Dear Mr Spielberg, can we now put to rest this overstretched, bloated dinosaur franchise? asks Aseem Chhabra.
We are in the year 2022.
The dinosaurs that roamed the restricted Jurassic Park are now everywhere in the world, living among us, running in the wild in the Sierra Nevada mountains, in implausible tropical forest like locations in Italy, and being sold and traded in an underground market in Malta.
There's a new world order in Jurassic World Dominion, designed and created by Director Colin Trevorrow (script writer of the Jurassic World trilogy, who directed Irrfan Khan in the first part film in 2015).
Greedy speculators and businessmen are still messing up the system, instead of letting man and dinosaurs live a healthy compatible life.
And there is a lot of suspension of disbelief.
No spoilers here, but the film ends with tiny baby dinosaurs hanging out in a park in Washington DC, and happy American kids playing with them.
But before we come to that, there is nearly two-and-a-half hours of jumping around the world.
There are two parallel plots that end up connecting with a multinational corporation Biosyn, headed by an evil smooth-talking businessman Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott).
Biosyn is located in the middle of a snowy mountainous area but there is also a tropical forest surrounding it, inhabited with angry, scary, dinosaurs.
If we have gone along with the idea of the Jurassic Park series that started with Steven Spielberg's original 1993 thriller, based on Michael Crichton's script, then some part of our brain might accept this crazy geographical set-up.
But this film really goes the extreme in the realm of impossibility.
One part of the story takes off with the last film, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, where Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), now a dinosaur-boy, trains the ancient animals as if they were cows.
Owen lives in a perfect home in the woods, with his love interest Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard).
They cut wood, cook, manage a simple life while also being foster parents to Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), the genetically engineered orphan, who is the grand-daughter of the late Dr John Hammond (played by the lovable Richard Attenborough).
Dodgson wants to kidnap Maisie to serve his scientific vision, coloured with greed and he will manage to do so, sending Grady and Dearing on a worldwide mission to rescue the little girl, aided with the help of an adventure loving pilot Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise).
Meanwhile, Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) and her old pal (and a love interest we have been waiting for) Alan Grant (Sam Neil) are looking for the DNA sample of giant locusts destroying wheat in America's food belt. Those locusts are also the creation of Dodgson's Biosyn and are developed in the deep basement of the same facility, located in the snowy mountains.
It is wonderful to see Dern and Neil, along with Jeff Goldblum (once again playing Ian Malcolm) in the new film.
There are moments which take you back to Spielberg's original thrilling adventure. And you will remember how the first Jurassic Park gave us a summer blockbuster experience quite unlike anything Hollywood had offered until that time.
But much of Jurassic World Dominion is overstuffed with genetic engineering mumbo jumbo to the extent that sometimes the film forgets that it is also supposed to focus on dinosaurs and how they are now living in our world, mingling with us, sometimes also scaring the hell out of us.
Jurassic World Dominion has some scary moments, such as when a large swarm of giant locusts attack a little boy and girl working in a farm in mid-America.
There is a touch of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds moment, upgraded with the latest CGI technology.
In another scene, the locusts now on fire, fly over the tropical forest creating a visually beautiful disaster sequence. And you think that maybe Trevorrow's film has something new to offer.
The film also takes us on a James Bond style chase sequence -- in this case, Grady is on a motorbike, chased by a couple of atrociraptors through the narrow streets of Valletta, Malta. And just before that, Dearing is also stalked by vicious atrociraptors over the rooftops of Valletta.
But the thrills are brief.
Most of time Jurassic World Dominion disregards that it is supposed to entertain us during these hot summer days. It is full of coincidences, convenient solutions and illogical jumps in the script.
The climax with about 10 (or was it 11?) good souls -- all the leading actors, trying to escape the madness at Biosyn is predictable and quite tiresome.
A post-script note to Steven Spielberg: Dear Mr Spielberg, can we now put to rest this overstretched, bloated dinosaur franchise? Or have you also been bitten by the greed bug that ails Campbell Scott's Dodgson.
