With its first trailer, Jurassic World Dominion gives us a good look at returning Jurassic Park stars Jeff Goldblum, Laura Dern, and Sam Neill, who—Sam Neill promises!—have considerable roles in the final movie (or is it?) in the Jurassic World trilogy.
Of course, Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, and their dinosaur pals are back, too. And life—very big, very hungry life—has found all kinds of ways, all over the planet.
The end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom saw Isla Nubar destroyed, and dinosaurs set loose on the world. Coexistence is, unsurprisingly, not going that well. The summary says:
Buy the Book
Sisters of the Forsaken Stars
Dominion takes place four years after Isla Nublar has been destroyed. Dinosaurs now live—and hunt—alongside humans all over the world. This fragile balance will reshape the future and determine, once and for all, whether human beings are to remain the apex predators on a planet they now share with history’s most fearsome creatures.
Somehow I don’t think this is going to be a movie in which dinosaurs snack on humans until the end of humanity, but maybe it should be?
Along with Howard, Pratt, and the original Jurassic Park trio, returning cast includes BD Wong (as Dr. Henry Wu), Justice Smith (as Franklin Webb), Daniella Pineda (as Dr. Zia Rodriguez) and Omar Sy (as Barry Sembenè). New dinosaur fodder cast members include the always excellent and perpetually underused Dichen Lachman (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), DeWanda Wise (She’s Gotta Have It), Mamoudou Athie (Archive 81), Scott Haze (Antlers), and Campbell Scott (Singles) as Dodgson.
After leaving Fallen Kingdom in the hands of J.A. Bayona, Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow returned for Dominion, which he co-wrote with Emily Carmichael (Pacific Rim: Uprising).
Jurassic World Dominion roars into theaters June 10th.
The commercials promised me Olympic stars!
Also, how did they all get off the island?
#1
They covered that in the last movie.
I recently rewatched the original Jurassic Park film for the first time in over a decade (it was on Netflix). It provoked a few thoughts about the Ellie Sattler character….
It’s been suggested that the portrayal of Ellie a paleobotanist and Alan Grant as a paleontologist was sexist: the male of the pair is interested in animals (active), the female in plants (passive). Whatever the case of that, paleobotany barely comes up in the film. There’s one scene, right before the protagonists see dinosaurs for the first time, where Ellie marvels over a living leaf from a long extinct plant. Afterwards, in the discussion at the compound, she remarks that the extinct plants have no idea what century they’re in, and will defend themselves aggressively if necessary. And that, as far as I can recall, was the last word on paleobotany in any of the Jurassic Park movies. Even when Ellie reappears for a cameo in the third film, she appears to be writing a book about dinosaurs, not paleobotany. The films never offer any explanation as to how the prehistoric flora was genetically resurrected. It couldn’t’ have been from mosquitoes preserved in amber, could it? Other than that one leaf, they never, to my knowledge, portray any extinct plants, let alone explore the implication of their reintroduction to the biosphere. The writers seem to have completely forgotten about it.
The irony here, I think, is that reintroducing prehistoric plants could be a lot more dangerous than dinosaurs. The premise of the new movie–that a few dozen dinosaurs of different species released from a single location in North America could proliferate so uncontrollably as to represent a threat to humanity’s planetary dominance– is laughable. It would be harder to preserve them in the wild than it would be to destroy them. They’d quickly suffer the fate of most other terrestrial megafauna in the Anthropocene: they’d be domesticated or dwindle to extinction. “Jurassic plants” to the contrary, spitting millions of seeds into the world’s winds, could constitute a genuine menace. They could rapidly replace native flora, with unknowable effects on the ecosphere. It might not be as dramatic on the screen as being stalked by a t-rex or velociraptor. But it would be a lot more plausible.
I hope that, with Ellie Sattler returning as a major character, the new film at least does something with paleobotany. My guess is that they won’t.
#3
They do make use of Sattler’s knowledge in the original film when she diagnoses the Triceratops’ sickness having something to do with its diet. And she sure gets her hands dirty doing it!
OK, there are some feathers. But not enough feathers.
Despite the preposterous science and over-the-top action, I’m sure I will love it, just like the rest of the movies in the series!
@@.-@ You’re right. I must have drifted off during that part. Was that the last mention of paleobotany though? “They will defend themselves, aggressively if necessary,” is a line that deserves a payoff, I think.
Is it wrong that I find myself hoping the dinosaurs eat all the self-righteous idiots from the last film who set them loose in the first place?
Please excuse me while I cackle with the Joy of B-Movie madness WITH DINOSAURS! (I hope, I dearly hope, that somewhere Mr Ray Harryhausen can see this trailer and think “No school like the old school”).
Also, if you listen carefully, you can hear the exact moment when the Good Ship Grant/Sattler cracks on full sail and swoops audiences into cinemas on the breath of a Mighty Wind … (-;
Man oh man, Sam Neil is just one beautiful guy.
#7
I believe it’s the last mention. And unless they come up with a giant T-rex eating pitcher plant, it’ll probably stay that way. Deep down, these are monster movies, after all.
@3. I don’t know. These plants are from before flowers evolved and when that happened flowering plants took over leaving these other prior species behind. So you then reintroduce them in a world where flowering plants are the primary form plants take, with many exceptions. Being dumped in this world, most of them would die. Which makes me wonder how much soil sterilization had to be done to get them established in the first place.
Just like that Mosasaur which I would expect to be shredded by the first pod of whale hunting Orcas it runs across.
But this is a movie and has movie logic so…(shrugs)
@13, Fair points. My understanding is that evasive species can rapidly displace native ones. It’s a problem here in Washington State, at least for those who care about maintaining the ecological balance of the bioregion, with blackberries, scotch broom, and others threatening the health of the indigenous species. I suspect if you released a few hundred Siberian tigers on the Olympic Peninsula, say, it would be an easier problem to eradicate. I also believe flowering plants overlapped at least with the Cretaceous, the epoch from which many of the “Jurassic” park dinosaurs come from, so presumably some/most of the genetically reincarnated vegetation might itself consist of flowering plants. I’ll grant that if a bunch of mosasaurs or pteranodons got loose, they might be harder to contain than terrestrial dinosaurs.