The Not-So-Good Dinosaur

My thoughts on Jurassic World Rebirth

I suppose that I am just going to have to come to terms with the fact that the Jurassic Park franchise is simply not my cup of tea and never will be. Yes, the original 1993 blockbuster from Steven Spielberg remains a landmark film for its still-astonishing technological breakthroughs but as a whole, the film, much like the original Michael Crichton novel, felt more like a less-than-impressive rehash of Crichton’s own directorial debut, Westworld, a film that had only a sliver of the budget that Spielberg was working with but also contained a genuinely neat idea (what if the man-made creations at an elaborate new theme park suddenly turned on the guests?) that it milked brilliantly. Although mostly derided, Spielberg’s 1997 follow-up, The Lost World, is actually the only one that I have completely enjoyed—the set pieces were beautifully executed and the final stretch in which dinosaurs wreak havoc in a San Diego suburb was truly inspired—and while I didn’t actually like Jurassic Park III (2001), I did approve of the decision to deflate some of the pomposity of the property and present it as an unabashed B movie, albeit one done on an A budget. As for the recent Jurassic World trilogy, it was an increasingly lumpy and unwatchable mess that offered nothing more than unmemorable pandemonium and, in Chris Pratt, one of the more unappealing franchise leads in recent memory while reducing Bryce Dallas Howard to playing a part that made Kate Capshaw’s in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom seem progressive by comparison. Those later films were the very definition of empty calorie multiplex fare—the kind of hard-sell product that had enough noise and flash to create the illusion that you were indeed watching a movie but failed to include anything that you might have recalled even a week after seeing it.

And yet, as crappy as those later sequels were, they made tons of money and demonstrated that the franchise was still viable after all these years, at least from a financial perspective. As a result, we now have Jurassic World Rebirth, which hopes to continue the franchise while at the same time serving as a definitive break from the preceding trilogy by not retaining any of the characters or plot developments from those films. While it marks a slight improvement over its immediate predecessors, it isn’t that much better because while it is clear that no expense was spared to make the elaborate visual effects come off, it is also painfully that the same could not be said about the screenplay surrounding them. Once again, it is a film that takes a seemingly irresistible premise and can’t figure out anything of interest to do with it and the result is the kind of film that feels like it was made only because Universal wanted to add an extra billion dollars or so into their coffers but didn’t want to expend much creative effort along the way.

As the story begins, money-hungry special-ops specialist Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and geek-chic paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) are contacted by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a representative of a big pharmaceutical company and offered a top-secret mission. Although the dinosaurs created by the nefarious InGen are dying off—those remaining are relocating closer to the equator for the climate—it seems that the blood of some of them just might contain the secret to curing heart disease. Their mission, should they choose to accept it (Spoiler Alert: They do) is to sneak onto Ile Saint-Hubert, an island where InGen housed a top-secret research facility, and collect blood samples from the three largest species there—the water-based Mosasaurus, the land-based Titanosaurs and the flying Quetzalcoatlus. Soon, the three set off to the island on a ship captained by Zora’s old friend Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and including Krebs’s trigger-happy security chief (Ed Skrein) as well.

Inevitably, what was supposed to be a quick in-and-out mission soon gets complicated for a number of reasons. For starters, the team comes across a family—father Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, trying so hard to be the next Pedro Pascal), bound-for-college daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), her dipshit boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) and pre-teen moppet Isabella (Audrina Miranda)—clinging to their overturned sailboat in the wake of a Mosasaurus attack and are forced to take them along. Then there is the fact that what most of them do not know—but we do thanks to a prologue set 17 years earlier—the research facility was one dedicated to creating mutant dinosaur hybrids in order to hold the interest of the public until the most dangerous creation, the six-legged Distortus rex, broke free and wreaked considerable havoc before escaping. After disaster occurs and the groups are separated as they reach the island, it cuts back and forth between the two as Zora and her group try to collect the blood samples in time to reach a rescue helicopter while Reuben and his family try to make their way through the terrain, occasionally joined by an adorable baby herbivore that arrives in order to befriend Isabella and hopefully sell millions of dollars worth of plush toys. Both groups, needless to say, quickly find themselves targeted by the more ornery species on the island, culminating with an appearance from a much larger and somewhat crankier Distortus rex during the finale.

After all the plot convolutions and general silliness of the previous trilogy, it makes sense that screenwriter David Koepp, who worked on the scripts for Jurassic Park and The Lost World, would want to cast all of that added weight aside in order to tell a more back-to-basics narrative that would presumably evoke memories of the original. While the storytelling is certainly cleaner and more efficient than the recent sequels, the storyline that he has devised here just isn’t very interesting when all is said and done. Structurally, it feels as if it was adapted from a video game cranked out to help stoke interest in the franchise in between films—you have the three key levels in which the characters try to get the blood samples and a number of side missions involving climbing down mountains, riding rapids before the climactic final battle with the boss Distortus rex—and trust me, it is not a game with much in the way of replay value. Whatever sense of mystery, magic and fear that the original film may have contained has long since dissipated and neither Koepp nor director Gareth Edwards—whose previous efforts have been the surprisingly effective franchise projects Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One (2016)—have come up with anything to replace them.

Sure, there are plenty of new dinosaurs on display but none of them convey the kind of astonishment that they once held and, with one exception, the big action setpieces are more workmanlike than anything else, with none of them coming close to equaling the crackerjack work that Spielberg accomplished in the sequence in The Lost World with the truck dangling over the chasm. In terms of generating suspense, Edwards has essentially one move here—putting a character in the foreground and then showing glimpses of some presumably dangerous creature behind them—and while there is one sequence where it works (in which a character is relieving themselves and there oblivious to what is happening behind them), others are somewhat less effective. As for the actors, they are all saddled with characters that offer them one note—maybe two, tops—to play and while this is sort of understandable (why invest any more depth into characters that are inevitably going to be overshadowed by their CGI co-stars?), it is still kind of disappointing to see actors as talented as Johansson and Ali going on presumably well=paid autopilot throughout.

And yet, for as much as I disliked Jurassic World Rebirth, there are a couple of moments where the movie actually does come up with something genuinely striking. Although one of the film’s initial conceits—that mankind has inexplicably grown so weary of dinosaurs that they go ignored and museum exhibits are being shut down due to lack of interest—does not make even the slightest amount of sense, even given the conceit of a world including genetically-revived dinos, it does lead to a amusingly crackpot image early on of a dinosaur that has escaped from captivity and is in the middle of New York City, where the locals regard it as just another hurdle to their commute. And while Edwards does go out of his way to try to emulate the feel of Spielberg’s entries in the franchise, the most effective of the film’s numerous setpieces—the increasingly chaotic attempt to secure blood from the Mosasaurus while on the high seas—is one that takes its obvious inspiration from Spielberg’s Jaws but does so in a way that is thrilling on a level that the film never quite manages to muster again.

My guess is that if you enjoyed the previous Jurassic Park movies—and there are clearly millions of people out there who feel quite differently towards them than I do—you will probably get some degree of a kick out of Jurassic World Rebirth as well. However, even during the rare high points on display, you always get a sense that you are watching a series that is running on fumes and audience goodwill rather than actual inspiration—at no point does it ever quite make a convincing case for its own existence other than as an excuse to print money. This is a series that has gone on for far too long and is need of a long hibernation period until someone can finally come up with a storyline that can actually hold its own with the effects and become more than just the cinematic equivalent of an amusement park thrill ride that does not quite live up to the hype.