Movie review: 'Jurassic World Rebirth' has few moments of fun
LOS ANGELES, June 30 (UPI) -- Jurassic World Rebirth, in theaters Wednesday, has some fun moments but they are never in service of anything significant. The premise is so overcomplicated that even "dinosaurs eating people" becomes mundane.
Set several years after 2022's Jurassic World Dominion, on-screen text informs viewers that since dinosaurs escaped captivity, modern climate and diseases largely killed them again. The survivors migrated to tropical climates near the Equator, and travel to those regions has been prohibited.
This leads to a fun image of an ailing brontosaurus causing traffic in New York, to which New Yorkers are more upset about the traffic than the dinosaur. The angle of the public losing interest in dinosaurs becomes a major thematic problem of the film.
Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) hires special ops freelancer Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) to lead his secret, illegal expedition to obtain samples of the largest dinosaur hearts. Krebs' pharmaceutical company hopes to use those samples to develop medication for coronary diseases.
They recruit paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to accompany them on the expedition, and hire Duncan Kinkaid (Mahershala Ali) to captain their covert boat.
"Running from dinosaurs" is a pretty innate story driver, so the more these films complicate putting people in that scenario, the more tenuous it gets. Medical research is spurious for two reasons.
Even if one believes Krebs is developing heart medicine for the greater good, a movie is not going to solve heart disease. If they succeed in the film, we still don't have dinosaur hearts to harvest in real life. Deep Blue Sea used Alzheimer's research as its premise, but at least sharks exist today.
Secondly, Jurassic audiences have already bought into extracting DNA from fossilized mosquitos to create dinosaurs. Rebirth is asking them to believe that those dinosaurs can also cure human diseases? Now they're just making stuff up.
The notion that dinosaurs have become a mundane nuisance is also at odds with the conceit of making a blockbuster spectacle about dinosaurs. The in-film public has lost interest in dinosaurs, and yet they still made a seventh movie?
Of course, in real life, the public never lost interest in dinosaurs, so it is a meta commentary on a phenomenon that doesn't exist. In Jurassic World Dominion, they finally made a movie where the dinosaurs got loose in the wild, and fans should be disappointed they're already walking it back.
The team encounters mutant hybrid dinosaurs that In-Gen was breeding to spruce up their theme parks. The idea that people got tired of seeing the existing dinosaurs suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the popularity of this franchise.
Nobody ever got tired of seeing Tyrannosaurus Rexes and raptors. They just want to see them again, and see them as well done as Steven Spielberg did them.
Stop making up fake dinosaurs. The T-Rex still gets the best sequence in Rebirth.
When Rebirth attempts to serve up a sequence of majesty akin to the reveal in Spielberg's first movie, it's only a response to an artificial apathy towards dinosaurs. The mercenaries marvel at dinosaurs in their natural habitat, when the rest of the film should focus on a more organic dinosaur tale.
Rebirth adds even more characters when Duncan responds to the distress call of Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), whose sailboat was capsized by a Mosasaurus in the ocean. Reuben's daughters Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise) are aboard too, with Teresa's stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono).
The script by David Koepp, who adapted the two Michael Crichton books for the first two Jurassic Park movies, can't even commit to the professionals on a mission. It has to throw in a regular family in peril and have them dragged along on the dinosaur mission.
In Koepp's defense, by movie seven he's neither adapting a book nor crafting an original tale. He's stuck in a no man's land of corporate mandates and stringing together set pieces into some logical sense. It's a living.
The cast appears to be having fun, as if reconciled to the fact that these are the roles available in Hollywood, so they might as well make the most of it. Zora has a way of explaining to men that they are unqualified for a task while letting it be their idea to let her handle the tough jobs.
Cursory backstory is given about Zora losing a friend on a previous mission, and Duncan having a family tragedy that broke up his marriage.
Director Gareth Edwards may be having the most fun using playful tricks to show the dinosaur action, given that the payoffs to those scenes are created in post-production with visual effects.
Dinosaurs approaching behind a character's back can be a misdirect, and a Quetzalcoatlus may fly into frame showing a character's fate in its beak. Edwards even pulls off a dinosaur version of Michael Myers disappearing from view in Halloween.
None of these are as effective as the simplicity of seeing glasses of water tremble with dinosaur steps in the original Jurassic Park. Some are blatantly telegraphed when a dinosaur wanders behind a large foreground object.
But at least visually, Edwards is bringing a new approach to the franchise, even though it takes a convoluted route to get there.
One sequence blatantly forgets its own rules once the story is ready to move on. Zora and Henry go to the trouble of rappelling down an entire cliffside, but once they reach the bottom, stairs of an ancient temple appear so the rest of the group can rejoin them.
This shows the rappelling sequence was conceived with no idea how they'd get back up, or the others down. They just filmed the sequence and then decided all the characters had to be together again.
Jurassic World Rebirth is not the worst Jurassic movie. That would be Dominion.
Still, saving this franchise will require someone with clout and daring enough to remember they're still making these movies because people want to see dinosaurs. Just trust the dinosaurs.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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