REVIEW: ‘Jurassic World: Rebirth” is a feeble clone of the original movie
The hybridized D.Rex looms over a lab worker in a scene from Jurassic World: Rebirth, directed by Gareth Edwards.
“Mutant dinos are fun, right?” is an idea that comes up a lot in the Jurassic World movies. Ever since the first “legacyquel” in 2015, we’re shown how the evil corporation in the series responded to waning audience interest in real-life dinosaurs by breeding ever-freakier hybrids. In each case, these new species prove to be smarter than expected and escape confinement. Nevertheless, it’s usually a member of a real-life species who “wins” in the end, restoring something like a natural order and letting the human characters escape in the melee.
If only Universal Pictures could learn a lesson here. The ironic thing about the now four movies in the World sub-series is that by building the movies around these implausible man-made beasts, it robs the stories of the thrills of the original Jurassic Park. We don’t need gimmicks. We can still be awed by creatures that roamed the planet millions of years ago. The filmmakers just need to spend a little more time on the humans we’re meant to care about.
The title of Jurassic World: Rebirth hints at an attempted cleaning of the slate. Gone are Chris Pratt’s and Bryce Dallas Howard’s characters from the last three outings, as are the original trio of Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum. Instead, the mission to the dino island is undertaken by Scarlett Johansson as Zora, a mercenary hired by Martin (Rupert Friend), an exec from a pharmaceutical company. Martin’s plan is to harvest samples from the largest living dinosaurs to enable research into a drug to cure heart disease. Along for the ride is paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and Zora’s merc buddy Duncan (Mahershala Ali), as well as a traumatized family who get thrown together with the explorers when their sailboat is attacked by a mosasaur.
Jonathan Bailey as Henry and Scarlett Johansson as Zora.
The sequel brings back David Koepp, the screenwriter of the original film, who you might think would re-centre the series after the excesses of the atrocious previous film, Jurassic World: Dominion (Don’t get me started about the prehistoric bugs in that one). Instead, Koepp’s screenplay is full of bizarre dialogue scenes, built around unearned emotional moments, unjustified familiarity between strangers, and broad comedic beats that feel like studio notes. What’s worse is that many of the line deliveries feel like they’re cobbled together from rehearsals, as if production was rushed.
Because the characters feel so wooden, their decision-making in the plot becomes so thick-skulled that a Pachycephalosaurus would be proud. I refuse to believe, for example, that it only takes the carelessly-discarded wrapper of a Snickers bar to shut down the security system of a cloning lab. There’s a sequence in the first act as the characters arrive on the island where secondary characters die randomly, with very little buildup or tension. It leaves you not shocked, but wondering if it’s possible for someone to be so unaware of their surroundings. These kills also often happen offscreen or obscured by an object, as if the movie doesn’t really care if you see it.
Much is made about how the characters are trespassing on the site of the deserted lab, the prison of the “worst of the worst” of the corporate cloning experiments. It leads you to expect some truly frightening variants with unexpected abilities. But the reality is a lot weaker: the only two hybrids are a flying raptor of some kind and then the hulking “D. Rex”, a six-legged monstrosity with a bulbous, xenomorph-style head. It’s almost like the filmmakers lost their nerve part way through and scaled back the appearances of the beasts. The flying ones are no scarier than a raptor or a pterosaur, and the D.Rex only lumbers into two scenes, paling in comparison to faster, more cunning animals in earlier installments.
Rupert Friend as Martin, Mahershala Ali as Duncan, and Beshir Sylvain as LeClerc.
For all these issues, director Gareth Edwards applies his well-known visual skills to create some pretty vistas. Every so often there’s a scene (like the one involving huge titanosaurs) that tries to recapture the wonder that these movies should evoke. Several action setpieces are also well-constructed; I initially thought that the T.rex chasing the marooned family (who are slowly paddling an inflatable raft) would be silly, but Edwards does a good job of ratcheting up the peril to a big climax.
It wouldn’t be a Jurassic movie without some gesture towards an anti-capitalist message, but here it’s almost an afterthought. Dr. Loomis pushes for the genetic samples and resulting research to be open-source so the whole public can benefit. Zora, meanwhile, begins the film just wanting to deliver the goods to the company and get paid, but it’s probably not surprising that she has a change of heart. And that’s really all the movie has to say; whereas the earlier entries had multiple interconnected examples of nature being corrupted for profit, here the theme is as flat as Rupert Friend’s accent.
I don’t know how Universal decided that regular dinosaurs are boring. Maybe they think audiences are stupid — after all, they did briefly consider putting human-dino hybrids into these movies. It’s thought that as many as 2,500 species of dinosaurs may have existed. The fact that after seven movies, the studio has resorted to ugly abominations to get some cheap thrills is so meta it almost hurts. Three years ago, I thought that Dominion’s creative bankruptcy was so overwhelming that the franchise was surely dead and buried. Then that movie made a billion dollars. I don’t know when audiences will get tired of the series as-is, but right now I’m wishing for an extinction event.
Jurassic World: Rebirth gets two stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
Zora brings only one round for her sample-collecting gun in the mosasaur chase, and the others are buried in a supply box - I thought she was a pro!
Why does the crew idle the boat and let the aquatic dinos go after them?
Why does Duncan not simply leave his boat in the shallows instead of crashing it? The mosasaur can’t follow him and the spinosaurs are amphibious anyways!
There’s no resolution to why the stoner guy is so down on himself and unwilling to help.
How does Duncan avoid the D.Rex at the end? Guess that’s not important.