Jurassic World Dominion extended edition: What’s in the extra 14 minutes?

Thanks to COVID-related delays in production and visual effects work, Hollywood’s blockbuster-release pipeline has slowed down considerably. With a series of expanded editions recalling the 2000s DVD boom, it is understandable that billion-dollar hit movies are being recycled. These two expansions have been very well-received. 2021’s gigantic hit Spider-Man, There’s No Way Home is back in theaters with 11 minutes of new footage and a subtitle, “The More Fun Stuff Version.” And an extended version of Jurassic World DominionYou can stream 14 minutes more footage on Peacock or digitally rent it. Blu-ray also has the option to download this extra footage. Extended editions are often viewed as a repair or cash grab. It’s fitting for Jurassic World Dominion’s kitchen-sink quality that the newly bulked-up version functions as both.

This has a greater potential for fan engagement than any longer version. There is no way home. The Spider-Man The sequel has some additional character comedy, but the movie was also widely loved; a longer version of the film is not really a victory lap. Dominion, however, received a more mixed reaction from both critics and audiences: It’s both the worst-reviewed Jurassic movie on Rotten Tomatoes and the lowest-grossing of the Jurassic World trilogy in the United States.

Jurassic World Dominion It is the longest existing. Jurassic It is a movie that runs for close to twenty minutes. This film assumes responsibility for wrapping up Jurassic World’s trilogy as well as serving as a postscript/reunion of the Jurassic Park movies. Essentially, it’s two unwieldy movies fused together. It’s a warmly performed but wan Jurassic Park legacy sequel, with older scientists visiting yet another dinosaur sanctuary and research facility that’s less controlled and less altruistic than it looks. Sam Neill and Laura Dern reunite for the first Jurassic Movie since 1993. Jurassic Park. At the same time, it’s also a crazier globe-trotting adventure, where characters from Jurassic WorldThe new status quo is dinosaurs roaming free all over the place. This half is much more silly, but it’s also more entertaining.

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To combine these movies in one cohesive and well-paced film would require more than 14 minutes. However, anyone can rewatch either movie. DominionYou can also stream it on your computer. You can pay a penny or a 160-minute pound for it. It’s a de facto director’s cut; Colin Trevorrow says this was his version of the movie before he was asked to trim it back. “It really wasn’t that I went back and did a director’s cut, it’s just that we have been honestly given a gift of being able to share the original film,” he says. Like so many director’s cuts before it, this longer version isn’t materially different as a movie, but it does make marginally more sense.

Two major types of new material are included in the extended edition. These include new scenes that involve dinosaurs and longer versions of scenes that feature puny human characters. Rather than recontextualizing this overstuffed monster mash, the additions play to the movie’s strengths and weaknesses — which is to say the dinosaur stuff is fun, and the human stuff is a bit half-assed. Trevorrow hopes that fans are seeking some kind of connection with Trevorrow will be provided with character cookies and fan service.

In the opening hour, the dino scenes will be frontloaded. The most substantial addition is the movie’s new opening, which won’t be brand-new to everyone who watches it. This five-minute sequence — which starts with nature-doc-style observation of the animals in their natural habitat before cutting to “65 Billion Years Later” as a T. rex tromps through a drive-in — has been available on YouTube since 2021. This teaser also served as a long-lead intro to the movie that was shown on IMAX in 2021. This teaser was perhaps too familiar, slow or derivative of 22-year-old Disney failure. Dinosaur.

Regardless, it’s far more elegant than the abbreviated Mosasaurus attack that opens the theatrical cut, which seems to be one of the only original-version sequences that’s truncated in the extended edition. The extended-version opening also ties in more closely with the movie’s thematic concerns: the folly of assuming that humans have dominion over nature. It is clear that their resurrection will cause a disruption in the status quo of nature and human society. There’s also a kind of serenity in watching these beautifully rendered dinosaur effects applied to something more naturalistic than a fun yet exhausting perpetual-motion monster movie.

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There is nothing else to the DominionWhile the extended cut may be as entertaining as the opening, it also has other interesting additions such as the section that establishes the off-the grid life of Owen Grady, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), Maisie Lockwood and Maisie Harwood (Isabella Sermon). New cut continues the Western feel of the opening scene, where Grady grabs and lassos an a. ParasaurolophusA follow-up in which Grady is held at gunpoint and taken away by poachers or rustlers.

These are the same people who eventually kidnap Maisie, which explains a strange moment in the theatrical cut where Grady notes after the kidnapping that he’s “seen them around” previously, which makes him seem weirdly ineffectual. (“Oh yeah, some shady guys have been lurking around my remote cabin and my secret hidden clone daughter, so I made a mental note of it.”) There’s also a scene where Grady’s beloved raptor Blue kills a hunter, which does more to leaven the sentimentality around the creature; in the theatrical cut, Blue seemingly avoids killing anyone simply by chance. Extended versions also include a welcome, but brief fight between two small dinos from the Malta black marketplace.

It is harder to identify the more human-centric material. Many of the new material extends scenes already in existence. Ellie Sattler (Dern), and Alan Grant (Neill), have a more lengthy conversation in their first reunion. This is preceded by a moment where two younger women on Grant’s dig refer to uncovering dinosaur bones as “random” while playing on their smartphones, another of this trilogy’s nod to indifference in the face of natural wonders. Grant manages to convince Maisie (a fearful and hesitant Maisie) to go with him into the tunnels under the Biosyn headquarters.

Only a few scenes from the back of the movie have been restored, including the exchange between Grant and Maisie. Another notable addition is an extended version of the fraught conversation between Lewis Dodgson, main villain (Campbell Scott), and Ramsay Cole, his disillusioned right hand man (Mamoudou Athie). These dialogue scenes were probably cut and shortened for the sake of pacing, and it’s telling that the last hour of DominionThey can feel slack, either with or without them. The movie is caught between the heedless momentum of the typical blockbuster (which Grant’s encouragement to Maisie unintentionally mimics: “Moving forward is better than staying still,” he advises) and the desire to give eight or nine major characters their due. It is impossible to cut the movie’s human and dinosaur lines enough to allow for substantial room. Even in the longer cut, the filmmakers are forced to rely on listless quips and filler lines, like Ian Malcolm (Goldblum) describing one bit of giant-locust mayhem as “bananas.”

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Really, the film and its action aren’t bananas enough. The first Jurassic film to be substantially cut is this one. This is the network television version. The Lost WorldSome deleted scenes have been restored. However, other material has been cut in order to fit within a given time frame. Even a version Jurassic World Dominion that approaches the three-hour mark isn’t a work of glorious, visionary excess.

It’s more a post-release souvenir of a certain type of contemporary blockbuster filmmaking, where genuine affection for the material, self-consciousness about pleasing the hardcore fans, and ever-present concerns about the bottom line converge into something equally appealing and cumbersome. Jurassic ParkThe ride is well-designed and characterized by its three sequels. It is the DominionExtended edition feels more like an extended exit from the gift shop.