June Movie Round-Up: Jurassic World Dominion, Lightyear, Elvis

Another summer month has gone by and a slew of blockbusters catering to various audiences have arrived in theaters. Whether you need some dinosaurs, space adventures, or a musical biopic, there's something for everyone.

Jurassic World Dominion: Go in with low expectations and you will be rewarded. This is a popcorn action flick with lots of dinosaurs running around and humans being hapless. As long as you know that, you will be fine. There are long action sequences that are quite thrilling and fun to watch as humans desperately try to escape the ever-growing number of dinosaurs they have unleashed onto the world. And as the conceit is that dinosaurs are now roaming freely through our planet, you aren't confined to watching folks screaming in a well-curated jungle. There are some urban set pieces to keep things visually stunning.

The actors are all trying their best (well apart from Chris Pratt, who literally just maintains one expression through the entirety of this film), and they are selling this script as hard as they can. But come on. This is supposed to be a movie about dinosaurs but instead it is a rambly, incoherent mess of multiple plots, including human cloning for some godforsaken reason, and half the time you are yelling at the screen, "Let's get back to the dinosaurs!" The best bits are when Laura Dern, Sam Neill, and Jeff Goldblum are reunited and we get the original trio facing up to the disasters of the new century after all the drama they dealt with back in the 90s. And of course, Bryce Dallas Howard is as endearing as ever. But yeah, don't expect this movie to make sense or deserve an award for anything beyond excellent stunt work. It is pretty, but dumb. Oh wait no, just pretty dumb. 

Lightyear: This isn't a top-tier Pixar movie, but it's certainly funny and charming and will keep you wholly entertained for two hours. The opening credits are a little confusing, because they say that in 1995 a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy - that toy was based on this movie. So I guess this is the movie that spawned the Buzz Lightyear action figure that Andy got in Toy Story? Anyway, that's the only connection to Toy Story - the rest of this film is just about Buzz himself, a Space Ranger who is stranded on an alien planet and determined to rescue the entire spaceship of people who crashed alongside him and his colleague, Captain Hawthorne. The kicker is that every time Buzz goes on a test flight to see if he can achieve the hyper speed necessary for everyone to leave this planet, he causes a weird space-time issue that results in him only aging a few minutes during the flight, but several years passing on the planet below him. So in classic Pixar fashion, there is a slightly sad story for us all to learn about the passage of time, and how to value your life.

The voice acting is great - Chris Evans is wonderful as the somewhat blustery but confident Buzz, and Keke Palmer, Taika Waititi, and Dale Soules are vastly entertaining as a ragtag bunch of rookies who help Buzz on his mission. There's a lot here about having to rely on help from others, no man is an island, etc. But also, there's a very funny robot cat and lots of jokes and sight gags to keep you giggling. So buckle in and get ready for lift off.

Elvis: Coco Chanel famously said, "Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off." Well, I wish Baz Luhrmann, director and co-writer of Elvis, had looked at this film during the edit and taken some flourishes off. It might have allowed a less chaotic cinematic experience.

Austin Butler is the best thing about this film. His portrayal of Elvis Presley is uncanny, never veering into caricature, and despite this film being way too long at 2 hours and 40 minutes, at no point did I ever find my enthusiasm wane for his performance. He is a powerhouse and destined for great things. In distinct contrast to his co-star, one Mr. Tom Hanks, who is playing Elvis's corrupt manager, Colonel Tom Parker. This man was a bizarre carnival charlatan who took advantage of Elvis and his family and was blamed for everything that went wrong with Presley's life. I don't know what Hanks is doing with this performance and his weird accent (Parker was an odd character, to be sure, so I am sympathetic that Hanks probably didn't have much to go on) but it certainly feels like he's in a completely different movie than Butler.

The movie acknowledges the many Black influences on Elvis's music and style, but ultimately this causes a cacophony of sounds that never quite mesh together. I found myself wishing for a scene where I could just watch Elvis sing a song all the way through without any other cinematic flourishes, but unfortunately, the soundtrack invariably would throw in two or three overlapping pieces of music and cause an auditory riot. The movie is a jumble and is trying to do too much, which ultimately means it does too little. I'm never a fan of birth-to-death biopics, so perhaps something that just looked at a week in Elvis's life would have proven more fruitful. But if you're a fan of the man, the myth, the legend, there's still a lot for you to enjoy here. It's a loving ode to an American icon that ultimately, like Elvis, starts out strong and then becomes a bit of a bloated mess.