Jurassic World Rebirth opens in theaters Wednesday, July 2.
There’s a story running through the “World” half of the Jurassic franchise that involves greedy corporations squeezing the last pennies out of that precious dino DNA. InGen or Biosyn or a pharmaceutical company – everybody is lining up for one more crack at cashing in off John Hammond’s original spark of brilliance. Unfortunately, the new Jurassic World Rebirth is an example of art imitating life: All these years after the creative and commercial jackpot of 1993’s Jurassic Park, Universal tries to make good on a massive investment in dinosaurs one last time with… a movie about a company trying to make good on a massive investment in dinosaurs one last time. But instead of a Rebirth for the franchise, they’ve ended up with just another Lost World.
Now, a couple things before I dive back into disliking this movie. Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali could read the phone book to each other while wearing beige sweaters on a cloudy day and I’d be on board. They’re more often than not the most interesting things on screen in whatever movie they happen to be in, and that’s true for Jurassic World Rebirth as well. As covert operations specialist Zora Bennet and her trusted mercenary colleague Duncan Kincaid, Johansson and Ali are at their usual best here.
Rebirth starts strongly enough as well. The promise of dropping Gareth Edwards into the Jurassic world seems like it’s paying off in the opening sequences. The only director who’s worked with both Godzilla and the Death Star, Edwards knows how to create real terror with scale on screen. And there’s a great horror, almost B-movie vibe in the beginning of Jurassic World Rebirth that I’m really into. When the iconic Jurassic Park logo appears on screen, it’s accompanied by a score that would be at home in a classic Universal monster movie. There’s no majesty to it. None of that trademark John Williams flavor of wonder. It’s all creepy creature feature vibes on the soundtrack, and I actually loved it because it’s a new flavor for the franchise.
There’s a boldness to the move of subtitling the sixth Jurassic Park sequel “Rebirth” – it’s kind of a promise that says we’re in store for something different and based on these opening moments, Edwards is coming at this movie with a legitimately new energy that lasts past the cold open. In an early scene where Rupert Friend’s shady corporate exec hires Johansson’s covert-ops expert, Zora Bennett, to take part in his shadiness, the exposition is set against action in the background that very quickly establishes the dynamic between dinosaurs and humans post Jurassic World Dominion. It’s the kind of efficiency in storytelling that I really like, and there’s a funny bit of it right out of the gate in Rebirth.
So, everything is heading in the right direction and then… it starts heading in the same old direction. There’s another as-yet-unheard-of island where inGen did its dirtiest work, and a group of heroes, villains, and other assorted dino chow find themselves in a fight to survive. It’s the same thing the franchise has done with varying degrees of success and pretty consistent degrees of failure since The Lost World.
Edwards may have made Rogue One, but Jurassic World Rebirth follows the playbook of a different Star Wars movie: The Force Awakens, which is, not for nothing, also an episode 7. It’s a legacy sequel that more or less follows the blueprint of the first movie. Rebirth is 1:1 to the original Jurassic Park, but there’s a problem this movie can’t solve. Jurassic Park was a simple machine. For all its big ideas and complexities, it’s about easy-to-like people trying to not get eaten and wondering if maybe we shouldn’t play God.
The franchise has since layered more and more on top of that relative straightforwardness almost every time out, to the point that there’s just too much to deal with in Rebirth. It’s a bit of the “should we do this?” with a dash of corporate greed, a pinch of coexisting with dinosaurs with a gene sequence gap filled in by questions about to whom scientific discovery actually belongs while every character with a speaking role gets a hyper specific emotional journey to go on that also has to get paid off. There’s so much on the table that I really couldn’t care about any of it.
There was actually a moment I knew Rebirth didn’t quite have the same thing working for it as Jurassic Park. It’s one you can see in the trailers where Zora and Jonathan Bailey’s Dr. Loomis run into a herd of Titanosaurs. It’s in a wide, green valley, the characters are awed by what they see. It’s clearly meant to evoke the moment when Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler, and by extension the audience, get their first real look at the Brachiosaur. This scene in Rebirth is structured exactly the same down to the cutaway to a wide shot of the valley revealing the whole herd – only in Rebirth, it’s a wide aerial angle, not from anybody’s perspective. It’s completely disconnected from the characters. It’s not the view that Zora’s enjoying in the scene, like it was for Dr. Grant in the original. It’s nobody’s view, just a massive and, frankly soulless shot of a valley full of dinosaurs.
Now it might seem small and myopic of me to be stressed about a single shot, but these are the moments that have a real impact on how a movie lands on you. Whether you realize it or not, shots like this make the difference between the movies you remember and the ones you’re already forgetting by the time the credits roll. If you want to buy into characters feeling awe, you need to be in their shoes, seeing what they’re seeing. It’s an insistence on just remixing the original that really keeps this Jurassic movie from evolving into something new for the franchise.
And that brings me to the Delgado family. This is, like the main cast of the film, a group of actors doing really good work. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is great as a dad crossing the Atlantic with his daughters. He’s capable, smart, empathetic, and relatable – as is his older daughter, played by Luna Blaise. There’s a familiarity to the dynamics of this family: the issues they’re dealing with have all been seen before, but they’re all charismatic enough that I enjoyed spending time with them. The bad news is, there’s no good reason for them to be there. The good news, though, is that superfluous is one of my favorite words. There’s an argument to be made, one that a colleague of mine has already shouted at me, that this family arriving by chance is the best way to get kids involved in a death-by-dinosaur adventure, and maybe it is. That’s not even my issue with it though.
If this had been a monster movie about a group of mercenaries sent to recover DNA from a dinosaur-filled island, hell yeah, I’m into that. On the other hand, if this were a monster movie about a family marooned on one of InGen’s old islands, forced to survive on the strength of their wits with no weapons or designs on profiting off of dinosaurs, I’m into that too. Instead there’s just a family there completely by accident who’s doing their own thing the whole movie. The way they cross over with Scarlett Johansson and her side of the cast is mostly incidental, and the themes they represent don’t really have anything to offer to Rebirth as a whole. If they weren’t there at all, it really wouldn’t have mattered. For example, maybe one character lost a child and so they’re extra determined to get these kids safely off the island. If the Delgados weren’t there, that character would just have to rely on not getting eaten for motivation which is no big loss.
But I’ve gotten this far into the review without focusing much on the main attractions: the dinosaurs. The insanely mutated genetic cocktail that gets loose in the opening sequence looms over much of Rebirth. Edwards and writer David Koepp keep its threat off screen for the most part, in a very Spielbergian show of restraint. And this is, as I said before, the basket in which I was keeping all my ostrich eggs and amphibian DNA: a Gareth Edwards sense of scale.
But where Rebirth’s marquee mega-mutant, half kaiju, half Rancor monstrosity is concerned, its scale feels off. It seems bigger in some scenes than others and felt like it might be changing size and shape to suit whatever particular flavor of terror it needs to inflict in any given moment. Now, to be fair, some of those terrifying moments are pretty cool. This monster does have a personality and honestly, I would’ve liked to have seen more of it. To go back the theoretical, simpler Rebirths that could’ve been, this bizarre, genetic hybrid abomination could’ve carried the B-movie energy of the intro if he had his sights trained on either the team of mercenaries and their shady employer or the family trying to understand each other a little better. Instead, he’s there until he’s not, and he’s just kinda not there until he’s back again.
None of this is to say that I’m docking the movie points because it wasn’t the movie I would’ve rather watched, by the way. I only want to illustrate Jurassic Park Rebirth’s general lack of follow through. For a movie that’s hinting at a fresh start from its title on down, Rebirth plays it frustratingly safe. There were bound to be more cinematic mosquitos they could’ve pulled other DNA from to make something a little different.
But, that is the story of the four Jurassic World movies. Rebirth is, when it comes down to it, just “more teeth,” the mostly cheesy line from Jurassic World poking fun at the absurdity of daring to ask “How do we make bringing dinosaurs back to life interesting again?” What Jurassic World was trying to make fun of, Rebirth ultimately became. It’s a very okay, middling movie, with nothing egregiously wrong about it aside from the fact that it ignores one of the franchise’s most iconic lines. Universal seems, in the words of Dr. Ian Malcolm, so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.
