Warning: This post contains MAJOR spoilers for Jurassic World Dominion.
Released in 1997, The Lost World: Jurassic Park is the Jurassic Park sequel that Jurassic World Dominion tries and fails to be. The Steven Spielberg-directed sequel to his 1993 smash-hit Jurassic Park saw Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough return as Dr. Ian Malcolm and Professor John Hammond, with the former being hired to save a flourishing dinosaur sanctuary from human interference. Jurassic Park was a tough act to follow, but while the sequel performed less well critically, it was the second-highest-grossing film of 1997, beaten only by James Cameron’s Titanic, the highest-grossing film of all time up to that point.
Jurassic World Dominion is the sixth film in the Jurassic franchise and the third entry in the Jurassic World series of movies and unites Jurassic World‘s cast with the cast of the Jurassic Park movies. Following on from the disastrous evacuation of the former Jurassic World site on Isla Nublar in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, dinosaurs are roaming the Earth once more, opening them up to exploitation by both criminal and corporate interests. However, rather than expanding the Jurassic franchise into the wider world, both Fallen Kingdom and Dominion spend almost 5 hours between them telling a story that was already told in Lost World.
There are numerous similarities between Lost World and Dominion, not least the involvement of a returning Jeff Goldblum. Both films explore the theme of humanity’s hubristic perception of their dominance over the natural world. However, while Dominion tackles this in a more serious nature, Lost World remembers that it’s also a blockbuster movie and contains some memorable action set-pieces. Steven Spielberg apparently became disillusioned with the movie while making it, however, like Jurassic Park 3, it’s better than some remember. The scene where Julianne Moore’s character Sarah is dangling over the void, pressed against an increasingly fragile pane of glass is more tense and thrilling than anything that appears in Jurassic World Dominion. However, it’s not just the assured directorial hand of Steven Spielberg that ensures Lost World is a thrilling piece of blockbuster entertainment. There are some deep, philosophical themes at the movie’s core that befit Jeff Goldblum’s charismatic chaotician. Many of these themes recur throughout Jurassic World Dominion but, bizarrely for the sixth film in a shared universe, feel less developed than in the first Jurassic Park sequel.
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The Four-Year Time Jump
Lost World and Dominion both take place four years after the ending of the previous movie. In Lost World, many people appear to have forgotten or are blithely ignorant of the catastrophic events at John Hammond’s Jurassic Park. Ian Malcolm is reintroduced boarding a subway train where he’s accosted by a young man who assures him that, unlike others, he believed in Malcolm’s warnings about dinosaurs. Their conversation horrifies their fellow passengers, who look on with a mixture of bafflement and concern for their mental well-being. Summoned to John Hammond’s home, Malcolm is chastised for breaching his non-disclosure agreement by Peter Ludlow, who’s taken over the management of Hammond’s Jurassic Park legacy. In the movie’s first ten minutes, including the ill-fated British holidaymakers who get too close to Hammond’s second site, Lost World quickly establishes there has been a substantial and potentially dangerous cover-up. The cover-up has even resulted in Malcolm’s university tenure being revoked for talking to the press. As in Dominion, Ian Malcolm is a celebrity, but for all the wrong reasons.
The four-year time jump in Dominion feels more hastily sketched in. Owen (Chris Pratt) and Claire (Bryce Dallas-Howard) are living out in the wilderness, avoiding detection to protect their adopted clone daughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon.) Meanwhile, in an incredible opening sequence, the difficulties of humanity living alongside dinosaurs are recounted via an online news video that shows, among other things, dinosaurs disrupting weddings. It also reintroduces Jurassic Park‘s Lewis Dodgson as a messianic figure offering sanctuary to the dinosaurs, much like Hammond intended with his second site on Isla Sorna. However, unlike the sharper focus on how Ian Malcolm’s life has been believably affected by his involvement with Jurassic Park, the introduction to Dominion feels too broad and expository for the consequences of the past four years to feel tangibly real.
Life Finds A Way
Both Lost World and Dominion feature dinosaurs evolving past their genetic modifications. In Lost World, the dinosaurs, bred with a lysine deficiency, should only have lived for a week. And yet, after a hurricane destroyed the facility and allowed the creatures on Isla Sorna to roam free, they’ve created their own living, breathing eco-system on the island. In Jurassic World: Dominion, it’s revealed that some dinosaurs have managed to evolve past the reproductive restrictions imposed on them by scientists at Jurassic World, allowing Blue to have a baby raptor. The plot developments in both movies affirm Ian Malcolm’s eloquent observation that “life finds a way” and also challenge the dominance of humanity and genetic modification over the natural world.
Parenthood
Unsurprisingly for a Steven Spielberg movie, The Lost World has the theme of parenthood running through it. Malcolm’s girlfriend Sarah is a paleontologist who wishes to disprove perceived notions of parenthood in T-Rexes. When she and animal rights activist and documentarian Nick (Vince Vaughan) discover an injured baby T-Rex, they bring it back to their camp to heal its wounds. This attracts the potentially fatal attention of the child’s parents, leading to the film’s greatest set-piece, involving Julianne Moore and the fracturing pain of glass. It’s also the baby T-Rex that holds the key to averting a catastrophe in the movie’s climax when the male T-Rex rampages through San Diego. Further to that, Ian Malcolm is attempting to build a relationship with his own daughter with whom it’s heavily implied that he’s estranged.
Parenthood both paleontological and anthropomorphic is key to the core plot of Dominion, too. It’s the kidnapping of both Blue’s child and Maisie by BioSyn operatives that puts Owen and Claire on a collision course with the original Jurassic Park cast. Claire and Maisie are struggling to bond and her eventual rescue of her adoptive daughter from Lewis Dodgson’s sanctuary finally brings them closer together. Parental responsibility is a theme that recurs throughout the Jurassic movies, all the way back to Jurassic Park‘s Tim and Lex and their bond with Alan Grant (Sam Neill.) However, both The Lost World and Dominion attempt to draw comparisons with the parental responsibilities of dinosaurs that emphasize humanity’s commonality with the animals it so often exploits.
Animal Exploitation
The kidnap of Blue’s baby is just another way that humanity is exploiting animals, separating a child from their mother for their own selfish ends. The audience first meets Claire in Dominion as she attempts to liberate a dinosaur from an illegal breeding farm, while another big set-piece involves Owen and Claire tracking down a shady dinosaur dealer at a Maltese market. As they move through this underworld establishment, they witness men betting on dinosaur fights, food trucks selling dinosaur meat on skewers, and all manner of dodgy dinosaur deals. This sequence continues a trend of animal rights messaging identified by Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom audiences.
However, animal exploitation is also featured in the plot of The Lost World. Like Dodgson in Dominion, Hammond’s nephew Peter Ludlow also wants to exploit the prehistoric creatures for profit. Where Dodgson uses genetically modified locusts to control the world’s food supply, Ludlow wants to capitalize on the appetite for animal attractions in San Diego. Believing that he can resurrect an abandoned plan for a Jurassic Park, he wants to go up against controversial tourist attractions like Sea World. This exploitation of animals for entertainment predictably backfires and unleashes an angry T-Rex on an unsuspecting public.
Dinosaurs In Real Life
Given the promise of the climax of the previous film, Jurassic World: Dominion wastes Fallen Kingdom‘s best innovation. Aside from the fun opening sequence and the sleazy dinosaur market, there are actually very few scenes of dinosaurs interacting with the real world. There’s certainly nothing as fun as The Lost World‘s T-Rex rampage around suburban San Diego, or as exciting as its devastating disruption of traffic. The destructive culture clash of humans and dinosaurs is never properly explored in Dominion, everyone mostly looks on in hushed awe as dinosaurs parade past them. The only moment of threat involves the ridiculous, laser-targetted, trained velociraptor assassins which overtly emphasizes that humanity is the real monster while completely wasting the dramatic potential of dinosaurs and humans co-existing. Similarly, abandoning this brave new world for a dry plot involving prehistoric locusts instead of dinosaurs adds to the disappointment.
Why The Lost World: Jurassic Park Is Better Than Jurassic World: Dominion
The main struggle of any Jurassic Park sequel has been justifying why anyone would attempt to replicate Hammond’s park after the first Jurassic Park. The first Jurassic World movie made a good stab at it, suggesting that corporate greed and the very human obsession with self-improvement were behind the ill-fated revival. Jurassic World is also a meta-commentary on sequels themselves, with the new park having to create an even bigger and deadlier dinosaur to appeal to audiences. Jurassic World was the logical continuation of The Lost World, like Ludlow, Simon Masrani believes the Jurassic Park concept is sound but they just need to iron out the kinks. Both men are proved fatally wrong, thus seemingly putting an end to the whole foolish endeavor. However, the subsequent movies have floundered in their attempts to tell the story of what comes after Jurassic Park. In particular, Dominion ends up falling back on various aspects of the first two Jurassic Park movies rather than taking them in a new direction.
The Lost World took the central concept of the original movie and expanded it out into what happens when humans enter the natural habitat of dinosaurs without the admittedly flawed safety measures of Jurassic Park. In doing so, it commented on the way that corporate interests exploit animals for entertainment and profit, and explored how a lone dinosaur would interact with the modern world. Rather than expand upon those themes, Dominion replays them but without the charm and wit of Spielberg’s movie. Despite Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard’s considerable talents, they’re no match for the charisma of Jeff Goldblum and Julianne Moore, as proved by the strong presence of the stars of the original Jurassic Park in Dominion.
The Lost World is also a more streamlined and focused movie. It’s about two conflicting interests for the future of Hammond’s dinosaurs and the never-ending battle between conservation and capitalist expansion. Jurassic World Dominion is also about this, but the message of the movie is muddied by too many complex plot threads involving clones, the convoluted family history of Hammond’s business partner, as well as the guilt of B.D. Wong’s scientist, and the return of Dodgson. If this is truly the end of the Jurassic saga then it’s a far less satisfying conclusion than the majestic sight of dinosaurs living in relative peace and harmony, away from human interference that closes out The Lost World: Jurassic Park. In many ways, the saga should have ended there, as original writer Michael Crichton intended.