Jurassic Park should never have worked as well as it did. Steven Spielberg’s 1993 dinosaur blockbuster was a mess of contradictions: an absurd fantasy with down-to-earth human characters; a horror-inflected monster movie that children could still enjoy; a tech-heavy CGI-fest with a beating human heart. It’s no wonder studio executives looked at the film’s immediate cultural ubiquity (and near-billion-dollar gross) and hurried out a sequel. The people wanted more, and, nature be damned, they were going to get it – even if it meant cloning star Jeff Goldblum from amberised DNA.
Of course, that ended up not being necessary, and Goldblum v1.0 did return, for The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997, adapted from a novel somewhat reluctantly churned out by Michael Crichton two years earlier. In 2001, another sequel followed, sans Spielberg and Goldblum but with Sam Neill reprising his lead role from the original. Cut to 20 years later, and the franchise seems finally ready to hang up its straw hat with the release of Jurassic World Dominion. Dominion is the third film in the Jurassic World series, a trilogy of films that loosely follow on from the original Jurassic Parks. Dominion is, significantly, the first film since 1993 to reunite the three original leads – Neill, Goldblum and Laura Dern. Also thrown in the mix, with considerably less fanfare, are characters from the previous two Jurassic World films, including Chris Pratt’s blandly heroic velociraptor wrangler Owen Grady, and Bryce Dallas Howard’s dino-conservationist Claire Dearing.
