“You look the same,” says Laura Dern when she catches up with Sam Neill in the sixth and hopefully final instalment of the dinosaur franchise.
She’s got a point. Neill is now 74, but his grumpy paleontologist Dr Alan Grant is so well-preserved you wonder if he’s spent the last 29 years in a bubble of amber.
Soon they will be joined by another member of Stephen Spielberg’s groundbreaking Jurassic Park. It’s a shockingly fit and luxuriantly bouffanted Jeff Goldblum, who at 69 can still convincingly fight off a T Rex with a flaming torch.
Sadly, while the returning humans have aged remarkably well, time hasn’t been kind to the dinosaurs.
Movies have moved on at a fair clip since Spielberg wowed us with the cutting-edge special effects of 1993, and director Colin Treverrow’s decision to use retro animatronic dinosaurs is an asteroid-sized disaster.
In close up, the creaky dino-bots fail to summon up the requisite oohs and aahs. And when the director does turn to CGI, his giant lizards look a few millennia behind the photoreal stars of The Lion King remake.
But the convoluted, cliche-ridden plot is an even bigger problem. It’s now four years since the action of the previous film Fallen Kingdom and the escaped dinosaurs have spread across the planet.
Biosyn, a not-at-all sinister-sounding biotech firm, has won a contract to experiment on all captured dinos in a vast research facility hidden, entirely innocently, in the Dolomite Mountains.
When a plague of cat-sized locusts rampage across America, Dern’s Doctor Ellie ropes Neill’s still smitten Dr Grant to help her investigate.
Luckily, they have a doctor on the inside in the form of Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Ian Malcolm, who has taken a nonsensical gig at Biosyn HQ lecturing boffins about the dangers of playing God.
Meanwhile, the stars of the previous two installments have their own issue with Biosyn. Since the last film, Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) have been raising Maisie Lockwood (British actress Isabella Sermon) in a secluded log cabin.
As the 14-year-old is the world’s first human clone, Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), Biosyn’s not-all dodgy CEO, is desperate to get his mitts on her DNA.
When Maise is kidnapped, Claire and Owen team up with Han Solo-esque pilot and smuggler Kayla (Dewanda Wise) to break into Biosyn’s HQ.
As it turns out to be just yet another misguided theme park, you always know where this is heading.
Goldblum ad libs some mildly amusing lines, there’s a moderately tense action scene involving a giant clawed dino skittering across a frozen lake. But if Dominion had a more interesting plot, I probably wouldn’t have spent so much time perusing the hairlines of veteran actors.
