Jurassic World: Dominion Would Have Made A Great Novel

Jurassic World: Dominion was advertised as “The Epic Conclusion Of The Jurassic Era,” a tagline that would be proven untrue just a few years later with the announcement of 2025’s Jurassic World: Rebirth. It’s a good thing that it didn’t end up serving as the finale — Jurassic World: Dominion has a clunky plot, uninspired cinematography and stretches its nostalgic potency to a forced breaking point. A cavalcade of subplots all manage to bury its prime hook — what would our world be like if dinosaurs were just, like, around? By the end of it, you’re begging for extinction.

That’s not to say there weren’t gems in the movie. One of the subplots gave us a sincerely fascinating idea to chew on: The genetically engineered locusts that threaten earth’s food supply are revealed to be a scheme by an unscrupulous genetics company. If only they ran further with this.

Instead, Jurassic World: Dominion juggled it with so much else — eventually dropping all the balls. At the end of the prior film, Fallen Kingdom, a veritable army of dinosaurs escaped into the world. This scatters the characters from the World trilogy: Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire is off trying to uncover some felonious dinosaur breeding. Meanwhile Chris Pratt’s Owen is both trying to protect a girl that was revealed to be the result of a genetic experiment in the last film (Fallen Kingdom didn’t just release dinosaurs but stray plot points) and wrangle dinosaurs. Meanwhile, the stars from the original film, Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler, Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm and Sam Neill’s Alan Grant are all trying to figure out what’s going on with Biosyn, that aforementioned genetics company with a concerning interest in messing with and combining DNA.

If you’d like to know one of the reasons why Dominion was less satisfying than its predecessors, look no further than that — you bring back the actors from Jurassic Park, a classic by any measure, and you have them deal with … basic corporate malfeasance? Sure, the two halves of the cast unite by the end, mostly to act scared around the film’s new big, bad dinosaur, Giganotosaurus, but it’s a jumbled effort. Biosyn’s plan to essentially bend our food supply to its whim through the use of these altered locusts was more interesting, but it also had to wrestle with the blockbuster tic of showing a CGI monstrosity every few minutes.

The problem, really, is the format. If there was a creative force that could’ve handled this story, it’s Jurassic Park’s late creator, Michael Crichton. Though successful in a variety of fields, Crichton’s claim to pop culture fame came from his techno/bio-thriller novels, ones that combined scientific deep dives with suspense and adventure. The Andromeda Strain sent us on an obsessive hunt into the way a group might deal with the emergence of a burgeoning pandemic. Congo blended a pulpy adventure story with a curious look into both computers and animal intelligence, while Sphere was a claustrophobic jaunt to the bottom of the ocean that questioned both the human mind and our potential relationship with extraterrestrials.

Jurassic Park, which some view as his magnum opus, didn’t just use the restoration of dinosaurs as an outlier in mankind’s scientific ambition, but as a particularly gory symbol of a wider arms race. There was money to be made in tampering with DNA and though the film does include the greedy Jurassic Park employee trying to steal embryos for a competitor, the early sections of the book turn it into a wider concern. John Hammond isn’t just a misguided dreamer but a paranoid industrialist. And the promise of a “Jurassic Park” isn’t just on a mysterious island, but in the starry eyes of boardroom executives around the globe. Everyone wants a piece of the pie, even if that pie is a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

That Crichton makes all of this feel palatable to the everyday reader, not just when it comes to the “Maybe they could pull this off in real life” explanation of how the dinosaurs have been created but the business of treating a mosquito in amber like an insider’s trade secret, was his gift. And the locusts in Dominion, the ones part of a wider, insidious plot to build a corporation’s stock, was another insect that could’ve used his touch. Crichton didn’t hold back (before we’re allowed to take a trip to the jungles of Africa in Congo, we get a brief history of supercomputing), but his best work makes this feel purposeful rather than alienated amidst its other, more potboiler elements. So the locusts sound like something Crichton would’ve made to fit in on a thematic level, rather than a disparate part seemingly competing with the next scene to come.

To add to all this, Crichton was an expert at bringing just enough real-world pop-science know-how to make his books so very believable. To bring it back to the locusts, well, there’s plenty of real world experiments in genetically engineered bugs to start with. It’s not hard to imagine that the very real billions of mosquitoes with self-limiting genes released in Brazil, India, Panama, and the Cayman Islands would make a great, believable plot starter. Surely someone looking to make a buck could have been watching this project. What if that person found, say, an unscrupulous insider to steal that tech (a theme in the books — the antagonists of The Lost World are also out to nab dinosaur eggs for Biosyn), bring it to the locusts, and … well, let’s just say we’re sure Crichton would find a way to land it.

Of course this is all a big “What if?” Crichton did write a sequel to Jurassic Park — 1995’s The Lost World. That ending was pretty clear-cut — the dinosaurs were all about to die from an infectious disease. But Crichton did write an alternate ending that left a little more mystery as to the fate of at least one ne’er-do-well geneticist who may or may not have had the key to healing the dinosaurs. Could Jurassic Park have been a trilogy? If it were, it’s not hard to imagine genetic engineering spreading to more modern species, in the name of profit. At the very least he may have found a way to use it to represent the wider issues of a world on the brink of plummeting back into prehistory. Because that was the literary brilliance of Crichton. Otherwise, the story would be like one of the many scenes in Jurassic World: Dominion — filled to the brim with state-of-the-art dinosaur spectacle and yet, somehow, empty.