The First ‘Jurassic World: Dominion’ Footage Offers a Franchise Origin Story and a Whole Bunch of T-Rex Action

Jurassic World: Dominion is a year away, but don’t fret. There’s an extended, dino-laden IMAX preview showing before screenings of F9 to get us revved up (pun intended, sorry) long before its June 10, 2022 premiere.

While the five-minute preview won’t be in theaters until F9 premieres on June 25, /Film had the chance to watch it early in all its IMAX glory. Read on to get my reaction to the sneak peek footage, including what dinosaurs you will get to see before they settle in with Vin Diesel and the rest of the F9 crew.

It’s Jurassic World, National Geographic Style

The footage begins with…wait for it…dinosaurs! But these aren’t the frog DNA-altered dinosaurs of the previous movies, however — these are 100% dino DNA dinosaurs, living in their natural habitat 65 million years ago. We see seven new species, including a feathered, egg-eating oviraptor and a tiny t-rex (AKA Morus Intrepidus, who you can see in the image above) nibbling between the teeth of a Giganotosaurus.

I’m no paleontologist, and I wasn’t around 65 million years ago, but the first part of the preview on an IMAX screen really does immerse you in this world. Despite the obvious CGI that had to go into creating the dinosaurs and the landscape where they reside, the setting felt real.

Director Colin Trevorrow worked with Industrial Light and Magic to get the dinos as realistic as possible, based on current scientific knowledge. That’s why the T-Rex is hairy-looking (proto-feathers, actually). And when that T-Rex gets into a scuffle with Giganotosaurus, it felt no different than watching one of those nature documentaries where a lion takes on a water buffalo. (Except in this case, the water buffalo has proto-feathers, teeth, and tiny forearms.)

The sequence is also an origin story for the Jurassic franchise and, for Trevorrow, a fulfillment of a childhood dream.

“If you’re a dinosaur fan, that’s the era that you’ve been imagining since you were a little kid,” he told /Film. “We took on the challenge of realizing it in a way that feels tactile and alive and present, and not just like a bunch of computers rendering as quickly as they can. It was a real challenge and ILM was up to it, and our animators and everybody took it on and was excited about it as I was.”

It Turns Out Our Favorite T-Rex is a Movie Buff

The prehistoric sequence ends with a shot of a mosquito buzzing off into the sunset after feasting on dino blood. That mosquito surely got trapped in amber, which brings us, and the preview, to a couple years after the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

I don’t want to get too spoilery here, but I’ll just say the T-Rex from the first two Jurassic World films is the on the lam, when all she wants to do is just live her life, you know?

Humans aren’t cool with that though, and a helicopter is chasing her as she crashes into a drive-in classic double feature of American Graffiti and Flash Gordon. Havoc ensues, and the T-Rex sadly doesn’t get to watch much before things get too crazy.

Trevorrow explained to /Film that the T-Rex sequence here teases her part in Dominion. “This is really setting up her arc in the third film,” Trevorrow explained. “The T-Rex has been through a lot…I want her to live in peace. That’s all I want for her. So hopefully, the audience will want the same thing.”

The five-minute special Jurassic World: Dominion preview will play exclusively at IMAX screenings of F9 starting June 25, and Jurassic World: Dominion will premiere in theaters on June 10, 2022.

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