JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH is the seventh entry in a series that resolutely and ironically refuses to die in the way the implied resurrection would require. Instead, Gareth Edwards takes the reins on a new entry that makes a clean break from the characters of the original JURASSIC PARK and JURASSIC WORLD, but not from the increasingly convoluted world that the series inhabits.
The cast is an ensemble, but the lead player is undoubtedly former covert operative Zora Bennett, played by Scarlett Johansson. Pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) asks her – and offers exorbitant pay – to obtain DNA samples from the largest dinosaur species from land, sea, and air to help kickstart the development of a drug that could combat heart disease. Accompanying her and Krebs on the (extremely illegal) mission are longtime colleague Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and young palaeontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey). In parallel, the film establishes a family whose sailing route goes through areas near the equator, where travel is forbidden due to its status as the only region where the wild dinosaurs have thrived.
For better and worse, Edwards’ film is beholden to the Spielberg original. The John Williams theme music is dropped into several moments, including two – a helicopter approach to an island, and our characters contemplating a gigantic sauropod – which are explicit nods and recalls to sequences from that film. Edwards has shown great ability to communicate threat at scale in films like MONSTERS, his 2014 GODZILLA entry, and even segments of ROGUE ONE; and REBIRTH frequently excels in this area. Where it falls short is in swimming in the same Mosasaurus-blighted waters as its more recent predecessors.
“Edwards has shown great ability to communicate threat at scale [and] REBIRTH frequently excels in this area. Where it falls short is in swimming in the same Mosasaurus-blighted waters as its more recent predecessors.”
The opening act of the film makes much noise out of the fact that the public has grown disinterested and apathetic toward dinosaurs, but this is the same underlying conceit behind the now decade-old JURASSIC WORLD. The genetic meddling, which was criticised in the original JURASSIC PARK, and re-upped with increasingly silly hybrid species in the JURASSIC WORLD trilogy, is amped up yet further here.
Rupert Friend’s executive embodies the corporate greed angle, which has long bubbled under the surface of these films. Still, there is no charismatic counterpoint to his character, save for the sub-Spielbergian inclusion of the sailing family. Bailey’s Loomis is the primary oppositional vector for the voracious commercialisation the film sets up against: “Science is for all of us, not some of us”. It’s a laudable theme in an increasingly anti-intellectual world, but the film does little to prove why it should be true. This viewpoint of Loomis is handled as brief asides to Zora, rather than intrinsically woven into the fabric of the story as the characters’ concerns were in JURASSIC PARK. Krebs also lacks depth as a human vessel that embodies the greed of capital. Where Richard Hammond’s ambition and optimism were, in fact, well-disguised arrogance and desire in 1993 (maybe even to Hammond himself), there is no such depth to REBIRTH’s human villains.
The good aspects of REBIRTH primarily lie in the execution of some of its set pieces. Even though one is ripped straight from the pages of Crichton’s original novel (and, though never shot, from the storyboards of the 1993 film), belying an overarching lack of originality, Edwards proves a good fit stylistically. A sequence where a T-Rex chases the family and a dinghy down a river is paced superbly and shot with an eye that understands how these animals would be threatening. Edwards chooses to show the T-Rex from slightly upward angles, resulting in nothing but blue sky behind it, getting across its terrifying scale in a way the previous three films failed to do. An aquatic showdown with an enormous Mosasaurus and a pack of Spinosauruses clips along magnificently, the situation and creatures convincingly presented as gripping threats, with more than a few subtle nods to Spielberg’s other industry-defining classic, JAWS, during the scene. Lastly, a climactic showdown with a final sharp-toothed assailant shows a level of tension-building restraint that has been comically absent in the denouements of nearly every other JURASSIC PARK sequel. However, in taking the rough with the smooth, the film still has time for some ugly green-screen cliff sequences, whose scenes in an old temple seemingly revel in superficial similarities to Spielberg’s RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.
Arguably, the most egregious rejection of REBIRTH’s own title is the decision not only to re-embrace but double down on the genetic hybrid ideas developed in the most recent films. We are introduced here to the ‘Mutadon’, which is seemingly a flying raptor, and the ‘Distortus Rex’, a six-limbed T-Rex-based grotesque with a bulbous head. Although REBIRTH lacks the increasingly silly anthropomorphisation of the dinosaurs that Colin Trevorrow (architect and two-time director of the JURASSIC WORLD trilogy from 2015-2022) pursued, it seemingly takes the deficit in absurdity quotient and funnels it into this aspect of the production design. It reduces the animals in the film to much simpler celluloid monsters than at any other point in the series, and flattens any themes that spin out from the characters’ interactions with them or the film’s world’s treatment of them.
“The strengths of REBIRTH in creating more than one memorable scene may well ensure its status as one of the better JURASSIC PARK follow-ups, but that bar is sadly low: the film still exhibits the same problems as many of its less compelling fellow sequels.”
The script also coasts on the strength of the cast’s inherent charisma and some of the aforementioned well-executed set pieces. A conversation between Johansson and Ali on grief and lost colleagues is engagingly delivered, but goes nowhere and is only weakly called back to. The film also borrows liberally (and inexplicably, given the film’s slightly harsh reputation) from JURASSIC PARK III in undertaking an illegal mission to a former research site. However, it also bolts on a plot driver (samples from the largest dinosaurs of air, land, and sea) that feels more like a contrived video game mechanism than a coherent mission. Between this and the previous six films in the series, half of the islands in the Caribbean or eastern Atlantic seem to have been given over to InGen research facilities.
The strengths of REBIRTH in creating more than one memorable scene may well ensure its status as one of the better JURASSIC PARK follow-ups, but that bar is sadly low: the film still exhibits the same problems as many of its less compelling fellow sequels. The fact that one of its most well-executed scenes comes from the original novel, and is a sequence screenwriter David Koepp has longed to include in one of the films, is maybe emblematic of the lack of ideas the series has now had for over thirty years.
“The fact that one of its most well-executed scenes comes from the original novel, and is a sequence screenwriter David Koepp has longed to include in one of the films, is maybe emblematic of the lack of ideas the series has now had for over thirty years.”
REBIRTH will not be the first time Ian Malcolm’s famous line about being “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” has been turned inward on the franchise itself. However, it’s a line from the same character in THE LOST WORLD which resonates more when contemplating REBIRTH specifically: “So, there’s another island with dinosaurs… no fences this time, and you want to send people in…very few people, on the ground, right? Who are the four lunatics you’re trying to con into this?” Somehow, Universal keeps conning us into revisiting this series in numbers much greater than four.
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