Scarlett Johansson describes the challenges of shooting 'Jurassic World Rebirth'
'It was a childhood dream of mine to be in this movie,' the actor told Craig Melvin during a recent segment on "TODAY." 'I've been trying to get in the 'Jurassic' universe for three decades.'
In the latest installment of the series, ' Jurassic World Rebirth,' Johansson plays Zora Bennett, a mercenary leading a team of operatives on a secret mission to track down dinosaur DNA. The hitch? It's on a forbidden island in the middle of the ocean and the inhabitants are, well, positively prehistoric.
'I saw the movie 'Jurassic Park' when I was 10 years old in the theater and it was so impactful,' Johansson said. 'Like the entire audience, I was completely transfixed, mesmerized, carried away, terrified, all of that stuff, and it's part of the formative part of my childhood.'
How did she finally land the gig?
'It turns out that if you harass Frank Marshall enough, you could get a job,' she joked, referring to one of the film's producers.
Clocking in at two hours and 14 minutes, 'Jurassic World Rebirth' is an action-packed, dino-filled romp that also stars Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Mahershala Ali, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ed Skrein, David Iacono and Luna Blaise as a mismatched crew of castaways fighting for survival on the tropical island.
To ensure the movie's authenticity, Johansson says, the cast and crew filmed at various exotic locations around the world, including Malta and Thailand.
'The environment was authentic and so it felt that we were in the middle of the jungle because we were in the middle of the jungle,' she tells TODAY.com in an interview.
According to the 'Avengers' actor, working in the jungle didn't come without its fair share of perils, including uninvited guests on the set.
'You'd be making coffee at the coffee table and then two minutes later (someone would say), 'You know what they just found at the coffee table? They just got a scorpion.' And you're like, 'What!?' Like, I was just making myself a coffee right there,' says Johansson. 'We had a venomous pit crew. Isn't that crazy?'
Filming ' Jurassic World Rebirth ' also required Johansson to scale a steep rock wall. Granted, it was built on a set, but according to Johansson, it was still 'pretty high up.'
Even so, Johansson, 40, says she wasn't daunted given the rigging crew had her back (literally) and that she'd been trained on a rock-climbing wall ahead of shooting the scenes.
'The heights is not, like, my greatest phobia,' she tells TODAY.com. 'My greatest phobia is cockroaches, and there were plenty of those, too — but not on the abseiling wall.'
Instead, Johansson likely encountered them while shooting in Thailand's rainforests.
'Thailand had some pretty serious creature critters,' she says.
It begs the question: Were there days during the making of 'Jurassic World Rebirth' when she wished she was on a traditional film set instead of the remote reaches of the world?
'Yes, all of the days. Every one of them,' she joked while talking with Craig on "TODAY."
'I'm from New York. I've got to say I'm a city girl. ... It is amazing to shoot in the majestic settings that we were in,' she explained. But it didn't come without the obvious drawbacks.
'We did shoot during the monsoon season,' Johansson added. 'I would say not as ideal as in the not-monsoon season. I watched Mahershala Ali melt like a human candle.'
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New Statesman
2 hours ago
- New Statesman
Jurassic Park Rebirth is phoney and illogical
Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad The seventh film in the Jurassic Park franchise may be a boring and dispiriting slog, but it has a surprisingly coherent premise. It's been 32 years since dinosaurs were brought back from extinction, and public interest in them has waned. Kids aren't visiting dinosaur exhibits any more, palaeontologists are out of work, and the few dinos that remain are dying of diseases in a climate that doesn't suit them. The savvy pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), however, believes that dinosaurs could still be put to use. He recruits Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a gun for hire who does rough jobs for whoever pays well, to venture to an island near the equator, where a number of remaining dinosaurs have been dumped. Zora's job – with the help of softboy palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) – is to find the three biggest dinosaurs on the island and get a sample of their blood while they're still alive. The hope is that the creatures' DNA will unlock a cure for heart disease. Why these three dinosaur species in particular? They have huge hearts and live for a long time; it's called science. Soon enough, the journey to the island hits a snag when the expedition leader, Duncan Kincaid, (Mahershala Ali) intercepts a mayday signal from a sailing boat that is sinking nearby. As luck would have it, the culprit is one of the very dinosaurs the team is seeking, a vast sea-dwelling leviathan with dreadful teeth and a lust for human flesh. It would be eccentric to watch Jurassic World Rebirth expecting originality; it's almost funny how predictable the beats of the story are. Minor characters are given just enough personality to register – then are fed, with grim inevitability, to the dinosaurs that wait behind every tree. As I watched these poor up-and-coming actors being gobbled and mauled, I found myself fantasising about another film, the dark side of this one's moon, in which the assembled stars – Johansson, Ali, Friend and Bailey – are unceremoniously stomped on, and the rest of the story is given over to the NPCs. The screenplay was written by David Koepp, who co-wrote the 1993 Jurassic Park adaptation with Michael Crichton, and at points, the characters act in ways they did in the original. When our righteous (and helpfully hot) palaeontologist sees a dinosaur in the wild for the first time, for instance, he cries: 'Ahhhh! It's beautiful!' Later, the gang encounters a lovely herd of vegetarian dinos, and the pace of the film slows as the camera takes in their curved necks, their graceful tails, the loving way they tend to one another. The trouble is, the 1990s energy Rebirth is trying to channel feels phoney. Bailey does a perfectly good job of pretending to be struck with awe by the sight of the dinosaurs, but he's such a thinly drawn character you don't care that he's having an epiphany. If what you want is a 1990s blockbuster with 1990s energy, you'd be better off watching a 1990s blockbuster. The film also has a size issue. Bennett and co may be looking for the biggest dinosaurs on the planet, but even so they are ridiculously, impossibly big. The largest animal ever to have lived is the blue whale – larger even than a megalodon, the prehistoric shark. Yet these dinosaurs are thundering Godzillas that would make a blue whale look petite. In the logic of the franchise, of course, this makes sense. To win back an audience, every film must deliver a bigger, badder foe. Seven films in, the dinosaur inflation has reached such a scale that the creatures feel silly and fantastical, not extinct animals brought back to life. And when the main characters escape them again and again, their good fortune begins to ring hollow: come on, you think, they'd have been killed in five minutes flat. Hardcore Jurassic Park fans may yet get something out of this film. It does tick some of the essential boxes: dinosaurs, dread, Jeeps. There are jokes that drew laughs from the audience (though many others were punished with silence). Friend has been underused by Hollywood for years, so it's nice to find him here. Ali brings his usual laid-back warmth; Johansson makes an effort. But really, this is a disposable film that makes you feel stupider and sadder the longer it goes on; not the worst film ever made, but one of the more demoralising ones. Jurassic World Rebirth is in cinemas now [See also: 28 Years of Zombie Britain] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
Times
4 hours ago
- Times
Jurassic World: Rebirth review — the best since Spielberg's original
What did Alfred Hitchcock famously say? 'To make a great film you need three things: the script, the script and the script'? This latest, and seventh, dino franchise entry may not be a 'great' film in Hitchcock's Vertigo, Rear Window, Psycho medium-defining sense of the word, but it's nonetheless the best instalment since the first Jurassic Park. And that's because of the script. The narrative reins have been restored to David Koepp, writer of Carlito's Way and Panic Room, who left the franchise after the second film, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, just when it was beginning to curdle. He returns here in some style, performing a miracle rescue job on a series that had dissolved into repetition due to its inability to answer one fundamental question: how do you make dinosaurs interesting in a dramatic environment in which they are unexceptional? The answer had previously been to make them bigger, more ferocious and more abundant. The most recent, and execrable, Jurassic World Dominion, concluded with humankind and dinosaurs sharing the planet. But Koepp cleverly flips that script and almost fully wipes them out again.
The Guardian
5 hours ago
- The Guardian
Jurassic World Rebirth review – Scarlett Johansson runs show as near-extinct franchise roars back to life
What a comeback. The Jurassic World film series had looked to be pretty much extinct after some increasingly dire dollops of franchise content: Fallen Kingdom in 2018 and Dominion in 2022. But now, against all odds, these dinosaurs have had a brand refresh: a brighter, breezier, funnier, incomparably better acted and better written film, with unashamed nods to the summer smashes of yesteryear, that makes sense of the dino-spectacle moments that earn their place. Screenwriter David Koepp and director Gareth Edwards have been drafted in to take us back to basics with a new story, all but retconning the drama with a '17 years previously' flashback at the start that entirely (and thankfully) ignores the tiresome convoluted dullness of what has recently happened. Then we're in the present day, when the existence of dinosaurs in the wild is accepted but they've all pretty much died out – except in and around the lush fictional Île Saint Hubert in the Caribbean. A creepy corporation (is there any other kind?) has discovered that dinosaur blood has the makings of a profitable medicine, so odious big pharma smoothie Martin Krebs, played by Rupert Friend, assembles a crack special forces team to take a blood sample from each of three types of dinosaur – land, sea and air. Zora Bennett, played by Scarlett Johansson, is the ex-military type running the show; bespectacled palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) provides the scientific expertise; and Mahershala Ali brings megawatt charm to the role of Duncan Kincaid, the easy-going boat captain. They and the rest of the crew chance across a family at sea. The dad, Reuben Delgado, is played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and this group have a kind of separate, parallel adventure, providing the conventional family-bond narrative beats. We get all the traditional moments, including some classic Jurassic slow turns: a cast member will be doing something, hear a dinosaur behind (which we can see) and then, aghast, will execute a slow swivel, after which we cut to a hilarious closeup on their suitably gobsmacked expression. We also get a classic Jurassic security guy (played by Ed Skrein), like a Star Trek redshirt, whose job is arrogantly shooting at dinosaurs and who meets an obvious comeuppance. There is some terrific romcom chemistry between Johansson and Bailey. Johansson's Zora seems to have a tendresse for this shy intellectual – a bit like the crush her character Natasha Romanoff had on Mark Ruffalo's cerebral Dr Bruce Banner in Avengers: Age of Ultron. It's a very different performance from the one Bailey gave in Wicked, but just as in that film, he comes close to pinching this one with his adorable high-mindedness. His Dr Loomis wants to die in a shallow sea and get covered by silt, apparently, because it's better for creating fossils. And he has an interesting line about how intelligence as a factor in survival is overrated; the dumb dinosaurs were around for 165m years and smart humans so far only 300,000. This new Jurassic adventure isn't doing anything so very different from the earlier successful models, perhaps, and I could have done without its outrageous brand synergy product placement for certain brands of chocolate bar. But it feels relaxed and sure-footed in its Spielberg pastiche, its big dino-jeopardy moments and its deployment of thrills and laughs. Maybe the series can't and shouldn't go on for ever: we need new and original ideas. This one would be great to go out on. Jurassic World Rebirth is out on 2 July in the US and UK, and on 3 July in Australia
