Over the course of thirty-two years, we now have seven installments of the Jurassic Park film series. Following the brilliance of the 1993 original, of which its director Steven Spielberg successfully brought the wonder and horror towards the spectacle of dinosaurs through groundbreaking visual effects, all the sequels have never come close to the quality of that first movie. Whatever low or high moments the sequels have achieved, there seems to be a lack of motivation when it comes to moving the franchise, even when 2018’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom concluded with the set-up of dinosaurs walking among us.
Following the disastrous Jurassic World Dominion, does the latest installment really bring new life to a series that has always been about resurrecting the extinct? Jurassic World Rebirth opens with the realization that the Earth’s climate is inhospitable to sustain the dinosaurs, now forced to reside in areas around the equator. Approached by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), an executive at a pharmaceutical company, former ex-military covert operative Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) are recruited for a top-secret mission to retrieve biomaterial samples from the three largest prehistoric specimens, which hold the key to a new heart disease treatment.
Right away, the first issue you have with Jurassic World Rebirth is not fulfilling the promise that the recent movies were setting up, which is the co-existence between humans and dinosaurs. Despite an earlier sequence featuring a Brachiosaurus getting stuck in traffic, right after Jonathan Bailey’s Henry Loomis makes the comment that no one cares about dinosaurs, despite his passion for them. That comment was something that was already said in the first Jurassic World, a film that showed that a dinosaur theme park could work as long as you don’t create hybrid dinosaurs, a theme that is repeated here.
Screenwriter David Koepp, who penned Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World, ends up making the same mistake that has plagued every sequel, which is why would you ever step foot on a dinosaur-infested island that will most likely kill you. Like The Lost World, your principal cast is comprised of mercenaries who would risk their lives for money. Despite the charisma of performers like Johansson, Bailey and Mahershala Ali as Zora’s team leader Duncan, it’s hard to really care about these characters, even with tragic backstories sprinkled here and there.
(There is also a subplot involving a family led by a dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) who should know better than to sail with his children around an island where the aquatic Mosasaurus swims.)
Whatever flashes of wonder Jurassic World Rebirth has, it is the few set-pieces that remind you that director Gareth Edwards is a student of Spielberg’s filmmaking. When you look at his first two features Monsters and Godzilla, Edwards is about showing the beauty and scariness of giant creatures, which is very apparent here. While the inclusion of John Williams’ iconic Jurassic Park theme feels forced for the sake of nostalgia, there is a wonderful sequence featuring two Titanosaurus being intimate, referencing Edwards’ own past work. However, evoking more the horror from Michael Crichton’s original novel, there are intense set-pieces that make great use of a T-Rex and the mutated Distortus rex.
