Josh Reviews Jurassic World: Rebirth

In Jurassic World: Rebirth, several years have passed since the events of the previous film Jurassic World: Dominion.  Whereas the Jurassic World trilogy of films built up to the development that dinosaurs now roamed all over the globe, Rebirth resets things closer to the more familiar Jurassic Park status quo, in which the dinosaurs are now once again contained to several islands along the equator.  The wealthy pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) believes that the key to a miracle drug that can prevent heart disease lies in the DNA of dinosaurs, so he assembles a team to sneak into one of the off-limits islands to get some.  His team includes mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), her friend and boat-captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), and Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a paleontologist whose knowledge of dinosaurs comes from research but not actual experience with real live ones.  Of course, the mission doesn’t go as planned, and the team soon find themselves in serious jeopardy, as does the Delgado family of civilians — Reuben, his daughters Teresa and Isabella, and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier — whose boat is attacked and who find themselves also trapped on this dangerous dinosaur island.

The good news is that Jurassic World: Rebirth might be the second or third best film in this series, after the original Jurassic Park.  (I have a soft spot for Jurassic Park III, whose main weakness is that I think it ends way too abruptly.  I haven’t seen that film for a while, though, so I’d have to watch it again before evaluating it against Rebirth.)  This film is definitely better than any of the three Jurassic World films we’ve gotten over the past decade.  At the same time, being the second or third best Jurassic Park film is a low bar.  None of the sequels have managed to come anywhere close to the greatness of the original film.  Jurassic World: Rebirth has a story structure that is very, very familiar at this point.  I feel like I’ve basically watched this exact same movie six times before.  (I was excited that screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote the first two Jurassic Park films, in addition to films I like such as Carlito’s Way, Mission: Impossible, and the first Spider-Man film, was returning to the franchise.  But I wasn’t exactly blown away with the script, at least as realized on screen here.)

I feel very similarly about Jurassic World: Rebirth as I do about F1, which I recently reviewed.  Both are fun action adventure spectacles that I had a great time watching on a big screen while eating popcorn.  But both have thin to no character development, and predictable plots.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is well-made.  Director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One, The Creator) has an extraordinary visual eye; he has a facility with visual effects that makes all of his films visually delightful, filled with incredible (and memorable) imagery.  He’s a great fit for a Jurassic Park film.  (Mr. Edwards took a long break between Rogue One and The Creator, so I’m thrilled to see him back helming another movie so soon after The Creator.)  There are a number of really terrific dinosaur sequences in this film!  Some of my favorites are: the mosasaur attack on Zora’s team’s boat, the beautiful mating ritual of the enormous Titanosaurs, the Pterodactyls’ nest, and the tense sequence with a raft and a sleeping Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The cast is solid.  It’s fun seeing Scarlett Johansson as the lead in this action movie, and she’s great as Zora.  I believe her as this tough, competent, kick-ass woman, and I like that she also has a kind, calm demeanor.  She’s not funny, exactly, but she’s light, which is not how these types of characters are usually played.  I like that.  I’ve been a fan of Mahershala Ali’s ever since The 4400 (a mostly forgettable TV show that had a cool hook of being a sort-of sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and he’s fun here as Zora’s buddy Kincaid.  I like their chemistry together as buddies and comrades-in-arms.  (Frankly, I wish the film gave them more to do together, and/or managed to dig deeper into their characters’ shared traumas.)  Jonathan Bailey plays the third member of the main trio: Dr. Henry Loomis.  I like Jonathan Bailey (he was terrific in Wicked), though I thought he was the weak link here.  His hunky doctor role felt pretty silly to me.  But this is a strong trio, and I’d be happy for them to continue together into future movies.  (Minor spoiler: I thought for a while the movie was going to kill of Mahershala Ali’s character, which had me all annoyed; thankfully he survived!)

The actors playing the Delgado family (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, Audrina Miranda, and David Iacono) are all strong, and the movie did a solid job of getting the audience on their side to root for them to survive, as opposed to our finding them annoying.  (Well, David Iacono’s Xavier is supposed to be annoying!  Mr. Iacono plays him just right; Xavier is a pain in the ass but he’s also funny and at least somewhat endearing by the end.)  Rupert Friend knows his assignment as the oily pharmaceutical dude who we know can’t be trusted.  Ed Skrein (Game of Thrones,  Deadpool, Rebel Moon) exists in this movie mostly to meet a well-deserved death in the jaws of a dinosaur.

It’s funny to see the entire “Jurassic World” premise of the previous trilogy — that the dinosaurs now had free reign across the globe — tossed out the window with just a few lines of dialogue at the start of the movie, but I think that was the right choice.  You sort of want these films to be set in something still recognizable as our own world, I think.  Still, after making that change, I wonder why they stuck with the Jurassic World title, as opposed to returning to the original Jurassic Park title.  (Neither are accurate anymore — there’s no amusement park element either — but part of me wishes they’d gone back to the original, because I thought the Jurassic World trilogy was mostly disappointing.)  (While we’re on the subject of titles, Rebirth has nothing to do with the actual story of the movie.  It’s just there to mean a relaunch/reboot of the series, so I found that lame as a title.)

The film has a number of winks and nods towards the original Jurassic Park; perhaps a few too many.  (We see “objects in mirror are closer than they appear”, we see a banner reading “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” flutter towards the ground; we see a scene of a character waving a flare to lure a dangerous dinosaur away from his friends; etc.)  These references are fun but they also took me out of the movie.  I could have done without them.

While watching this movie, I kept wondering why it was taking place on some new island (Île Saint-Hubert) instead of the original Isla Nublar island from Jurassic Park.  It was only days later that I remembered that they’d (foolishly and ridiculously) destroyed that island back in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.  Ha!  This new island basically looks and feels just like the old Jurassic Park island to me.  That’s not a complaint.  (Though I wonder why they didn’t just set this film on the second island with dinosaurs, Isla Sorna, which is where The Lost World and Jurassic Park III took place.  I realize that I am probably now thinking about this film more than it deserves.)

My main complaint about this film is the ending.  These movies seem to think they need to keep coming up with bigger and badder dinosaurs to be the “big bad” in the end, and I think that’s a mistake.  (This has been a problem ever since the Spinosaur in Jurassic Park III.)  The weird, mutated dinosaur (can you visualize me rolling my eyes as I type the words “Distortus Rex”??) with whom our heroes have to face off in the finale is, in my opinion, ridiculous.  The weird, xenomorph-like design just didn’t work for me at all.  (This reminds me that the Alien movies have also frequently made this mistake — trying to top the Alien Queen from Aliens — including the most recent, and otherwise pretty great, Alien film Alien: Romulus.  That film also gave us a weird-looking, mutated version of the titular Alien at the end, and I didn’t like it at all.)

I was also surprised that the little dinosaur who Isabella adopts as a pet didn’t factor into the ending.  I’d expected that little dinosaur to either cause a problem or somehow save the day; or for Isabella’s kind treatment of it to wind up helping the family in some way.  I was surprised that didn’t happen!  (Thinking back on the film, I also wonder about the moment when Zora, in the pterodactyl nest, asks who carved the ancient-looking carvings we see.  Was the suggestion that there was something special or important about the location where the pterodactyls built their nest?  That didn’t seem to pay off.)

There’s nothing revelatory in Jurassic World: Rebirth, and if you’re expecting deep characters or anything radically new from the formula, you shouldn’t.  But for what it is, I enjoyed it!  The film looks great — Gareth Edwards is a terrific director — and I had a fun time watching this on a big screen and happily munching popcorn.

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