Few movie franchises have battled allegations of greed like Jurassic Park. Since Steven Spielberg’s trailblazing 1993 blockbuster and its cynical and gruesome 1997 sequel, Universal Pictures’ attempts to keep the series alive have felt like beating a dead tyrannosaur. With one bloated, inept Jurassic World movie after the next, the series seemed to continue at the whims of people who were, to quote Jeff Goldblum’s mathematician character, “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Gareth Edwards’ slick Jurassic World: Rebirth might not make a strong case for its own existence, but it’s nevertheless an enjoyable theme park ride that shows that this dinosaur of a franchise still has some energy in its bones.
Correcting the Mistakes of the Jurassic World Trilogy
I know the movies made a lot of money, but the Jurassic World rebrand might have been the worst misstep possible for this series. The 2015 legacy sequel-slash-reboot lazily aped the formula of the original and then went nowhere fast. In the following two sequels, dinosaurs escaped containment and spread across the planet, which is a cool idea for an open-world video game but the complete wrong direction to take a billion-dollar franchise. Suddenly, the conflict became far too big for the characters to believably wrangle, the stakes totally impossible to imagine, and the story far too complicated to wrap up neatly, even in a three-hour globe-trotting adventure. What the franchise badly needed was to go back to basics, but the metaphorical Velociraptor was already out of the bag.
Jurassic World: Rebirth is very much intended to be a “back to basics” installment. The “rebirth” in question is not a literal one, but like Batman Forever and Star Wars: The Force Awakens before it, its subtitle is a promise to the audience. It’s the brand that’s being reborn. To put a stamp of quality on this new installment, Universal spared no expense, hiring Godzilla helmer Gareth Edwards in the director’s chair and bringing back the original Jurassic Park screenwriter, David Koepp.
Koepp’s script labors to solve the Dominion problem, trying both to honor the previous films’ absurd and dead-end “world-building” while also wiping the slate clean. The dinosaurs, we’re told, have indeed spread throughout the world, but the changed climate has killed the ones that stayed too far north and pushed the remainder into the tropics. Effectively, there’s now a band along the equator of prime dino habitat.
Meet the Dinosaur Chow
Our heroes are a bunch of mercenaries, led by Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and hired by seedy big pharma man Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend, very much in Rupert Foe mode here). On a quest to cure heart disease, Krebs’ company has poured millions into a cockamamie scheme to sneak onto the dinosaur-riddled island of Ile Saint-Hubert to harvest blood from three of the largest dinosaurs alive. That’s all the pretense Koepp and company need for a good old-fashioned island adventure in the vein of Kong: Skull Island or The Lost World, and thin though the plot may be, it’s nice to have a relatively simple premise in one of these.
Joining the mercenaries are boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), as well as a shipwrecked family the crew rescues along the journey. Many of these characters are completely forgettable — Ali brings a terrific attitude to this, and all of the actors are good but never iconic. Friend does fine work as the requisite corporate baddie — there’s a shot where he clambers ashore from the water, crawling like a lizard and sputtering like a newborn, just a tremendous physical performance.
Bailey, however, is the MVP here, firmly cementing that his charismatic turn as Fiyero in Wicked was no fluke and that he has the sauce to be a movie star. A scene where he gets to touch a live dinosaur for the first time sent shivers down my back. And that’s before we get to how attractive Bailey is — there are times where all he does is clench his jaw and you can practically hear the whole audience gasp in unison.
Across the board, the film fails to develop its cast beyond their archetypes, but Johansson’s character is the weakest link. As written, the character doesn’t make a whole lot of sense — she’s the best mercenary in her field, a stone-cold “extraction specialist,” yet she completely breaks down when she loses somebody? That’s the only major trait given to Zora, the person whose face is in all the marketing. The badass mercenary with a heart of gold is never a particularly fascinating archetype to me, whether it’s Jurassic World: Rebirth or Extraction or John Wick, and it’s a shame to see Johansson — who has been able to deliver a good performance in other projects — seem so stuck here with only her occasional smirks and superhero slides to help her. The relationship Zora has with Loomis suffers as a result — I know modern blockbusters don’t exactly lean on romances as much as they used to, but Zora and Loomis should have had some kind of relationship to make us care about them, even if that’s just Loomis getting Zora to see the dinosaurs more as animals and less as obstacles. All I want is their dynamic to have been like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby! Is that too much to ask?!?!
David Koepp Dreams in Campbellian Hero’s Journeys
Besides not making Dr. Henry Loomis bisexual enough, Koepp’s screenplay is a producer’s dream, and it’s easy to see why it was fast-tracked to production back in 2023. Koepp probably dreams in three-act structures. His scripting of incidents is first-class, obeying that time-honored storytelling rule that coincidences — a sleeping dinosaur just out of view, a pistol lying out in the open, a rope snapping at just the right time — are not allowed to work out in the protagonists’ favor.
His script is also very loyal to Michael Crichton’s original novels. Not only are several moments lifted directly from unfilmed scenes from the novels — a river rafting sequence here, a villain’s comeuppance there — but the science Koepp introduces feels of a piece with what came before. Pharmaceutical science is full of innovations synthesized from animals — Ziconitide is a painkiller derived from snail cone venom; Enexatide is a diabetes medication derived from Gila monster saliva; and bright blue horseshoe crab blood is crucial for testing vaccines for harmful toxins. Getting a quart of blood from a Titanosaur might seem like a long shot, but to me, it’s just on the razor’s edge of being believable. And the blood-ejection-parachute system is genius. Ironic how, like the fossilized insects that started it all, the team here is harvesting dinosaur blood.
As for Edwards, he’s definitely in director-for-hire mode here, but his love for pragmatic characters and dense Southeast Asian environments makes this installment look the part, even if he and cinematographer John Mathieson lack that Spielberg touch. Edwards does, however, effectively capture what made the original Jurassic Park so appealing to moviegoers in the first place: the awe, the magic, and the wonder. And seeing respectable actors get munched by giant monsters.
But compared to the artsier, more daring originals, this one is missing grit. It feels like it was shot on real locations — or the background plates were, anyway — so it’s automatically better than the CG environments of the World movies or the plastic jungle of Jurassic Park III. And the monsters feel big this time, even if they’re at times comically large. And even if — like the D. rex — they seem to constantly change size from shot to shot. It’s all executed with such ruthless efficiency that you have to gruffly respect it, even if you don’t like these movies — there are no wasted minutes, but also no unexpected feelings. The little kid does not get chomped. Scarlett Johansson is not killed off in the first 30 minutes. The dinosaurs roar, and it’s loud. It’s exactly what it says on the tin.
Conclusion
Rebirth is a hard movie to hate. It’s also a hard movie to defend vigorously. It’s better than any Jurassic movie since The Lost World, which is less praise for Rebirth and more damnation for those sequels and reboots. Rebirth doesn’t make you want to giddily return to the cinema to see it again, and it’s not the sort of thing you want to stand on a rooftop and shout about, the way great art sometimes makes you want to do. No, it is, at the end of the day, a competent, well-made film and little more or less.
It reminds me, in that way, of a curious summer blockbuster from last year — Alien: Romulus. That film is also a labor of love from a director who has clearly been very inspired by the original, yet for all the technical wizardry on display, for all the callbacks to previous great films, the new one doesn’t pack the same punch. Romulus and Rebirth are both installments in enormous franchises, yet neither is strong enough to compete with the original, and neither really offers any places to take the story next. They exist solely to keep the IP alive, resurrected like a featherless dinosaur.
As good as the original Jurassic Park is, Universal Pictures doesn’t make a ton of money by rereleasing it ad infinitum. The company makes more money by releasing a glossy new IMAX movie, one that offers pleasant reminders of the original film without usurping it in quality. The CGI is handsome, and Jonathan Bailey is perhaps the series’ best leading man since Jeff Goldblum traipsed, muttered, and complained across Isla Sorna. But there’s nothing much beyond that. Nothing the movie is trying to say, not really. No reason to exist besides the bottom line.
Jurassic World: Rebirth is currently in theaters.
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