Warning: Spoilers for Jurassic World: Dominion below!
Jurassic World: Dominion has finally delivered on the speed of Raptors promised in the original Jurassic Park. A series conclusion of sorts, Jurassic World: Dominion continues from the ending of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in which the dinosaur population is uncaged and roams freely across the world. This includes both Velociraptors like Blue and her offspring Beta, as well as the newly introduced Atrociraptors - and Dominion shows one of their long-hyped-up abilities in all of its glory.
During the movie's Malta sequence, a pack of Atrociraptors are set loose by Biosyn on human characters like Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), and Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise). Even in speeding trucks and on motorcycles, the humans can barely stay ahead of their Raptor pursuers, who swiftly and nimbly navigate the streets of Malta with incredible speed. While an exhilarating action scene on its own, this also fully delivers on the long-purported speed of the Raptors that goes back to the original Jurassic Park.
In Jurassic Park, Sam Neill's paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant, deep in his study about Velociraptors, asks the park's game warden Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck) some questions on the dinosaurs, including about their speed. Muldoon responds that Raptors can move with "Cheetah speed" at "50, 60 miles per hour if they ever got out in the open. And they're astonishing jumpers." Oddly, the original Jurassic Park trilogy never really made good on this boast aside from a brief shot of Raptors sprinting through a field in pursuit of humans in Jurassic Park III. Yet that started to change in the Jurassic World movies.
With Owen Grady acting as the Raptor's trainer in Jurassic World, the movie offered a more vivid picture of how fast the dinosaurs could move when he led them by motorcycle in pursuit of the Indominus Rex. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom would also offer more glimpses into Raptor speed, such as in its final scene of the Jurassic World series' stand-out Raptor Blue sprinting freely into the world of humankind. With its Malta sequence, Dominion is the first Jurassic Park or Jurassic World movie to truly devote a major dinosaur set-piece to utilizing Raptor speed to its full potential.
Indeed, Dominion even surpasses what Jurassic Park promised by having Atrociraptors pursue their designated prey through Malta's narrow streets and corridors and even through apartments, outdoing Muldoon's caveat that they'd need to be in open terrain to achieve peak speed. Even using a cargo plane, Grady, Claire, and Watts only narrowly manage to get away. As testimony to their speed, one Raptor even briefly leaps aboard the plane before being knocked out into the ocean by Grady's motorcycle.
Throughout the Jurassic Park franchise, the intelligence of Raptors has frequently been emphasized as their defining trait, and it is not one that Dominion neglects, especially with the returning Blue and her young Raptor child Beta (though Blue's role in Dominion is minor). With that said, while the Raptors have long been played up as the speed demons of the dinosaur kingdom, this is a side of them that was only fleetingly tapped into in the Jurassic Park films. The Jurassic World movies began showing the Raptors' speed more and more, and with the Malta chase of Jurassic World: Dominion, the long-promised speed of the Raptors has finally been fully showcased.
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