Jurassic World: Dominion will have one key difference from all the previous movies: it won’t be set on an island. Jurassic World 3’s director Colin Trevorrow confirmed that Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard will be returning as Owen Grady and Claire Dearing respectively, alongside original Jurassic Park cast members Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum. However, not much else is currently known about the plot of Jurassic World 3 except that it will be picking up where Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom left off, with the dinosaurs venturing from the confines of Isla Nublar out into the world.
All five films within the Jurassic Park franchise were set on two separate islands: Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna. The original Jurassic Park, as well as the reboot films Jurassic World and Fallen Kingdom, all took place on Isla Nublar, the main island located off of Central America’s Pacific Coast where John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) first created his theme park filled with genetically-engineered dinosaurs. Isla Sorna, a neighboring island also known as “Site B” that contains the InGen research station where the dinosaur clones were first created, is the setting of the sequels The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III. In Fallen Kingdom, however, the surviving dinosaurs that were transported to Benjamin Lockwood’s (James Cromwell) estate are set free from their cages by Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), and head out onto the mainland - starting a new Jurassic Age.
Unlike past Jurassic Park films, Dominion will be the first film in the franchise to break away from Jurassic Park’s original formula by having the dinosaurs explore beyond their controlled environment. With the exception of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which featured a Tyrannosaurus rex briefly wreaking havoc within the city of San Diego before being returned to Isla Sorna, much of the damage caused by dinosaurs in previous films is usually restricted to a single island and has no lasting effect on the outside world. Instead of following the traditional formula with humans trespassing on the dinosaurs’ isolated world, Trevorrow’s vision for Dominion reverses the concept by having these predators invade our own habit, mainly in the wilderness where dinosaurs “might run out in front of your car on a foggy backroad, or invade your campground looking for food.”
While the genetically engineered dinosaurs have always posed a threat to Earth’s ecosystem and to the human population at large within the Jurassic Park universe, Dominion will be the first film to truly play out that concept. We'll get to see how the dinosaurs alter the face of our world once it's impossible for them to be returned to their island. Since the last frame of Fallen Kingdom features Blue discovering a suburban community out in the desert, Dominion may answer a theory posed by Alan Grant within Jurassic Park III: if velociraptors hadn’t gone extinct, would they have evolved into the dominant species instead of humans? Not only will there be drastic changes to the food change within Dominion, but bringing back the original cast from Jurassic Park will bring the story full circle, emphasizing the moral ramifications for those who took part in the origins of this new Jurassic Age.
By changing the setting from the traditional island to the mainland, Jurassic World: Dominion also sets up an interesting conflict that can’t be resolved as easily as it was in past films. At the beginning of The Lost World, and the end of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, the dinosaur clones always destroy whatever facility they are housed in and gain dominion over the island, leading the main characters to resolve that the best solution is to abandon the site entirely and leave it to the dinosaurs. Similarly, within Jurassic Park III, Alan Grant and the remaining survivors are saved after the Navy arrives at Isla Sorna and transports them off of the island. Unlike past Jurassic Park films, Grady and Dearing won’t be able to solve the dinosaur invasion simply by evacuating the area if the dinosaurs occupy all of Earth, which will force the main characters to face the consequences of bringing dinosaurs back to modern day head-on.
