But that’s not all! Very bad people have trained the raptors to attack people when a laser pointer in aimed at them, a plot point so stupid it wouldn’t have made it past brainstorming for Austin Powers 3. Finally, Biosyn – which is sort of like a more evil Monsanto – has used dinosaur DNA to create a species of locust that only eat their competitor’s crops and will cause global famine.
So, it’s up to our ragtag team of two former zoo keepers, a paleobotanist, a mathematician, a clone of a little girl and an (admittedly pretty cool) retired pilot to save the day. Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant has progressed so little in the past 30 years, he is summoned from a paleontology dig – apparently in this world having living dinosaurs at your disposal has in no way altered the methods of paleontological research. Said research has altered these dinosaurs, however, and now some come in an array of plasticky feathers that render them hopelessly cartoonish.
The film is not so much a narrative as a sequence of loosely tied-together chase sequences where every running person, car, plane, raptor, and larger-than-average locust travels at the exact same speed. With so little dialogue and so much green screen that it’s hard to imagine the cast had any clue what the film they were shooting actually was, most of the exposition is given to a flashback of a woman pregnant with her own clone, and franchise favourite BD Wong who seems utterly exhausted.
Beyond its nonsensical plot, the film imagines the audience will be delighted by a myriad of references to the first film – but in Dominion it feels less like watching a beloved band play their greatest hits and more like watching them hawk merch to pay for an expensive divorce. Embarrassing.
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