Film Review: "Jurassic World Rebirth"
The newest iteration in the "Jurassic Park" franchise is an entertaining, if also somewhat empty, dino adventure.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.
As a ‘90s kid, I’ve long had a lot of love for the Jurassic Park franchise. It is impossible to overstate just how important and impactful Steven Spielberg’s original masterpiece was on the collective psyche of ‘90s kids (and adults!) and, while I haven’t been a huge fan of every entry–I continue to think that the scene The Lost World in which a T. rex rampages through downtown LA is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen in a major blockbuster–I’m never not entertained. When it comes to Hollywood these days, sometimes that’s about the most that you can realistically expect.
I thus went into Jurassic World Rebirth with low expectations. For the most part, the film fulfilled them. I was highly entertained during it, the visual effects were seamless and stunning as always, and the cast were uniformly excellent. At the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this is, when all is said and done, something of an empty blockbuster, devoid of the true sense of awe that was such a key part of the appeal of the original. More perplexingly, while Rebirth gestures toward some bigger issues, it ultimately ends up being as intellectually empty as every other entry of the reboot series.
The summary is basically the same as every other Jurassic Park film. Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) enlists the aid of mercenaries Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kinkaid (Mahershala Ali) and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to go to the research island Ile Saint-Hubert and procure DNA samples from various dinosaurs in order to perfect a potential treatment for heart disease. Along the way they cross paths with the Delgados: father Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s dim bulb boyfriend Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono). Once they reach the island all hell breaks loose, leading to carnage and lots of escapes.
If there’s one thing that I really did love about this film, it was the cast. I could watch Scarlett Johnasson read the phone book, and I wouldn’t love her any less. She is perfectly cast as Zora Bennett, a mercenary who really is in it for the money but also has a conscience. Jonathan Bailey, likewise, is his usually charming and handsome and nerdy self, and he manages to give this heart that it often desperately lacks. Mahershala Ali was sadly underused, but hopefully we’ll get to see more of him in the sequel. The Delgados are all fine, but far too often their story feels like it was teleported from a totally different film (and, as others have noted, one can’t help but wonder at Reuben’s parenting skills, given that he takes his two daughters into waters that, the film repeatedly reminds us, have been declared off-limits by all of the world’s governments).
There were other things that I found irksome. For a film that is supposedly all about dinosaurs, there are remarkably few of them, and it takes almost half an hour before we get some up-close encounters with the beasts. Even there, though, the encounters are often so brief that one can’t help but wonder where the film’s massive budget went, and the slayings are, it has to be said, lackluster. The thing about the dinosaur devourings in the original film–and, to a lesser extent, the sequels–is that they had some weight to them. When Dennis Nedry gets blinded and eaten by the Dilophosaurus the moment is both satisfying and terrifying, and all of the other deaths are equally compelling to watch, reminding us of the impact of human hubris.
In Rebirth, by contrast, the deaths are neither as detailed nor as emotionally/dramatically effective because the side characters don’t have much depth. When, for example, Ed Skrein’s Bobby Atwater gets devoured by a Spinosaurus, it’s hard to feel much of anything, both because it happens so quickly–it lacks the brutal detail that such deaths often had in the original film–and because there’s really nothing to this character that makes his death notable. This is even more the case with two other dinosaur fatalities, both of which take place almost off-screen.
The one exception to this is the demise of Rupert Friend’s Krebs, who ends up being devoured by the Distortus rex. Anyone who has ever seen a movie like this will have seen this coming from a mile away, of course, but it’s still at least somewhat satisfying to see this nefarious capitalist eaten alive by one of the creatures that call this island home. This is a man, after all, who was willing to toss Teresa overboard when she threatened the operation by sending out an SOS for aid. Like so many other Jurassic Park/World villains he is capitalism incarnate, and he ends up paying the price.
That said, I also want to go on record and say that I hate how the Jurassic World films lean so heavily on the conceit of the mutant dinos. Maybe if the mutant dinosaurs were in any way visually compelling, but instead they just look…quite silly. The D. rex, the supposed big bad of this movie, looks like nothing more than a rejected creature design from the Alien franchise, and it’s kept so much in the shadows that it’s hard to even say precisely what it looks like. Apparently the dinosaurs of this new iteration are camera-shy.
Lastly, a word about the screenplay. To put it simply, there are just too many things going on in this movie, which means that no single narrative strand or philosophical question gets the attention that it deserves. While the Delgados make for nice heroes, their presence causes the film to deviate from the central trio of Zora, Duncan, and Henry. I know that it’s obligatory to have kids in these movies, but perhaps there was a more organic way of including them.
Likewise, the film just lacks any sense of intellectual or artistic depth. There are a few moments of awe and genuine feeling–such as when the central trio encounters a herd of Titanosaurus, but these play more like homages to the original rather than anything new. The film also doesn’t really have anything important to say about dinosaurs or about humans, with even its commentary about capitalism diluted by its lackluster story.
When it comes down to it, though, we watch these kinds of movies to be entertained and, despite the fact that the dinosaurs don’t get as much screen time as I would have liked, there’s more than enough here to make it worth a trip to the theater.