jurassic world: dominion [2022]

i'm confused.  my natural state of being.  i recall the summer of 1993 & being so stoked to see Jurassic Park.  the crichton novel was floating around.  i think my brother read it first.  i picked up his copy & read it in anticipation of a summer blockbuster with real dinos!  this was my first summer with anna.  we met a few months earlier.  movie-going was an event.  a special occasion when you'd need to get to the theater in plenty of time to get your tickets & find a decent seat.

29 summers later anna, nick & i were searching for a summer thing to do.  go bowling?  have you seen how much bowling alleys charge for games & shoes?  go to the movies?  yes!  but what to see.  i've not been to the movie theater for at least three years.  movie-going has changed.  buy your tickets online, get emailed a QR Code for your tix, reserve your seat, hell, you can even buy your munchies online & have it waiting for you when you get to the theater.

sure there's still the obligatory half hour of trailers - which i love seeing - & commercials for the products you go to the movies to avoid seeing those same commercials for.  but the seats are large, comfy & recline.  man!  they are so good you can nap in those seats!  the surround sound system is killer & even if your neighbors are gabby the movie will roar over their noise & you forget you have someone sitting next to you loudly munching on a candy bar &/or popcorn.

the movie?  well, as i confessed, i'm confused.  i enjoyed the shit outta the original.  that summer blockbuster movie experience is something that can't be replicated in today's world.  but there's been so many sequels they blur into one movie.  this particular flick finds all the stars here together, sam neil, laura dern, bryce dallas howard, chris pratt, jeff goldblum, b.d. wong, et al.  the bad guy is a biotech billionaire, played by campbell scott, who has genetically modified locusts to fuck up the world's food supply for reasons that are murkily expressed.  he is also busy raising pure-breed dinos that roam free on his island bio-campus cum nature preserve. 

but this is a world where dinos are now part of the ecosystems.  pratt & howard live in the sierra nevada mountain range & are the guardians of a young girl with a modified genome.  this little girl is the maguffin of the movie.  she is kidnapped so the scientists of the bio-tech firm can learn her secrets.  the sierra nevadas are snowy.  in the mountains, among the deer, bear, & all the other critters, are feral velociraptors.  dinos in the snow?  what the fuck.  i'm supposed to believe that shit?  thus it goes for all the world.  dinos in every eco nook & cranny.  & the message of the movie is that we are all expected to live in harmony with animals that lived on a far different planet than the one we live on today. the baby velociraptor that live in the woods is also kidnapped for its genome too. 

still, it is fun to watch the evolution of the dinosaurs.  we know so much more about them today than even 30 years ago.  such as the relation of some dino species & birds.  some of the species of dinosaurs in this movie have feathers, for example.  & the technology to create realistic animals is extraordinary.  our heroes go on a world-trekking adventure to find & rescue the little girl & the baby dino.  do they succeed?  does a dino shit wherever it fucking wants?!

the director colin trevorrow doesn't have much of a script to work with but he keep the action going fast & hard.  i had to look past the plot holes & scientific inaccuracies.  i mean why would we assume that a species that has been extinct for tens of millions of years would roar to life with a yen for the skinny meat & brittle bones of a human body?  how the hell am i expected to believe that dinosaurs will roam the african veldt in relative peace with wild elephants or for us to be fine for them to make nests on the top of our skyscrapers?   

it was fun to get out for a couple of hours & tune in, turn off & drop out of common sense to enjoy a summer flick.  i do miss the old days when going to the movies was more spontaneous, chaotic & messy.  29 years ago we bought our tickets at the box office & hoped the movie wasn't sold out.  then we looked for seats in a crowded theater.  popcorn & other goodies has always been a bit more spendy.  but man was it fun standing in line for a ten-gallon soda & a five-gallon bucket of popcorn.  i love today's technology.  buying tix & goodies online is fast, easy & convenient as fuck.  i wouldn't go back to the good old days but i do miss, sometimes, those good old days.  i think the days of the movie theater as being the powerhouse it once was is gone.  but going out to the movies will never die.  it is fun as hell.  the very first poetry book i bought was living at the movies by jim carroll.  i've spent my life both in poetry & at movies.  & the greatest joy for me is watching a really bad movie.  on a hot summer afternoon with the loves of my life, anna & nick.