Jurassic World Rebirth Review – Sadly, Sequels Find a Way
by Ken Jones
Jurassic Park generated a huge box office in 1993 and spawned two sequels over an eight-year span to diminishing returns. The franchise restarted in 2015 with Jurassic World, which reinforced the money-making power of dinosaurs at the box office. That period ended with Jurassic World Dominion. Dinosaurs are still lucrative at the box office, though, and so the franchise continues with a soft relaunch of a potential new trilogy in the form of Jurassic World Rebirth.
This sequel sets up a world where the planet is becoming an increasingly inhospitable environment for dinosaurs, most of whom now live in a small band around the equator. It is into this world that intrepid mercenary Zora Benentt (Scarlett Johansson) is recruited by a pharma bro Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to lead a team to (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) a here to unknown island that the original Park scientists were working on mutant dinosaurs. With the help of paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who (of course) studied under Dr. Alan Grant, and the expertise of boat captain Duncan Kincaid, Zora and her team are tasked with going to the island and extracting live biomaterial from three of the largest dinosaurs because they hold a cure for heart disease.
They must extract one sample from an aquatic dinosaur, the Mosasaurus, a terrestrial dinosaur, the Titanosaurus, and a flying dinosaur, the Quetzalcoatlus. On the trail of the Mosasaurus, they cross paths with a family sailing the Atlantic, father Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his two daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono). Eventually, everyone who manages to survive the Mosasaurus becomes stranded on the island, fighting for survival with only one shot at escape.
This fourth Jurassic World entry, and seventh in the overall Jurassic franchise, is a world where the thrill of dinosaurs existing alongside humans has peaked and waned, and people have lost interest. Museums like the one Henry works at are closing their dinosaur displays. A dinosaur escaping from the zoo in New York City, causing a traffic jam, is commonplace and shrugged off as a nuisance rather than something to evoke awe and wonder.
It feels like a preemptive meta-narrative, trying to make the case to anyone wavering in the audience that dinosaurs are still cool and interesting and shouldn’t be taken for granted in a theatrical world overpopulated by CGI and where anything can be put on screen now. It’s a cry for relevance and an attempt to stay as the king of the jungle, so to speak.
Scarlett Johansson looks like she is having fun in this movie. Zora is a character who likes to keep things light and breezy, ready to unholster a quip as quickly as a gun. She and Mahershala Ali’s Duncan have a shared history of previous jobs, and their own shared heartbreaks of losing people close to them because of their line of work. This gives them just enough backstory to engender them to the audience. It also gives Duncan added purpose to protect the kids at all costs, given the loss he has experienced.
Jonathan Bailey’s Dr Henry is the eager scientist who is green behind the ears in the field, and Rupert Friend’s Krebs is of the lineage of Paul Reiser’s Burke in Aliens, a corporate snake that won’t let anyone get in the way of the bottom line. Everyone in the crew on the mission to the island is essentially little more than dino fodder, so the script can justify not killing off any of the main characters or the kids (obviously).
Basically, every Jurassic Park/World movie has to feature kids in danger; it’s part of the formula. The youngest is traumatized by her close encounter with the Mosasaurus, but eventually opens up when she takes a baby herbivore as a pet on the island (I was under the impression that it was a triceratops, but Wikipedia says it is an Aquilops, so ok). Some of the dinosaur encounters are thrilling. Even though there is an obligatory scene with a T-Rex, I still caught myself tensing in my chair, even though I ultimately did not believe the family was ever in any real danger, because kids are never going to die in these movies.
Even with the best of the dinosaur encounters, there are still the classic cheats that the franchise has employed. One minute, the dinosaurs can be lumbering, like the classic goat scene when the approaching T-Rex causes ripples in the cup of water. But in the next minute, they move undetected and as nimbly as a mouse.
What is supposed to be the centerpiece dinosaur on this island of experimental genetic testing is what the film has dubbed a “Distortus Rex.” This abomination is supposed to be a T-Rex crossed with other dinosaurs and has six limbs, and looks more like it was designed after a xenomorph than a dinosaur. First off, Distortus Rex, after having a previous genetically mutated dino dubbed Indominus Rex in Fallen Kingdom, and calling the evil corporation in Dominion Biosyn, the writers went to the Avatar “Unobtainium” School for Naming Things. Second, the design of the dinosaur is terrible; as I said, it looked more like a xenomorph, but it made me think more of the awful mutant on in Alien: Resurrection than any of the genuinely terrifying ones. Meanwhile, there are flying raptor mutant hybrids that act like the monster in Kong: Skull Island.
Simply put, while Rebirth tries to ramp up the action at a few points, too much of this movie is inert and dull. And the mutant dinosaurs come off as more laughable than terrifying, which is a real shame, because director Gareth Edwards has proven himself capable in the past of telling a compelling human story in a world of monstrous creatures with his directorial debut Monsters and his 2014 reboot blockbuster, Godzilla. And the moral of the story that corporate greed is bad and something so valuable should be available to everyone is really watered down and not groundbreaking in the least.
The plot tries to make a case that there is still a place for dinosaurs and that they haven’t become uninteresting, but their theory of the case is weak. There are only so many ways that they can contrive a scenario of people going to a Jurassic Park island and getting into trouble. And they need to stop dipping into the “secret island” well. At this rate, the number of secret islands that InGen has is going to rival the number of Jedi that survived Order 66 or the Buzz Lightyears in Toy Story 2 who think they’re the real Buzz Lightyear. I can’t wait to discover the secret lab they had on the moon, and we get raptors in space.
Jurassic Park Rebirth is a soft relaunch of the franchise, a standalone sequel that at least doesn’t bash the audience over the head with countless references to the previous movies. But it just isn’t bringing much new to the table other than the island being the dinosaur version of The Island of Dr. Moreau. Dr. Ian Malcolm would say to the makers of this movie, “Your studio producers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." ScarJo and Mahershala Ali are cashing in and having fun in the process, but at this point, I think I’m ready for the dinosaurs to face a second extinction.
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars