Jurassic World Dominion is the latest “legacyquel” to hit theaters, as it features the return of Jurassic Park alums Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. They join Jurassic World leads Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard in a film that attempts to unite the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World trilogies. It isn’t entirely successful due to a sprawling, unwieldy screenplay and a decided lack of interest in the dinosaurs roaming the Earth, which has been the major draw of these films. Yet for all the possibilities that Dominion frustratingly refuses to explore, the biggest issue is how it utilizes the Jurassic Park characters — and how their role in the story ends up taking the pitfalls that other legacyquels have managed to avoid.
Crafting a legacyquel is a tricky affair. If a filmmaker manages to get actors from the original film on board, they have to figure out how to utilize those characters in a way that builds upon the stories that came before. There’s also the matter of how the new characters in the story interact with them. A good filmmaker can manage to make the new characters bring something unique to the table, as well as have them interact with the legacy characters in a way that feels not only natural but satisfying.
Take Star Wars: The Force Awakens, for example: that film managed to keep the audience engaged in the adventures of Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega) while also giving Han Solo (Harrison Ford) a meaty role in the story. The same happened with recent films like Spider-Man: No Way Home, which managed to unite Tom Holland‘s Peter Parker with his predecessors Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield, and even Top Gun: Maverick, which features Tom Cruise‘s titular pilot bonding with the son of his late co-pilot Goose and even reuniting with his rival-turned-ally Iceman (Val Kilmer).
In contrast, Dominion opts to keep the Sattler/Grant/Malcolm trio in a separate storyline from the Jurassic World characters. In fact, it’s their storyline that drives most of the plot, as Sattler enlists Grant and Malcolm to help her solve the mystery behind a swarm of genetically enhanced locusts that are devouring all the grain in America’s breadbasket. You read that right: This is a Jurassic World movie where the focus is less on the dinosaurs and more on a race of mutant insects. Even with that baffling plot choice, this plot thread feels more interesting than the one with Pratt’s Owen Grady and Howard’s Claire Dearing, which finds them attempting to track down their surrogate daughter Masie (Isabella Sermon) and feels like director/co-writer Colin Trevorrow was trying his own hand at a spy film that just happens to have dinosaurs.
And when the Jurassic Park trio eventually encounters the World protagonists, the latter ends up paling in comparison to the former. Pratt, in particular, feels less than commanding when standing side by side with Neill; this only serves to emphasize how thin of a character Grady is compared to Pratt’s roles as Star-Lord in the Guardians of the Galaxy films and Emmett Brickwoski in The Lego Movie. A similar problem happened with the release of Ghostbusters Afterlife, as the entire third act of the film shoved aside its new cast of characters to focus on the returning Ghostbusters, and essentially recreate the climax of the first Ghostbusters in the process.
Again, other legacyquels have managed to figure out a balance that gives characters old and new their due. Creed is a perfect example, as it features Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) grappling with the legacy of his father Apollo (Carl Weathers); this leads him to Apollo’s rival turned friend Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), who helps train him to be a boxer despite the sport leaving him with brain trauma. Blade Runner 2049 slowly builds up to the reappearance of Rick Deckard, as Officer K (Ryan Gosling) investigates a mystery that Deckard is connected to. And a large part of what makes No Way Home work is how it utilizes characters from the past two Spider-Man film series: Holland’s Peter works to help villains including Electro (Jamie Foxx) and Doctor Octavius (Alfred Molina) avoid a grisly fate, and both Maguire and Garfield’s Parkers act as mentors to their younger counterpart.
Ironically, the spinoff series Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous manages to handle the legacy elements of the Jurassic World franchise better than Dominion. The T-Rex from the original Jurassic Park serves as a danger to the younger campers, and Dr. Henry Wu (voiced by Greg Chun) also shows up in Seasons 1 and 3. In the end, Dominion will more than likely serve as an example of how not to construct a legacyquel. Or like its fellow franchise-ender Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, it’ll probably be viewed as an example of how not to close out a trilogy.
