It’s the end of an era — the Jurassic Era. After six “Jurassic Park” and “Jurassic World” movies and almost 30 years, it’s apparently the end of the line for the creature feature franchise that left an oversized footprint on pop culture. “Jurassic World” director Colin Trevorrow returns to helm “Jurassic World Dominion,” the final film of the legacy trilogy, and a trio of favorite actors from the “Jurassic Park” movies have returned to bid adieu to the dinosaurs as well. It’s laden with nostalgia, made up of nods to the original films and other action-adventure classics, and as a goodbye note to the franchise, it’s heartfelt, if a bit limpid, giving preference to references over storytelling.
If Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” was a slasher movie where Michael Myers was a velociraptor, “Jurassic World Dominion” is a swashbuckling action-adventure picture in the style of “Indiana Jones,” but with huge, murderous reptiles. After the dip into gothic haunted house horror that was J.A. Bayona’s “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” the dinosaurs are officially free of the park and out into the world, and we’ve been promised a film about dinosaurs inhabiting the same space humans and other animals do: stampeding across the prairies, invading city parks, rampaging through the oceans, etc.
There is some of that, to be sure, but "Dominion," written by Trevorrow, Derek Connolly and Emily Carmichael, quickly brings the story back into "Park" mode, after a couple of international detours in the style of Indy or James Bond or even Jason Bourne. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) find themselves plunged into the dinosaur black market in Malta while tracking down their adoptive daughter, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), a human clone of a brilliant genetic scientist who has been kidnapped for her very valuable DNA.
