While Jurassic World Dominion had its problems, the movie's first scene at least acknowledged one of its biggest issues via a secret, subtle in-joke. Jurassic World Dominion scored big at the box office, but the sequel didn't wow critics. This didn't come as a major shock, since the final movie in the Jurassic World trilogy was facing an uphill battle from the beginning.

Between the struggle to find screen time for both Jurassic Park legacy characters and Jurassic World's returning cast, the tricky job of finding a new angle for the franchise, and handling the Chris Pratt backlash, Jurassic World 3 needed to solve a lot of issues at once. The sequel wasn't helped by the ending of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, a wild twist that saw dinosaurs unleashed on human civilization. However, for all of its flaws, Jurassic World Dominion did acknowledge the difficult bind that the franchise was left in during the movie's opening scene.

In the faux-documentary prologue produced by NowThis, Jurassic World Dominion clarified that the world has been overrun with dinosaurs and humans now co-exist uneasily with the prehistoric beasts. During the sequence, an infographic that is briefly seen onscreen shows that reopening Jurassic Park was the public's least favorite option when it came to handling the threat of dinosaurs being let loose on humanity.Jurassic World 3 returning to Jurassic Park's roots was both necessary for the legacy sequel and a tricky proposition, making this moment a clever way of tacitly acknowledging that there was no way to simply bring back Jurassic World and Jurassic Park's original conceit in the trilogy's final movie.

This problem did result in Jurassic World Dominion being a bizarre cross of spy adventure, siege thriller, and (very soft, family-friendly) horror, with the movie massively cutting down the body count and upping the number of car chases and fight scenes. In particular, the lengthy Malta sequence could have been taken out of a James Bond adventure if it weren't for the dinosaurs. The ending was an anodyne retread of Jurassic Park wherein no one died save for Jurassic World Dominion's villain in a Dennis Nedry-inspired kill. As the above synopsis indicates, Jurassic World Dominion wasn't clear on what sort of tone the movie needed to have, with one-third of its story following Maisie's kidnapping, one-third involving Alan and Ellie's corporate subterfuge in BioSyn, while the final third saw the cast escape from the company's headquarters while evading dinosaurs.

While this made for a mishmash in terms of genre, Jurassic World Dominion's pre-credits prologue proved that this uneven tone was inevitable thanks to the movie's unenviable position. If the sequel simply set up a new version of Jurassic Park/World, it would be a retread of those two movies, whereas if it followed poachers and conservationists fighting over dinosaurs, Jurassic World Dominion would have relied too much on recreating the earlier sequel The Lost World and the plot of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. As the infographic proved, Jurassic World Dominion couldn't repeat any of the earlier sequel's stories, resulting in the messy plot of the trilogy's final outing.

More: Jurassic World Dominion's Biggest Failure Was Lying To You

Want more Jurassic World Dominion articles? Check out our essential content below...

  • Jurassic World Dominion Ending Explained (In Detail)
  • Jurassic World Dominion Cast & Character Guide
  • Jurassic Park & World Complete Timeline Explained
  • Everything We Know About Jurassic World 4
  • Is Jurassic World Dominion Really The Worst Jurassic Movie?
  • BioSyn's Complete Villain History In Jurassic Park & World Explained
  • All Dinosaurs In Jurassic World Dominion

Marvel Keeps Forgetting The Best Part Of Iron Man's Endgame Story

About The Author

Cathal Gunning (1700 Articles Published)

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

More From Cathal Gunning