In 2019, JJ Abrams’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker served up a string of emptily familiar set pieces as it brought the curtain down on Episode IX – the final instalment of a sequel trilogy. Ever since, fans of the furiously divisive penultimate instalment, The Last Jedi, have argued that The Rise of Skywalker’s original co-writer/director, Colin Trevorrow, would have delivered a far more rewardingly risk-taking finale had he not left because of “creative differences”. Now, Trevorrow, who graduated from the Sundance prize-winning indie fantasy Safety Not Guaranteed to directing the behemoth Jurassic World in 2015, gets another shot at closing out a blockbuster trilogy in adventurous fashion. Yet perhaps chastened by his bruising experiences on Star Wars, he has gone for the Abrams option following a formula in which surprises are few, plodding is the order of the day and safety is absolutely guaranteed.
Jurassic World Dominion picks up four years after the events of JA Bayona’s visually inventive Fallen Kingdom (co-written by Trevorrow), which ended with Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm heralding the beginning of “a new era” – a neo-Jurassic age. In this strange new world, where monsters have been sprung from their island cages and spread across the globe, mankind and dinosaurs must coexist, an anomalous circumstance previously explored in such varied films as the famously ahistorical One Million Years BC and the apocalyptically stupid A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell.
