Watching Jurassic World: Dominion inspired me to write about foreshadowing. I’ll talk about that first and then I’ll share my opinion about the movie overall.
Foreshadowing is where you introduce an idea or concept earlier in your story that might not fully make sense yet but that will be more fully developed later in the story. This comes to mind with Dominion in that they seem to be foreshadowing something very strongly and multiple times, but it never pays off. I am guessing that the pay off hit the editing floor (or rather, the digital bit bucket).
The bit has something to do with Dr. Lewis Dodgson obsessively eating granola bars and other nut-based foods. They give it more importance than just him being a hungry man. Something is being hinted at, but we never find out what it is.
Novels grow rather organically. Sometimes you’ll write a scene that comes out very differently from the way you imagined it when you start writing it. You might write something that you decide should be foreshadowed earlier, somewhere. I don’t want to lose my momentum and stop and try and figure out where the foreshadowing should go, so I have a page where I track what I call Pickups, things that I will add in the next editing pass.
A good example of this is the scene I just wrote between Maggie and Barry. They have a particular type of banter between them that is key to the scene. In my Pickup notes, I have a reminder to add this type of banter between them in an earlier scene to establish that they have this sort of bantering relationship. Otherwise, it will seem artificial and that it just came out of nowhere just to add humor to the scene.
In another case, I had Grace use an expression that seemed a little off for her to use. I was going to change it, then realized that it was more like an expression Bill, her former lover, might use. In her previous scene, she visits with the hallucination of a younger version of Bill. My Pickup for that was to have Bill use that expression when talking to her, and then later she uses that same expression. It is a form of her mirroring him and shows her being impacted by that encounter.
When you hint at something and then later it pays off and makes sense, it gives the reader an ah-ha moment. They feel smart if they got the earlier clue. It also helps to keep plot developments from seeming like they came out of left field. How many times have you heard someone say that disaster could have been prevented if they had only seen the signs? When things in real life do go disastrously wrong, there are usually many indications beforehand that don’t get noticed. You can let the reader see those signs before the characters through foreshadowing.
Just like movies, novels go through a lot of editing and a lot of things wind up getting cut. By keeping this Pickup log I have a record of where one part of the book references another part. When I am cutting, I can check to make sure the scene I am cutting is not linked to an earlier or later scene.
Jurassic World: Dominion is the final film of the second trilogy of one of the greatest movies ever, Jurassic Park. When it came out in 1993, I was very into the developing world of desktop special effects and CGI, and Belle had grown up digging up fossils and hanging around geology grad students during summer field trips with her dad. As you might guess, it was a big deal for both of us.
The subsequent films disappointed in progressively greater degrees with each sequel. I thought the next to the last one, 2008’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, was one of the worst films I ever saw. Badly written with surprisingly mediocre effects work and a disregard for science and physics that was mind-boggling.
I enjoyed the characters from the first film, so I wanted to see them back together for the final film, Dominion, and I thought their interactions with the characters from the second trilogy could be fun. The director thought otherwise. I did not think that it could possibly be worse than Fallen Kingdom, but I was wrong. Very wrong. Very very wrong.
We watched it with an actor friend and there were many laugh out loud sequences that were not intended to be funny but their ridiculousness made us all laugh. I am glad we did not see it in a movie theater as we laughed in all the wrong places. If they pushed it just a tiny bit further it could have been an entertaining Jurassic Park parody.
The old saying “If its not on the page its not on the screen” is not actually true. Great actors and a great director can save a mediocre script. That did not happen here, primarily because the director who was also the co-writer, who I will not name here so as not to shame his family, seems to have done little more than make a long string of extremely bad artistic decisions. All of the main characters are already established, so he apparently felt that there was no need for further character development or exploration. What we know about them we knew from previous films.
They do introduce a couple of new characters, the hotshot pilot and the turncoat employee. The pilot has a lot of potential, perhaps in the next trilogy, which I am assuming will be Jurassic Universe: Dinosaurs in Space. Here she is just not given enough to do.
They also recast a minor character from the first movie, Dr. Lewis Dodgson (I am guessing a blend of Lewis Carroll and his real name, Charles Dodgson). He is the one who hired Nedry to steal the dinosaur embryo. Originally played by Cameron Thor, that actor was available to reprise the role, as he was just released from prison for child sexual abuse. For some reason they decided to use a different actor.
Thor was replaced by Campbell Scott. As written, this character had little more character development than the original role (a part so small I bet you don’t even remember him). Kudos to Scott for imbuing the role with personality using his voice and physicality in a way that went way beyond the paper thin development on the page. That is one advantage of screenwriting over writing novels- there are actors who can make your lazy writing appear far better than it is.
Dr. Dodgson is seen with a Barbizon shaving cream can, the same type used in the original film to transport the dinosaur embryos. Why is not revealed. It looks like the original, old and battered even, which was lost in the mud in the first movie. I suppose it could have been retrieved with metal detectors, but that would have taken quite a bit of effort. Since the embryo would not have been viable by the time they could have retrieved it, why bother?
Nods to the earlier films are constant throughout. There are even nods to other films, such as recreating the parkuor scene from one of the Jason Bourne movies, but with a dinosaur instead.
The problem is, the entire film seems more like an homage than anything original. It is as if all the best moments from the previous films have been preserved in amber, they extract it, but much of the original DNA of those scenes is missing, so they replace the missing DNA with random bits that make little sense. Every scene is far inferior from the ones they so heavily borrowed from. Instead of a knowing nod to previous films, this seems more like wholesale plagiarizing by writers out of ideas.
The thing about the original film was that we were seeing something we had never seen before on screen- realistically convincing dinosaurs. It was breathtaking. Now even the nature channels have dinosaurs. Just making them bigger doesn’t make them new or more captivating.
And, seriously, the focus on giant locusts was not a great idea. The 2005 Locusts: The 8th Plague was a cheesy movie with terrible acting, but the giant corporate engineered locusts in it are scarier despite Sharknado level effects. They ramp up the danger by making the locusts carnivorous. It has an oddly similar plot to Dominion, but no dinosaurs. There were carnivorous giant insects in the Carboniferous era. Those would be scary. While the threat from the locusts has global implications, it is not an immediate threat so it has less urgency.
I don’t really want to see locusts in a dinosaur movie. First of all, locusts/grasshoppers would not appear until the Eocene (30 million years ago), long past the time of extremely large insects in the Carboniferous period (300 million years ago). Instead, they cite an imaginary species from the Cretaceous period (145 to 66 million years ago).
They also genetically modify these imaginary large locusts to be even larger. Imagine that I told you I genetically modified a human to be 15 feet tall. We already know the many health issues someone even 7 feet tall faces. Our bodies are not structurally designed to be that large. A 2022 study showed that the very tall are more likely to suffer from peripheral neuropathy, lower extremity ulcers, chronic venous insufficiency, ruptured aortas and pulmonary embolisms. Creatures become larger due to millions of years of tinkering. They go through substantial morphological changes. You can’t just scale them up, despite that being a popular science fiction trope. An enlarging beam on almost any creature would wind up with it being crushed to death by its own weight.
And the way they save the world from locusts is dodgy at best. There is a thing called a gene drive, which is a self-propagating CRISPR-based drive system to alter DNA. It takes generations, though, and is considered extremely dangerous and apt to get out of control. They incorporate a more made-up single generation variation of that that makes little scientific sense to me. It involves a viral pathogen that alters DNA. As we know from Covid, pathogens can mutate very quickly. In the film they super speed up migration, so the locusts have somehow spread all over the very big world in an astonishingly short time. You’d have to get your pathogen spreading locusts into each and every isolated community. This seems like a slow and iffy way to stop the locusts.
All of this is in service to a badly written script. You could probably teach a semester’s long screenwriting class just on all the things they did wrong from a storytelling aspect. Mostly, it was about missed opportunities. They did little with the idea of a world now filled with prehistoric creatures. This film mostly takes place on an island and we see little of the world except in a news show and in a laugh out loud ridiculous shot at the end of dinosaurs and horses galloping together. They really don’t do much world building here in a world that would have been dramatically transformed. The characters from the first and second trilogies are mostly kept separate from each other, not meeting up until near the end. There were so many missed opportunities by choosing not to have these two different groups interact and work together. The relationship between Alan and Ellie had potential but it was handled unconvincingly. While her genes make her the lynch pin of the story, there is not much interesting about Maisie other than to add child in danger elements. She is the only one like her. Could not she have been more special? The original movie incorporated children and their relationships with adults extremely well. This, not so much.
Even the music seemed to be a faint echo of the original John Williams score, which I consider one of the great movie scores by one of the greatest of movie composers. Michael Giacchino is very talented and an award winning composer, but my wife, with a more trained musical ear than mine, also found the music just a little wanting.
I enjoyed reading Michael Crichton’s books, and I loved the movie Westworld when I was a kid. As an adult, with some formal training in directing, I rewatched it and was astounded that the directing was so terrible. It was only Crichton’s second stab at directing and his first feature film. Crichton later wrote that film directing was not a complicated craft. He said you could learn it in a month. That’s the problem when you don’t know what you don’t know. I think the director of Dominion has the same problem.
The science is pretty wonky in it. Isaac Asimov proposed that good science fiction can have one major element that goes way beyond known science, but that the rest of the science should be grounded. For Jurassic Part, that concept is that dinosaurs can be recreated using genes locked in amber. Not really possible, but we could go along with it as they did try to maintain the science in the original. In reality, the larger dinosaurs would not be able to breath as the atmosphere was a lot thicker in their time and it took a lot of oxygen just to move those massive bodies.
Dominion adds some new science- the more recent understanding that dinosaurs had feathers (although that was still beig debated when the first one was made). It looks cool, moving them away from looking like large lizards. Most of the “science” is just embarrassing, though. They swing wildly with genetics and cloning.
I disliked the editing, which of course impacted the pacing, which I also did not like. Yes, it will make well over a billion dollars and thousands of very talented people worked on it, and many people with less discriminating taste will enjoy it. For $185 million and such an extremely talented cast, I just think they should have made a better movie than this. It series truly jumped the Mosasaurus.
