With seven films across more than three decades, the Jurassic Park/World installments have been all over the place in terms of quality, filmmaking prowess, and storytelling. But the elements that have gone into the latest installment, Jurassic World: Rebirth, are so good, I thought for sure this one was going to be a return to form, if for no other reason than it offers negligible connective tissue to the other movies. There is something encouraging about a franchise that basically starts from scratch—new characters, new location, even mostly new dinosaurs. There’s even a new filmmaker, Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, the most recent Godzilla remake, The Creator), with a substantial visual prowess. And on top of all of that, the writer of the first two Jurassic Park movies, David Koepp, returns as the sole screenwriter.
Even the new actors are big, bold choices, including Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, a mercenary leading a new team to an island somewhere on the equator. That’s the only place left on Earth where dinosaurs can still exist, after we humans made the rest of the globe uninhabitable for the out-of-this-era creatures. It just so happens that this island was the research and development location for the original Jurassic Park, which basically means they attempted to mix and match dinosaurs through unethical crossbreeding to make bigger and weirder ones, since humans were getting bored with the same old same old. If the resulting dinosaurs didn’t turn out right, they would pitch them behind a familiar electric fence and let them live out their years. Of course, some of these dinosaurs are terrifying and gigantic, and it’s these massive creatures that our team has to find.
The team is assembled by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), the representative of a big pharmaceutical company who needs the DNA from the three most colossal creatures—one that operates primarily on land, one in the sea, and one in the air—from across this pocket of the world. Zora brings along nerdy paleontologist (you can tell he’s the smartest because he’s the only one wearing glasses) Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, Wicked, Bridgerton), who understands animal behavior, but also is in the process of downsizing his museum dinosaur exhibit because the world has grown bored with the giant creatures roaming the Earth. Zora also recruits an old friend, Duncan Kincaid (two-time Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali), to act as team leader and take a boat to this new location, which looks a whole lot like the old location but less threatening and exciting—or maybe that’s just the whole movie.
To test our patience and implausibly bring kids into the story, Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating trip across the Atlantic is upended when their ship capsizes thanks to marauding aquatic dinosaurs. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo plays Reuben Delgado, the father of the family, which includes a teenage daughter (Luna Blaise), her idiot boyfriend (David Iacono), and a younger daughter (Audrina Miranda). I don’t care how nautically inclined your kids are, you don’t bring them on a trip like this and have them cross the equator where the world’s governments have forbidden humans to travel due to unregulated dinosaur activity. But having this family as a part of this story means that Zora and her team have to deal with amateurs who slow them down and have different, more personal, priorities when it comes to safety.
The plot of Jurassic World: Rebirth (which might as well be subtitled Reboot) overtly resembles Aliens in many ways, from its story of corporate greed over human life to characters crawling around in tunnels and ducts to escape marauding, hungry dinos. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it seems painfully obvious in the action-adventure space. Perhaps more disappointing is that the characters seem to give no reverence or sense of awe about seeing these insanely huge versions of these dinosaurs, most of which have never been seen by any other humans because of their blended DNA. They just treat them like any other threat, rather than the monsters on Earth they actually are.
It’s weird saying that nothing felt true to life in a Jurassic movie, but there has usually been some believability factor in at least the reactions in these films, if not the junk science. But in Rebirth, the dinosaurs just exist to be avoided, with no paralyzing fear or sense of astonishment. Of course, a halfway decent story might have made me overlook this serious flaw, but this chapter is easily one of the weakest in the franchise.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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