2025 | PG-13 | starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend | directed by Gareth Edwards | 2 hr 14 mins | 3 out of 5 stars |
2025 Sequelfest # 6
In 2022 Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World: Dominion seemingly buried the Jurassic Park franchise under a pile of bad decisions and embarrassment. A misbegotten mess that didn’t pay off what it set up, was crammed with 2 franchises worth of characters, had no new ideas and punch drunk with nostalgia bait, Dominion ended this once awe-inspiring story with a whimper. 3 years later comes Jurassic World: Rebirth as both a sequel and a rebuke to that movie. It’s an odd duck, a movie that deliberately side-steps most of the tropes that we’ve come to associate with this franchise in a way I kind of admire, but doesn’t replace it with anything new and exciting. It’s better than Dominion and Fallen Kingdom, but that doesn’t say a lot.
Five years after dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the Earth’s climate has proven too dangerous for them, and they just started dying off. Oh well. there goes that threat. Now they’ve congregated in a belt around the planet around the equator. In the meantime, a pharmaceutical company has decided the strong, massive hearts of dinosaurs may hold the key to curing our own heart disease. Company man Krebs (Rupert Field) hires mercenary-for-hire Zoe Bennett (Scarlett Johansson, if anyone can sell this franchise back to life it’s her), paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, Wicked) and guy-with-the-boat Duncan Kindaid (Mahershala Ali, a f–king Oscar winner) to travel to the island and extract samples from its 3 largest specimens. Once they get there, the dinosaurs have mutated in ways they haven’t expected, and they find themselves saving an innocent vacationing family that has been swept up in the danger themselves.
First things first. Aside from turning this franchise over to Johansson, the best thing Rebirth does is hire Gareth Edwards to direct. The director of Rogue One, Godzilla (2014) and The Creator is a master with making special effects feel grounded and lived-in. In all 3 examples above, even with an iffy script, Edwards is able to take fantastical worlds and make them feel visceral where every other director is happy with the cartoonish effects of green screen CGI. For all the movie’s script flaws (and there are plenty), Rebirth at least looks great and feels like a movie where practical dinosaur effects share the scene with actors. It has a physicality that has been lacking in all 3 other World films so far.
The second good idea is the one that is going to annoy people. It was a good decision to scale this movie down into a little side-adventure. We’ve done the world-wide adventure thing, and this franchise can’t handle it so simplifying things into a simple Specimen Hunt film centered around 3 dinosaurs and 3 set pieces works. And those three set pieces, are not bad: we get one on sea (with a boat hunting the Mosasaurus, the scariest beast this franchise has put together), land (a Titanosaurus, the film’s most nostalgia bait-y scene) and air (a giant Pteranodon called a… Quetzalcoatlus). For my money the best scene in the movie is the Quetzalcoatlus scene, a vicious monster hunting our heroes as they dangle miles up on the side of a cliff. If you’re keeping track that’s a count of no raptors. It’s kind of refreshing to see a Jurassic Park movie showcase dinosaurs other than Velociraptors. They get a nod but mostly stay on the periphery. The 4th and final set piece brings our group together in an abandoned gas station against a pack of hybrids that threatens to get fun when it’s not rehashing the original movie.
Because this movie had dinosaur set pieces to spare, it creates a second storyline involving a family that get lost on the island. Meet the Delgados – father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, The Lincoln Lawyer), daughter, daughter’s obnoxious boyfriend and younger daughter. Younger daughter is here to befriend a cute little dinosaur that the audience can swoon over and buy plush toys of. I’m not sure why anyone else is here. Every one of their action scenes could have been repurposed to the main cast and made a much more streamlined movie. Through them we finally get to see the T-Rex river attack from the original Jurassic Park novel and it dumber than ever. The major storyline here involves Mr. Delgado coming to terms with his daughter’s obnoxious lazy boyfriend. I’ve never seen a movie create such a hateable character and then spend the rest of the running time bending over backwards trying to get us to love him.
The downside to hiring a director like Edwards is while the movie looks great, Edwards has never been a master of suspense. Like Trevorrow he can arrange a set piece but can’t milk any excitement or tension from it. That’s a Spielberg talent and it can’t be replicated by just any indie filmmaker; these movies need to hire a crowd-pleasing action director who can turn these set pieces from flat visual pieces to nail-biters. I was never that big a fan of The Lost World, but that movie still has its thrilling moments. Nothing in these last 4 movies has done anything like Julianne Moore on a window of cracking glass in that film.
Which brings me to the end of this movie and my biggest problem with the franchise as of late. The thing that would make this franchise more thrilling would be to make the dinosaurs more villainous, to make them monsters that our heroes can fight off – that they can kill. None of these movies have finales where our heroes face off with the big bad monster and blow it up, set it on fire, shoot it dead or what have you. In Jurassic Park, that made sense. The dinosaurs in the first 3 Jurassic Park movies were wonders that were just being who they were, dropped in a time they didn’t belong. An audience isn’t going to cheer for their protagonist blowing up a majestic endangered species. I get that.
But then Jurassic World decided dinosaurs weren’t enough and took the extra step of making commercialized, hybrid, mutant super-monsters, each deadlier and smarter than the last. Human-created freaks of nature. The only reason you would do that is so you can kill them with impunity, without upsetting the balance of nature the first film argued for – and the movie still doesn’t make them scary, it still doesn’t have a climax, and it still refuses to kill off its deadliest beasts. My God, the big bad mutant that shows up at the end of Rebirth looks like something out of Gears of War and we still have to leave it be.
So yeah, it’s dumb, filled with flat characters and cringe dialog, but it’s not terrible. Compare it to Jurassic World and its sequels and it’s a passable time. Compare it to Jurassic Park and it will obviously fall way short, but that ship has long sailed. We’ll probably get a lot more Jurassic movies, but we’ll never get another Jurassic Park.