Review by Tim Robins
Zora Bennett leads a team of skilled operatives to the most dangerous place on Earth, an island research facility for the original Jurassic Park. Their mission is to secure genetic material from dinosaurs whose DNA can provide life-saving benefits to mankind. As the top-secret expedition becomes more and more risky, they soon make a sinister, shocking discovery that’s been hidden from the world for decades.
SPOILERS AHEAD!!
Jurassic World: Rebirth must be one of the few films whose premise is contradicted by the film itself. In this case, that the public will eventually grow tired of watching dinosaurs and end up treating them with indifference.
The premise is derived from public reaction to the Apollo missions which has today reached a nadir with a vocal minority trying to persuade us that men walking on the moon was a hoax. But I don’t believe the public will everlose their appetite for watching dinosaurs and prehistoric reptiles gobbling up hapless humans.
Indeed, Jurassic World: Rebirth has done well at the box office, already making 322.5 million dollars at the box office worldwide, according to Deadline. I have read that each of the sequels to Jurassic Park have made less money than the one before. Even if that’s the case, the Jurassicfranchise has netted over six billion dollars worldwide.
In that context, fretting about public indifference to dinosaurs seems more like a reflection of Universal Pictures’ anxieties about the film itself. And the inclusion of yet more hideous new mutations surely arises from the producers’ need for trademark toys (prehistoric monsters having fallen into the public domain millions of years ago).
Jurassic Park: Rebirth sees Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), of big pharma company ParkerGenix, assemble a team to collect DNA samples from the biggest representatives of dino-kind: Titanosaurus, Quetzalcoatlus and Mosasaurus. Team members include Scarlett Johansson as Kora Bennett (a mercenary), Jonathan Bailey as Dr Loomis (a museum-based paleontologist and former student of Jurassic Park’s Doctor Grant), and Mahershala Ali, as Duncan Kincaid, (the appointed team leader). Krebs tells them that dino-DNA will be used as medication to stop heart disease, much as Gila Monster venom, used in Ozempic, is currently combating Type Two Diabetes.
Those fans hoping that a Jurassic World film would finally live up to the promise of the franchise’s title (a worldwide battle for dominion over the Earth), will again be disappointed. Instead, Jurassic World: Rebirth’s plot is a “fetch-quest”, set on yet another Ingen-owned island, Saint-Hubert, where the company was developing an ever more fearsome monster of its own imagination.
The mutants include a “D-Rex” which resembles a dinosaur crossed with a Rancor from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. If the film takes the structure of a videogame, then the “D-Rex” is the island’s final big boss. It escaped containment because of an accident involving a Snickers wrapper. (Sadly for the Ingen scientists, the D-Rex wasn’t feeling itself until it had snacked on Snickers’ snackers).
Cut to 17 years later, and the island of Saint-Hubert is now part of an equatorial nature reserve. Here, those prehistoric creatures who weren’t in zoos have legged, winged or swam in their search for a more hospitable climate than the rest of the globe. Humans are forbidden from entering the equatorial zone, so that, of course, is where everyone in the film wants to go.
In addition to the ParkerGenix team, there are the Delgaodo family, who are sailing through the forbidden zone as a shortcut from Barbados to Cape Town. The family comprises Reuben Delgado, his two daughters Bella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise). The crew is rounded out by Xavier (David Iacono), Teresa’s boyfriend, who seems to have been invited on board to provide us all with comic relief.
Despite splitting attention away from team ParkerGenix, and further extending an already laborious first act, the family are a good deal more interesting. And Bella, in particular, gives us someone to worry about when the prehistoric creatures eventually attack. Child endangerment is always extra exciting, I guess.
The Delgado family also provides film’s more involving story arcs: Xavier must win the respect of the father, while Bella, who starts out wishing the dinosaurs hadn’t come back.
Among team ParkerGenix, Dr Loomis gets to see dinosaurs in the wild, Bennett is won over to the idea of making Dino-DNA “open-source”, and Kincaid satisfies his survivor’s guilt over the death of his daughter. Kincaid apparently sacrifices himself to save the survivors from the “D-Rex”, but, much like Hooper in Jaws, his life is spared thanks to studio or test-audience feedback.
Screenwriter David Koepp shared writing credits with Michael Crighton on Jurassic Park (1990) and wrote the screenplay The Lost World: Jurassic Park(1997). Apparently, he watched all the sequels before scripting Jurassic World: Rebirth and, at times, the film feels a bit like a reworking of the franchise’s greatest hits.
There are appearances by fondly-remembered dinos, including a cheeky appearance by a Dilophosaurus, and scenes that echo moments from the earlier films – cue Jurassic Park’s theme music, as Zora and Loomis stare in awe at the Titanosaurs, much as Dr Grant and Ellie Sattler did, albeit at a Brachiosaur.
Much like the first few films, Koepp’s script also includes scenes from the novel that didn’t make it to Jurassic Park. Among such scenes, Jurassic Park: The Lost World included a ‘compy’ attack on a child on a beach, and Jurassic Park III included a scene in the park’s aviary.
In Jurassic World: Rebirth we get the much-anticipated scene in which a T-Rex (or in the book, two T-rexes) chase survivors, who are heading down river in a raft down a river. This provides Rebirth with one of its most exciting moments, even though the chase climax has already been used in an earlier movie, where the T-Rex menacingly sticks its head through a waterfall behind which the characters are hoping to hide.
However, it is director Gareth Edwards’ flair for the monstrous that is Rebirth’s real star. The film is often visually arresting with jungle scenes painted in deep reds and greens. It was shot in 3D, and Edwards often divides the screen into foreground, midground and background zones that sometimes seem to exist independently of each other. The scene where the team first see the Titanosaurs provides a good example of this.
The clear separation of grounds works well in one of the film’s funnier moments. Xavier wanders off to take a leak. As he relieves himself, he’s blissfully unaware of dinosaurs stalking him behind his back. Nor does he seem aware of a developing dino-fight, with him as the prize.
The climax of the film recalls the director’s early movie Monsters (2010). Both films end at an abandoned gas station, where humans have taken refuge. In Monsters, the human survivors look on in awe as two of the gigantic yet ethereal monsters of the title, meet and commune with each other. This time out, we get to see Mutasaurs, (think hench Skeksis from The Dark Crystal, 1982) stalking through the aisles of the gas station’s store, much as the Velocoraptors stalk the children through a kitchen in Jurassic Park. Edwards makes such scenes ominous and atmospheric but, the more sequels I see, the better the first Jurassic Park movie looks.
I was one of those who was disappointed that the movie didn’t have the blood and guts of author Michael Crighton’s novel. But, to be fair, Stephen Spielberg may have gutted the novel but he replaced the guts with much needed heart. Many of the deaths remain in the film and Nedry’s death by Dilophosaurus is pretty much shot as written by Crichton.
There’s nothing in Jurassic World: Rebirth that establishes the characters as well as Jurassic Park introduces the character of Dr Grant. Where, you may recall, we see Dr Grant teasing (or, in today’s terms “verbally abusing”) a young boy by graphically telling him what a raptor attack must have been like.
This scene not only foreshadows the actual velociraptor attacks, it also establishes Grant’s awkwardness around, and lack of empathy for, children. By the end of Jurassic Park, Hammond’s grandchildren are on board a helicopter off the island, and we see them sleeping contentedly in Dr Grant’s comforting and protective arms. Dr Grant himself seems relaxed about this state of affairs. Importantly, the scene not only brings closure to Dr Grant’s story arc, but also cements Jurassic Park’s identity as a film for and about the family.
In contrast, Jurassic World: Rebirth opens with a catch-penny lab disaster. It is a terrifying hook, but films really don’t need a hook. They have a captive audience, so can put the time to better use. It may have been better actually seeing Johansson’s character in action, perhaps on a mission with Kincaid that ends in disaster after they are betrayed by a corporation’s penny pinching. That way, we’d have established kickass character, her friendship with Kincaid and her eventual rejection of ParkerGenix’s mission conversion to public mindedness.
In the event, Jurassic World: Rebirth is weighed down by uninteresting conversations and chit chat, none of which makes us care about the characters, particularly the members of team ParkerGenix. Despite the undeniably entertaining action and the many visually arresting scenes, the Jurassic franchise probably needs to be reborn again.
Tim Robins
Jurassic World – Rebirth is in cinemas now | Jurassic World – Official Site
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A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
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