Review: ‘Jurassic World Rebirth' is tense but a downer, with dinosaur fatigue part of the story
The 1993 Steven Spielberg film changed that, building on early '90s breakthroughs in digital effects found in 'Terminator 2' and others. Spielberg oversaw several storyline changes as well, in his commercially canny pursuit of roaring terror and solemn wonder in more evenly alternating currents.
The franchise has gone back and forth between those currents ever since. We've had interesting, controversial sequels (J.A. Bayona's 'Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,' especially when it turned into a gothic haunted house suspense affair) and billion-dollar mediocrities ('Jurassic World: Dominion'). So what's the deal with 'Jurassic World Rebirth,' beyond its blatant misspelling of the word in its title that clearly should be 'Reboot'?
Mixed, let's say, and that means mixed often within the same scene. More broadly, it's mixed in the early critical reaction, considered a widely well-regarded success in the British press but mostly bleh here in these United States.
'Jurassic World Rebirth' is a genuinely peculiar seesaw, with 'Godzilla' and 'Rogue One' director Gareth Edwards managing some occasionally striking jolts amid a lot of tonal uncertainty. Rarely an exuberant spirit as a filmmaker, Edwards here directs a rather mournful script by veteran pro David Koepp, the primary adapting writer on the '93 franchise-starter.
Coming off 'KIMI' and 'Black Bag' with director Steven Soderbergh, Koepp's return to dinosaurs builds its premise on what might be termed the inevitability of franchise fatigue, coded here as dinosaur fatigue in the popular imagination. The world, as this movie depicts it, has plainly had it with the human/dinosaur integration experiment. Dinosaurs are no longer trending. Fleetingly, one poor specimen glimpsed early in 'Jurassic World Rebirth,' under the Brooklyn Bridge, lives with the indignity of graffiti on his aging hide.
'Nobody cares about these animals anymore,' we hear at one point, evoking what may have been the thought balloon floating above Koepp's head as he wrote this seventh 'Jurassic' go-around.
Koepp's script imagines a Big Pharma weasel (Rupert Friend, inspired by Paul Reiser's 'Aliens' antagonist every step of the way) hiring globe-trotting mercenaries (Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali), an idealistic museum paleontologist (Jonathan Bailey) and a bloodthirsty hunk ('Game of Thrones' alum Ed Skrein), among others, to harvest precious DNA samples from three different bioengineered dinosaur species — land, air and water dwellers. The illegal but potentially lucrative gig takes them by boat to the forbidden (fictional) Caribbean island of Ile Saint-Hubert, not far from French Guiana. Thailand provided most of the movie's lush exterior locations.
En route, the passengers on the Ali character's boat encounter two problems: the mighty and mighty hungry water dweller known as Mosasaurus, followed by a meteorological phenomenon known as the B Plot. Much of 'Jurassic World Rebirth' follows the travails of a sailing family's oceangoing excursion, interrupted by a Mosasaurus attack. Adrift but alive, dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), daughter (Luna Blaise), daughter's unpromising boyfriend (David Iacono) and daughter's younger sister (Audrina Miranda) are rescued by the mercenaries' expedition. Then they're separated on the island from their rescuers. Worst vacation ever!
The DNA is to be used for life-saving heart disease cures, to the benefit of millions, and with trillions in profits. It's a time-tested setup promising reasonably high stakes. Yet the early dialogue sequences are determinedly casual and easygoing to the point of 'yeah whatever.' Johansson and Ali are both formidable wellsprings of charisma but their roles stick to basics.
Most everyone on screen has either suffered or is in the process of suffering, or both. Ali and Johansson's characters carry deep-seeded emotional wounds from the loss of loved ones. The anguish endured by the rescued family, especially by Miranda's traumatized preteen character, render large swaths of 'Jurassic Park Rebirth' more grueling than exciting.
Compared to 165 million years for the small-brain dinosaurs, humans will be lucky to last a million years on this climate-changed, nuke-crazy planet, the Bailey character warns at one point. The movie feels more than a little down in the mouth, even with its string of cliffhangers, some visually impressive, tied together with some ill-fitting comic relief. The moments of awe, involving the pleasant, plant-eating dinosaurs, provide callbacks to previous movies (cue the John Williams 'Jurassic Park' theme for another reprise). But the conspicuous newcomer, a bio-engineered mutant misfire called Distortus rex, pushes things into a different breed of monster movie.
And yet: There are flashes and occasional whole sequences when Edwards' directorial eye snaps into focus, as in the brutal but superquick demise of one shipmate, seconds after making it to safety on shore, only to learn that safety is relative. The strategic conceals and reveals of the latest predators recall the best of the director's 'Godzilla,' unfashionably sparing in the visual exploitation of its antihero. But the first-rate digital creature designs must contend with an air of weariness.
Still, I'd rank 'Rebirth' ahead of two or three previous chapters in a franchise whose sole consistency lies in a simple question: How have humans survived this long, even?
'Jurassic World Rebirth' — 2.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language, and a drug reference)
Running time: 2:13
How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 2
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‘Jurassic World Rebirth' Review: Scarlett Johansson In Spielbergian Reboot That Is Part ‘Jaws', ‘Skull Island' & ‘Indiana Jones' Mixed With The Pure DNA Of 1993 Original
I am not quite sure why the latest spinoff of Steven Spielberg's enormously popular Jurassic franchise is using the Jurassic World moniker of the past trilogy rather than the Jurassic Park handle of the first trilog. Jurassic World Rebirth looks and feels somewhat retro, like it could have been a direct sequel to one of the earlier films that Spielberg himself directed, rather than simply executive produced, as is the case again with this one. But even with that EP title, make no mistake, Spielberg's fingerprints are all over it. He and his Amblin team including director Gareth Edwards reunited with screenwriter David Koepp, who wrote the first two Jurassic World films, have concocted another winner with all the elements that made this such a blockbuster series in movies and Universal theme parks. Proof of that is just to look at the box office of the past three entries, ending with 2022's Jurassic World Dominion, each one a billion-dollar-plus grosser. 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It is completely verboten and forbidden to any human being. This particular jungle setting last was used as an initial research and development location, headquarters still intact, for the first iteration of these cloned dinos. Now man's very greed is going to interrupt the animals' peaceful existence yet again as Big Pharma has discovered that many of the ancient creatures regularly lived to over 100 due to strong hearts. With the idea that a massive drug company could not only revolutionize modern medical science for the world's leading killer, heart disease, but also stand to make billions of dollars, an aggressive executive for one of them, Martin Krebs (a slippery Rupert Friend), enlists the services of a team led by extraction covert operations expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson, back in action) to obtain the DNA of some of the worst of the worst of these dinos. Notably they include the avian Quetzalcoatlus, aquatic Mosasaurus, and terresstrial Titanosaurus. Sure, why not? 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