? You KNOW the same rich families were going year after year, thus the reason they were getting "bored" with the same old dinosaurs. Damn bratty rich kids. Hammond even (internally) curses his own grandchildren (he's much more grandfatherly in the movie!) and his grandkids are kind of the reason he dies! They're playing with a sound system that allows them to play different dinosaur calls and he gets scared when he hears the T-rex, thinking it's close and ends up twisting his ankle or something where he can't really walk very well. There are these little scavenger dinosaurs called procompsognathus (compys) that are not in the first movie, but will play a big part in the next film, as they do in the novel. These things are just pure evil and eat anything that's wounded and can't run away and you can try to shoo them away, but there's so many of them, you can't get away from them, and well, Hammond becomes a buffet for a bunch of them. Yeah, not a pretty way to go. I do recall a scene in The Lost World where somebody (I'm presuming a bad guy!) gets killed by them. Then you have Ian Malcolm who, in the book, gets attacked by the T-rex, then breaks his leg when the large animals throws him. He is said to have died from his wounds, but obviously he is brought back to life in the next book. At least he just had a bad wound, so it's plausible that he didn't really die. Now, if he had died the same way as Nedry (Wayne Knight aka Newman), there's no way he could have survived that as Nedry was dead as a doornail (doorknob?) His death is much more gruesome and graphic in the book! He does get killed by the same dinosaur as in the movie, a dilophosaurus. You get a little bit of foreshadowing of this dinosaur in the beginning when they're taking the Jeeps through the park and the dilophosaurus is the first dino that's featured and the announcer tells them it spits venom into its prey's eyes to paralyze them...and that is exactly what will happen to Nedry in a few scenes. In the book, it is ten feet tall, which is more accurate, while in the movie, it's about the same height as Nedry. It also didn't spit poison in real life and didn't have the frill around its neck.

Speaking of dinosaurs that Jurassic Park took liberties with (well, mainly Michael Crichton), the velociraptor that once roamed this planet is not at all what we see in the movies. They were still something you wouldn't want to come across, but they were a lot smaller, the size of turkeys. Apparently, legend is, the dinosaurs that are described in the book are actually more in line with the deinonychus (never heard of it), but Crichton thought "velociraptor" just sounded cooler and more menacing. And, yeah, he's right. Nobody goes around saying what a fierce and ferocious creature the deinonychus (die-non-uh-cuss) was, but thanks to the success of Jurassic Park and its following movies, everybody and their grandmother have heard of a velociraptor. And they're getting all the credit! Poor deinonychus! I remember a time when no one even knew what a velociraptor was. They might as well just switch the names! Do you think that irritates paleontologists when they watch this movie? There's probably a lot of things that irritate them when they watch this movie (like the dilophosaurus having a neck frill and being able to shoot poison); that's why I'm glad I'm not one, otherwise I wouldn't be able to enjoy Jurassic Park! 

Speaking of things that probably irritate paleontologists, this probably doesn't come as a huge surprise, but if you did encounter a T-rex, it would be able to see you even if you were standing still, contrary to what Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) says. I guess a paleontologist must have informed Michael Crichton he was wrong (that scene was in the book, right? I honestly don't really remember. To me, the movie is cannon, not the book!) because there's a scene in The Lost World novel where a character (a bad guy, of course) gets eaten by a T-rex because he was misinformed about a T-rex not being able to see him if he just stood there, and nope! Not true! Also, the scene when paleo-botanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Malcolm, and Muldoon are in the Jeep driving away from the T-rex, it would have easily been able to catch up to it and overturn the vehicle. I recently read a book called The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by a young paleontologist named Steve Brusatte and he touched upon the mistakes the film made.

This movie establishes that opening a theme park with real life cloned dinosaurs is a terrible, terrible idea. (And Jurassic World PROVED it!) I would say Jurassic World was worst in that it was a full-operating theme park and there were many people there that day (although the fatality rate didn't seem to be that high considering there were carnivorous dinosaurs running around!) In Jurassic Park, there was only Hammond and his crew and his guests and grandchildren. The park seems so antiquated compared to what we would later see in Jurassic World. And the dinosaurs didn't seem to be very well contained....especially when the power went off so they could escape from their cages which were held with power lines.

I don't know, if you were going to have a dinosaur theme park, why not start with some simple and non-threatening ones? Why have the T-Rex? I sure as hell wouldn't want to go anywhere near that thing! And then why even create raptors when you know they are one of the most vicious and intelligent of the dinosaurs. (Until Chris Pratt will come along 20 years later to train them!) I mean, when Muldoon tells Grant, "They should all be destroyed" when talking about the raptors, maybe you should listen to the expert! Is Hammond just not thinking about this stuff? At least when his grandchildren are in trouble, he seems to realize what a mistake he made. Just because you CAN do something outrageous (like clone dinosaurs) doesn't mean you SHOULD. This theme is brought up in the movie (and the book). How did Hammond think he was going to feed his sauropods which are easily more than four times the size of an elephant (if not more)? And how much livestock was he going to need to feed all the carnivores? And did he not stop think that the air dinosaurs breathed nearly 65 million (and beyond) years ago would be drastically different from the air we breathe today? Moral of the story? Don't play God!

Jurassic Park is just a little over two hours long, but yet dinosaurs are on screen for only fifteen minutes! I was really surprised when I first learned this fact. I know it takes awhile before we actually see a dinosaur, but I would have guessed at least 30 minutes of dino screen time. Even though a dinosaur may not be shown at all times, we are constantly reminded we are in the midst of them and the atmosphere gives us the perception they're always around even though we may not physically see them. And when they are on screen, they make a huge impression on us (the T-rex attack; the raptors in the kitchen; the flock of gallimimus; the seemingly cute and harmless, but extremely dangerous dilophosaurus, etc.).

What do you call a blind dinosaur? Doyouthinkhesaurus! What do you call a dinosaur that nobody's ever heard of, but is actually the star of Jurassic Park? Deinonychus!