Jurassic World Dominion is the latest nostalgic reboot that will make a billion dollars, no matter what critics say.
It’s hard to know exactly when I first felt the space-time continuum warp under me during Jurassic World Dominion, but I’m sure it happened under the streets of Malta. The island nation has become a hot spot for the trafficking of dinosaurs — a big problem in this cinematic universe. Thanks to the missteps of a few overambitious scientists, all kinds of ancient reptiles have taken over the planet. But that’s not why Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Clare Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) have found themselves in a gritty Mediterranean sewer. The heroes are there to rescue their daughter: a young human clone.
Written out, all of that sounds fairly original and even compelling. But on the screen, it amounts to an uncanny collision of tropes pulled from the summer blockbuster franchises of the past few decades. A walk through the underground dinosaur market may as well be a visit to an outer world in a Star Wars movie, and then there’s a parkour-laden chase through sunburnt streets that feels distinctly similar to a certain chase scene in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace. This is followed by Chris Pratt somehow driving a motorcycle onto a moving plane in a stunt that I’m pretty sure I saw Tom Cruise do in one of the Mission: Impossible sequels. Meanwhile, kind of in the background, the stars of Jurassic Park are busy reliving the plot of the original movie.
Speaking of the stars, even if you haven’t seen the past few movies in the Jurassic universe, Dominion is worth a look if only to see Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum all on the same screen for the first time since the 1994 film. That’s the one directed by Steven Spielberg featuring a legendary soundtrack by John Williams, all based on Michael Crichton’s eponymous novel. Jurassic Park offered a look at a world in which we could use technology to create clones of extinct species for theme park purposes. The concept seemed absurd at the time, but with the arrival of the final movie in the second Jurassic trilogy, people are cloning their pets, and bringing back the woolly mammoth seems like it may be within reach.
So why not clone Jurassic Park? That’s not exactly what Jurassic World Dominion sets out to do. Rather, like The Matrix Resurrections and Scream before it, the movie creates a new chapter in a decades-old franchise by splicing together a new plot with a reimagined version of the original. This means finding a way to insert the old dinosaur enthusiasts (Dern, Neill, and Goldblum) into a story that revolves around the contemporary versions of their old characters (Howard, Pratt, and … well there’s no substitute for Jeff Goldblum in any world). Fans love this sort of thing, and it’s uniquely appropriate for this universe. After all, Michael Crichton had never written a sequel until the Jurassic Park movie was such a hit that fans demanded a sequel, and they got one. That dynamic is not so different from what we’re seeing with movies nowadays.
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John Wilson/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
Welcome to the age of nostalgic reboots. The summer blockbuster as we once knew it — typically an action-packed, star-studded, roller-coaster ride on screen — has been replaced by a recycled version of all the action-packed, star-studded, roller-coaster rides from years past. In the case of Jurassic World Dominion, it’s not only intellectual property from 30 years ago but also a little dose of all the money-making ideas that have hit the big screen since then. The only thing that’s more likely than nostalgic reboots to get a big budget and huge distribution deals is superhero movies, because studios also already know the template and audiences know what they’re going to get if they spend $12 on a ticket. Good luck finding an indie drama at your local theater. Jurassic Park Dominion and Top Gun: Maverick are probably playing on all eight screens.
Reboots, though, can be fun. Jurassic World Dominion is a blast, especially if you want to remember how incredible the original was. The new film offers up parallel plotlines that eventually intersect. One picks up right where Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom left off and focuses on Grady and Dearing, whose adopted daughter Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) is abducted by dinosaur poachers early in the movie. The other follows Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) as she rescues captured dinosaurs, only to discover that a breed of giant, prehistoric locusts is multiplying and eating the world’s food supply. But, Sattler learns, the locusts aren’t eating the crops planted with seeds made by a company named Biosys, so she goes to visit fellow paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and talks him into taking a trip to Biosys headquarters, where their old friend Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is working as a philosopher in residence.
Did I mention that dinosaurs have taken over the planet? This surprised me, too. I did remember some dinosaurs escaping into the wild at the end of Fallen Kingdom, but what we see in Dominion is truly astounding. The movie opens with a news segment from Now This about how dinosaurs are wreaking havoc all over our built environment. There are pterosaurs nesting on top of the World Trade Center! (Now This and Vox share a parent company, Vox Media.)
So unlike all previous Jurassic Park movies, there is no island from which the main characters will ultimately need to escape. After all, there are now dinosaurs all over the world, there’s no point in trying to outrun them. The place where the two plotlines intersect, Biosys HQ, is a different sort of island. It’s where the company is doing all of its experiments on the dinosaurs, which are all contained in this massive compound somewhere in northern Italy’s Dolomite mountains.
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John Wilson/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
If the name Biosys sounds familiar, by the way, congratulations: you’re a Jurassic Park superfan. Biosys is the company responsible for the inciting incident in the 1994 film, the one that involved Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) attempting to steal the embryos of 15 dinosaur species so that Biosys could breed its own. The main villain in Jurassic Park Dominion is Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), the character who very briefly appeared in the original movie (played by Cameron Thor that time) — he was on screen just long enough to give Nedry a can of Barbasol that had been modified to store dinosaur embryos. Dodgson’s chief scientist, you’ll learn, is Dr. Henry Wu (B.D. Wong), the same guy who developed the DNA-splicing technique that made it possible to bring dinosaurs back to life back in the 1994 film. Don’t worry, these details will come in handy.
Once everybody’s at the Biosys compound, things heat up. The legacy cast goes about its mission to save the world from the giant locusts, while Grady and Dearing from the Jurassic World crew try to find their adopted clone daughter. We even get to meet a couple of new characters: reformed poacher Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise) and Biosys handler Ramsay Cole (Mamoudou Athie), who bring some diversity to what has historically been an almost all-white cast. The last hour of the film is otherwise dedicated to bringing down big bad Dodgson, who bears a striking resemblance to Tim Cook, and packing in references to the classic Jurassic Park. It’s got it all: Malcolm distracting a T. rex with a torch, an escape from an upside-down SUV with a T. rex on top, more than one battle between a T. rex and a dinosaur that’s supposed to be bigger and meaner than the T. rex. Everyone knows, though, this is Jurassic Park: The T. rex will win, and she will roar at the lightning-filled sky.
All of this points to the central theme the Jurassic Park universe has always explored: the tension between man, technology, and nature. And while earlier installments lean heavily on a message about humans’ habit of tinkering with biodiversity, director Colin Trevorrow clearly wants you to think that Dominion is a climate change story. The prehistoric locust plague started with Dr. Wu manipulating the insect’s DNA, setting off a chain reaction that threatens to leave the planet barren, and at one point, the locusts literally rain down fire from above. If Drs. Sattler, Grant, and Malcolm don’t intervene, the world might burn, too.
But when you’re sitting in the audience, you’re probably not going to be thinking about climate change or biodiversity much at all. You’ll be too busy thinking about how much you love Jurassic Park. But you might not be able to reconcile your love of the original with the struggle to make the new trilogy, which was never quite as powerful as the original. Steven Spielberg has an executive producer credit on Dominion, but the most we really see of his work are references to other Spielberg movies.
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John Wilson/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
You could almost separate Jurassic Park Dominion’s two competing storylines into their own movies, but neither plot is all that interesting. The primary one, starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, is derivative and inevitably sort of dull, as it amounts to a couple of parents trying to find a lost child. The nostalgic one, starring the original Jurassic Park cast, feels like a cheap but extremely familiar trick: take an old fan favorite, mix up some details, hire the same actors, and make it into a new movie that lots of people will buy tickets to go see. It’s the same thing you’ll see in Top Gun: Maverick, and we saw a version of it last year in Spider-Man: No Way Home. The formula works. The Top Gun reboot made over $250 million in its first two weekends. The Spider-Man that features all of the old cinematic Spider-Mans made nearly $2 billion at the box office. Industry insiders are already saying Jurassic Park Dominion will be the next billion-dollar hit.
There’s nothing wrong with a good nostalgic reboot. Reboots and remakes have been around as long as movies themselves. Heck, there have been at least four versions of A Star Is Born made over the course of a century! What’s a bit worrisome, however, is that if the only movies Hollywood wants to make are reboots of dependably successful franchises — and superhero movies, of course — that’s a lot of talent and money that’s not going into making entirely new features for theaters. As my colleague Peter Kafka recently argued, the future of movies looks pretty bleak in a world where studios only want guaranteed success at the box office and everything else gets relegated to streaming services.
Industry trends aside, Jurassic World Dominion is an awe-inspiring mess of a movie. It’s full of plot holes masquerading as scientific miracles. It feels like a pastiche of Steven Spielberg’s biggest hits — seriously, there are several scenes that may as well be in the next Indiana Jones sequel — and it’s hilarious. It’s 150-minutes of dinosaurs, both CGI and animatronic, that will thrill the kids. It’s loud.
I’ll probably see it again next weekend. I’ve already seen Top Gun: Maverick, and there’s not much else playing.
Where things stand on Senate gun control talks so far.
A bipartisan group of senators hoped to unveil a gun control deal on Friday, in the wake of a string of mass shootings, including those in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York. They don’t have one yet, but negotiators are still cautiously optimistic about getting an agreement in the coming days.
“It’ll be a miracle if we get a framework agreement, never mind a final bill,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) told reporters on Thursday. “But miracles sometimes happen!”
Initially, lawmakers had hoped to reach an agreement by the end of this week, but as with many things in Congress, that deadline has slipped. Despite this delay, those leading the talks — including Murphy and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) — remained bullish on a possible agreement.
“This is a town where it’s fashionable to be pessimistic, so for my colleagues to be optimistic suggests there’s really cause for optimism,” Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), the former head of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, told Vox.
Any bipartisan deal — even an incremental one — would be significant given how enduring the logjam on gun control has been. While mass shootings have increased in the US in recent years, Congress has been unable to find any meaningful compromise on the issue for more than a decade. A deal would show the public that Congress can actually make progress on gun control, and, more importantly, any compromise could open the door to more ambitious policies down the line.
“Success often begets success,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) told Vox. “It’s been a long time since we’ve done something meaningful on guns, a very long time, so if we’re able to do something solid, I think that could create conditions like ‘Hmm, Congress can act on guns.’”
What’s on the table
There are four main areas that the talks have focused on so far, according to a congressional aide. As Cornyn has repeatedly explained, whatever policy that emerges is likely to be “incremental” in nature, though it would still be the most progress lawmakers have made on guns in years.
Below are the four issues that lawmakers are currently discussing:
1. Red flag laws: A major component of any agreement is likely to be grants that incentivize states to either pass red flag laws or improve their implementation of them — an effort that builds on past negotiations between Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Currently, 19 states and Washington, DC, already have red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders, which enable law enforcement to bar an individual from possessing firearms if they pose a risk to themselves or others.
Whatever bill the Senate passes would be aimed at encouraging more states to pass these laws, and at helping states with existing ones impose them more effectively. As was evident in a recent mass shooting in Buffalo, the efficacy of a red flag law is highly dependent on implementation, as well as on law enforcement and the broader public being aware of how to properly utilize them.
2. Enhancements to background checks: At this point, legislation that would impose universal background checks, much like the bill introduced by Sens. Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey in 2012, is not in contention due to Republican opposition. Instead, lawmakers are trying to see if more information can be required as part of background checks for 18- to 21-year-olds.
For example, in the case of an 18-year-old attempting to buy a gun, senators are looking at whether additional information from their juvenile records, which are presently left out, could be included as part of a background check.
3. Mental health resources: There’s also talk about increasing funding for mental health programs, which could include measures that help states bolster their efforts. One bipartisan bill previously introduced by Sens. Roy Blunt (R-MO) and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) could be a model — it would fund behavioral health clinics that help provide mental health and addiction services.
4. School safety: And finally, there are discussions about policies to improve school safety and security, though lawmakers declined to share additional details about what this could include. Previously, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has introduced legislation that would allow schools to use grant money for campus design and stronger security measures.
Why it still matters even though it’s incremental
Anything the Senate passes is likely to be far less ambitious than what Democrats had hoped for and what experts say is needed to more significantly curb gun violence.
Earlier this week, the House passed a sweeping package of proposals including a ban on high-capacity magazines, a bill to raise the age limit for buying semiautomatic weapons from 18 to 21, and legislation that would require safer storage of guns in homes with minors. Policies like these could reduce gun violence by making it tougher to fire many rounds of ammunition at one time, and making it harder for younger people to obtain guns.
The House bills are widely expected to get blocked in the Senate, where any deal is poised to be quite limited.
Still, negotiators say it’s important to get something done in order to begin addressing public demands for more gun control, and show that it’s possible for Congress to make inroads on the issue. “We can help to build the muscle that we will use again by starting now,” Blumenthal told Vox.
Murphy has said, too, that this could be an opportunity to demonstrate to Republican lawmakers that any backlash they may face for supporting gun control would actually be far less than what many fear. Because of how vocal a minority of Republican voters have been on the issue, many GOP lawmakers have been reluctant to take any action on gun control due to concerns about the electoral blowback and potential primary challenges they could face.
As of now, there still isn’t a concrete agreement, but lawmakers were broadly hopeful going into the weekend on Thursday. Whatever emerges from these talks, they hope, will be a step forward in the wake of devastating recent tragedies.
“Everybody wants to get this done this work period,” Murphy told reporters, noting that senators aimed to finalize a deal before leaving for their next recess.
“I don’t gain anything besides a commute.”
Andres is back to the office three days a week, and like many knowledge workers, he’s not happy about it. He says that while he and the other executive assistants at his Boston law firm have been forced back, the attorneys haven’t been following the rules. That’s partly because the rules don’t quite make sense, and people in all types of jobs are only coming in because they have to, not because there’s a good reason to go in.
“People have adapted to remote work, and truthfully, the firm has done a tremendous job at adapting in the pandemic,” said Andres, who would prefer going in two days, as long as others were actually there. “But I think it’s more the returning to work that they’re struggling on.” He, like a number of other office workers, spoke with Recode anonymously to avoid getting in trouble with his employer.
Andres enjoys working from home and thinks he does a good job of it — and it allows him to escape a long commute that has only gotten 45 minutes longer thanks to construction projects on his route.
The majority of Americans don’t work from home, but among those who do, there’s a battle going on about where they’ll work in the future. And it’s not just people who enjoy remote work who are upset about the return to the office.
Those who want to be remote are upset because they enjoyed working from home and don’t understand why, after two years of doing good work there, they have to return to the office. People who couldn’t wait to go back are not finding the same situation they enjoyed before the pandemic, with empty offices and fewer amenities. Those who said they prefer hybrid — 60 percent of office workers — are not always getting the interactions with colleagues they’d hoped for.
The reasons the return to the office isn’t working out are numerous. Bosses and employees have different understandings of what the office is for, and after more than two years of working remotely, everyone has developed their own varied expectations about how best to spend their time. As more and more knowledge workers return to the office, their experience at work — their ability to focus, their stress levels, their level of satisfaction at work — has deteriorated. That’s a liability for their employers, as the rates of job openings and quits are near record highs for professional and business services, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
There are, however, ways to make the return to the office better, but those will require some deep soul-searching about why employers want employees in the office and when they should let it go.
The current situation
For now, many employees are just noticing the hassle of the office, even if they’re going in way less than they did pre-pandemic. This is what’s known as the hybrid model, and even though people like the remote work aspect of it, for many it’s still unclear what the office part of it is for.
“If I go into the office and there are people but none of them are on my team, I don’t gain anything besides a commute,” Mathew, who works at a large payroll company in New Jersey, said. “Instead of sitting at my own desk, I’m sitting at a desk in Roseland.”
Mathew’s company is asking people to come in three days a week, but he says people are mostly showing up two.
Further complicating things is that, while the main reason hybrid workers cite for wanting to go into the office is to see colleagues, they also don’t want to be told when to go in, according to Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who, along with other academics, has been conducting a large, ongoing study of remote workers called WFH Research.
Employees say that management has yet to really penalize people for failing to follow office guidance, likely out of fear of alienating a workforce in a climate where it’s so hard to hire and retain employees. Many others moved farther from the office during the pandemic, making the commute harder. The result is circular: People go into the office to see other people but then don’t actually see those people so they stop going into the office as much.
With 70 percent of office workers globally now back in the office at least one day a week, the excitement many people felt a few months ago is wearing off. For many, that novelty is turning into an existential question: Why are we ever here?
“It was sort of like the first day of school when you’re back from summer vacation and it’s nice to see people and catch up with them,” Brian Lomax, who works at the Department of Transportation in Washington, DC and who is expected to come in two days a week, said. “But now it’s, ‘Oh, hey, good to see you,’ and then you go on about your day,” an experience he says is the same as working from home and reaching out to people via Microsoft Teams.
Most of the people we spoke to use software like Teams, Slack, and Zoom to communicate even while they’re in the office, making the experience similar to home. If one person in a meeting is on a video call from home — say, because they’re immunocompromised, or they have child care duties, or it just happens to be the day they work from home that week — everyone is. There’s actually been an uptick in virtual meetings, despite the return to the office, according to Calendly. In April, 64 percent of meetings set up through the appointment scheduling software included videoconferencing or phone details, compared with 48 percent a year earlier.
One issue is that hybrid means different things from company to company and even team to team. Typically, it seems employers are asking workers to come in a set number of days per week, usually two or three. Some employers are specifying which days; some are doing it by teams; some are leaving it up to individual workers. Almost half of office visits are just once a week — and over a third of these visits are for less than six hours, according to data from workplace occupancy analytics company Basking.io as reported by Bloomberg. The middle of the week tends to be much busier than Mondays and Fridays, when there are empty cubicles as far as the eye can see.
There’s also a disconnect between why employees think they’re being called in. Employees cite their company’s sunk real estate investments, their bosses’ need for control, and their middle managers’ raison d’etre. Employers, meanwhile, think going into the office is good for creativity, innovation, and culture building. Nearly 80 percent of employees think they’ve been just as or more productive than they were before the pandemic, while less than half of leaders think so, according to Microsoft’s Work Trends Index.
Employers and employees generally tend to agree that a good reason to go into the office is to see colleagues face to face and onboard new employees. Data from Time Is Ltd. found that employees that started during the pandemic are collaborating with less than 70 percent of colleagues and clients as their tenured peers would have been at this point. Slack’s Future Forum survey found that while executives were more likely to say people should come into the office full time, they are less likely to do so themselves.
The nature of individuals’ jobs also determines how much, if at all, they think they should be in the office. Melissa, a government policy analyst in DC, is supposed to go in twice a week but has only been going in once because she says her work involves collaborating with others but not usually at the same time. She might write a draft, send it to others to read, and then they’ll make comments and perhaps, at some point, they all get together to talk about it.
“I see a lot of these ads for these teamwork apps — they always show these pictures of people sitting at a conference table and they have paper and all sorts of things on the wall and they’re really collaborating on product development or something,” Melissa said. “And I’m like, that’s not what we’re doing.” Still, she thinks that from managers’ perspectives, in-person is the gold standard, regardless of the actualities of the job.
“It feels like they just want people in the office,” she said.
It also depends on the pace of work. A financing services employee at Wells Fargo in Iowa said he works more efficiently at the office but that since his job consists of working on deals that come in sporadically throughout the day, that efficiency means he ends up wasting a lot of time playing on his phone or pacing around the office in between.
“What makes this so frustrating is that my wife will send me a photo of her and my 10-month-old son going out for a walk,” he said. “If I had a break at home, I’d go on a walk with them.”
Employers are certainly feeling the frustration from their employees and have been walking back how much they’re asking employees to be in the office. Last summer, office workers reported that their employers would allow them to work from home 1.6 days a week; now that’s gone up to 2.3 days, according to WFH Research.