Jurassic World Rebirth: satisfying thrills, thin storytelling
At its best, Rebirth replicates some of Jurassic Park’s magic, but Gareth Edwards' blockbuster-savvy direction can’t save the subpar script.
The multi-billion-dollar box office for both Jurassic movie trilogies (Park in 1993, 1997 and 2001, World in 2015, 2018 and 2022) suggested a public ever eager to gobble up dinosaur-themed adventures. But Steven Spielberg’s original VFX game-changer aside, reviews and reception to the subsequent films also pointed to a diminishing sense of genuine enthusiasm, particularly for the most recent entry, the lumbering, callback-clogged Jurassic World Dominion. As one character here complains early on, “Nobody cares about these animals anymore.” Time, then, to inject some fresh DNA into a new era? For rebirth, read: reboot.
And so, the series’ carefully developed concept of man and prehistoric beasts now co-existing is immediately abandoned. Instead, dinosaurs are dying out in the modern world, basically confined to and roaming free in a thin, equatorial strip of the tropics and given a wide berth by humans. You’d have to be on Scarlett Johansson’s bafflingly understaffed, under-fire-powered team of mercenaries, covertly employed by Rupert Friend’s conniving Big Pharma rep seeking live genetic samples to cure heart disease, to be dumb enough to invade their territory. Or as foolhardy as Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the dad taking his two young daughters and a stoner boyfriend on a sailing trip in giant aquatic predator-infested waters. Desperate times breed desperate measures, apparently.
To give Jurassic World: Rebirth its due, there’s a pleasantly throwback feel to its island survival thrills. British director Gareth Edwards, now an experienced hand at blockbuster sequels (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)) and monster mashes (Godzilla (2014)), shoots on 35mm film, self-consciously reaching for Spielberg’s bygone sense of wonder. The tripartite water-land-air mission deftly switches up locations and creatures, and an abandoned lab now overrun by its mutant crossbreeds attempts to amplify the horror element. The domed head and thrusting jaws of new big bad, Distortus Rex(!), resemble nothing so much as a prehistoric Alien xenomorph.
Sadly, the connective tissue between CGI-heavy set-pieces is perfunctory at best, the original Jurassic Park writer and usually reliable David Koepp’s script bogged down with flat humour, paper-thin characters and plot holes so vast a T-Rex could amble through them. The predictability of those marked as dino snacks, and a cute pet Aquilops negate any genuinely mean streak (best seen in Spielberg’s The Lost World).
The entire enterprise might look revamped, but this is ultimately second-hand genetic code, inadvertently echoing the Big Pharma greed plotline: supposedly looking to fix people’s hearts, but actually fixated on bottom line profits. It’s the DNA of today’s mainstream moviemaking: franchise life will, indeed must, find a way.
► Jurassic World Rebirth is in UK cinemas 2 July.