Jurassic World Dominion [IMAX]

Well at least with this film, this double-trilogy is now finally over. Hopefully. 

With each successive film, they have managed to continuously downgrade the good faith and awe generated from the incomparable first film. With each new entry, the spectacle of seeing dinosaurs on the big screen just seemed to slowly evaporate. It could be a consequence of time or the saturation of the modern movie-going experience with CGIs, but undoubtedly it was also due to the lack of realism from the practical effects that made Steven Spielberg's very first Jurassic Park such a wonderous milestone in cinematic history. It almost felt like the dinosaurs' CGI are getting cheaper with every film.

Then of course, Colin Trevorrow's direction is not at the level of Spielberg yet. Granted, Trevorrow had a couple of great scenes. However, those involved mainly the dinosaurs and action set pieces. They were tense, well-framed and exciting. But, the scenes that involved human interactions and dialogue exchanges were flat and lifeless. 

The messy screenplay by him and Emily Carmichael definitely did not help. Too many ideas, too many characters, too much exposition. It was like Jurassic Park meets Indiana Jones meets James Bond meets Taken meets Godzilla. Tonally inconsistent and not even fun while doing it.

The persistent lack of chemistry between Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt did not help. Pratt remained a blank slate here as his leading man character who just so boring and vanilla; Howard at least had a little more emoting to do here. 

Although the addition of legacy characters played by Sam Neil, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum were welcomed - the strains of John William's classic score underlying Neil and Dern's first meet was giddily fun - they were let down by a clunky script, poor direction choices and a huge sense of "why are they even here in the first place?". Goldblum provided some humour playing, essentially, the same act he has honed through these recent years. Nothing new but pleasant nonetheless. 

Music was by Michael Giacchino and it was unimpressive. One of his most rote and unimaginative score. John Schwartzman lensed the film and there were a couple of great shots but sadly not when the film needed it most.

This film was just all over the place and had so many ideas but yet so little conflict to engage an audience. It was almost as if the humans and their concerns were secondary to the spectacle of the dinosaurs.  But even then, the dinosaurs were losing their lustre and allure. And if even that is gone, what more can the Jurassic Era offer?

At 146 minutes long, this film was easily 20-30 minutes too long, and IMAX was definitely not necessary for this. Honestly, nowadays, maybe even wait for it to come to streaming.