Despite racking up an impressive body count, Jurassic World: Dominion is proving that the dinosaurs themselves were never actually the biggest threat in the Jurassic Park franchise. Just as in every other entry, Dominion boasts a huge assortment of prehistoric creatures causing mayhem in the modern world. However, for perhaps the first time in the saga, the movie also implies that something much more insidious and potentially catastrophic is going on under the surface.
Dominion takes place after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. The previous film saw several dinosaurs brought back to the mainland in a bid to help them escape from an erupting volcano, before an attempt to sell them for a profit to some exclusive clientele. This included yet another dangerous hybrid in the form of the Indoraptor. Predictably, the dinosaur auction did not go according to plan, resulting in a mass break out and a new status quo in which dinosaurs roam free across the world.
The prospect of dinosaurs ranging unchecked across Planet Earth 65 million years after they last topped the food chain is undoubtedly a scary prospect. However, as Dominion makes clear, the biggest consequence of their return is not the very real risk of them eating innocent people, but on the untold damage they could do to the environment. Footage from the Jurassic World: Dominion trailer, including swarms of unidentified insects and dinosaurs running alongside extant species, shows that the creatures' impact extends far beyond devouring the occasional unfortunate tourist. As a result, Dominion could perhaps feature a greater threat to the planet as a whole than any of the series' previous entries.
Although they have understandably taken a back seat compared to the franchise's major stars, environmental issues have always played a role in Jurassic Park. In the very first film back in 1993, Ellie Satler remarks on the unpredictability of an extinct ecosystem, chastizing John Hammond for using venomous plants as window dressing because they "look good". Even in the limited trailer footage, it seems Dominion is bringing this concept full circle. In a dramatic voiceover, Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire Dearing declares, "humans and dinosaurs cannot coexist. We created an ecological disaster." All this indicates that the threat posed by dinosaurs goes beyond physical danger – their very existence threatens to destabilize the natural world. Considering the very real environmental concerns dominating political and social discourse, this seems like a very prescient message.
The full extent of the potential damage inherent in this situation is alluded to by Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm. As he explains in a typically gloomy soliloquy, "We not only lack dominion over nature, we're subordinate to it," highlighting that, for all humanity's technical advancements, people ultimately still depend on the planet for their survival. A radical environmental shift, therefore, could potentially lead to exactly the sort of apocalyptic event that led to the dinosaurs' own destruction. Although the Jurassic Park series has never hinted at anything this existential before, it would in many ways be a fitting end to this era of the franchise. Given the dire tone of the trailer, Jurassic World: Dominion may well represent the most consequential entry to date, precisely because of these grave environmental concerns.
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