‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’ Review: Gareth Edwards Takes the Dino Franchise Back to B-Movie Basics, For Better or Worse [C]

When the last three movies in a franchise each earned over $1 billion at the box office, it’s no shock to see a regularly scheduled sequel come down the pipe a couple of years later. What is a little disconcerting is the apparent attempt by Jurassic World: Rebirth to hit the hard reset button just three years after the previous entry, Jurassic World: Dominion. It was a full 14 years after Jurassic Park III that the franchise was rebooted with the first Jurassic World, which ended up shocking box office pundits by proving that, commercially, the time away was well spent — audiences were eager to shell out their hard-earned dollars to see some dinosaur rampage projected big and loud. The actual quality of the film notwithstanding, it felt like a successful resurrection of a dormant franchise. Rebirth, by contrast, feels more like a studio desperately trying to course-correct to ensure the generous tap of dino profits keeps flowing.

The sweaty sense of executives trying to artificially regenerate an entity that should have long been extinct (hey, what does that sound like?) is an inevitable burden Rebirth was always going to carry. But beyond the sheer exhaustion of continuing to flog a profoundly dead horse, this direction was probably the most logical way forward. The initial Jurassic World trilogy — largely steered by the baffling artistic decisions of Colin Trevorrow (with directorial reins handed to J.A. Bayona for the middle and most interesting entry, Fallen Kingdom) — was mostly an exercise in empty, brand-building spectacle. It reached a nadir with Dominion, which found itself hopelessly lost in a sea of nonsense plotting, weightless CGI set pieces, and a “hey, recognize these people?” legacy sequel haze.

Rebirth liberates itself from that last point, but its attempt to re-rejuvenate the now-decade-old rejuvenation of a 32-year-old franchise can’t shake the same underlying elements that continue to drag these mega-budget blockbusters toward meaninglessness, no matter the quality of the talent they bring on board. That’s a particularly nasty sting for this entry, as original Jurassic Park and The Lost World screenwriter David Koepp (who’s seen recent success with his Steven Soderbergh collaborations Kimi, Presence, and Black Bag) pens a script put to screen by sci-fi journeyman Gareth Edwards. Edwards has proven his ability to craft large-scale spectacle (2014’s Godzilla) and, even when constrained by franchise guardrails (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) or unable to fully realize his vision (The Creator), he’s generally reliable when it comes to building a vivid sensory experience.

That sense of craft is put to good use here, making this the best Jurassic Park movie since Jurassic Park III, though such faint praise still damns Rebirth. But it’s true that this steers away from the garish and chaotic directions of its immediate predecessors to deliver something that feels more classical in its sci-fi adventure aspirations. In the lead-up to Rebirth, the duo that started it all — Koepp and now-executive producer Steven Spielberg — said they wanted this film to get back to the keen heart of the original, and in some basic sense, those ambitions shine through, despite the film carrying many of the same burdens that every Jurassic Park movie except the first has harbored.

What that really means is a fairly anemic and flimsy script. Koepp’s broad strokes are fun and read like a lightweight pulp novel you might bring to the beach: a crackpot team of people with various agendas — and who all turn out to have the worst decision-making skills imaginable — all head out to a remote dinosaur island near the equator, where the species has been exiled ever since Earth’s climate elsewhere became inhospitable and humanity grew bored of their miraculous existence. Leading the pack is Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a mercenary recruited by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a self-serving Big Pharma executive who wants to synthesize advanced dinosaur blood to cure heart disease, and make a ton of money in the process. Sure!

To do so requires shooting needle darts into living dinos, which means going to dinosaur world, which means recruiting a few extra faces as potential dino chow. That includes boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali, clearly having the most fun of anyone here), nebbish and well-meaning paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and a couple of other expendable bodies to round out the squad. As fate would have it, also on the island is the Delgado family, with father Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) guiding his two daughters and a tagalong boyfriend through the treacherous jungles after their boat capsizes.

The screenplay takes its time getting to the good stuff, moving through patient phases of team assembly, some out-at-sea aquatic dino action, before finally arriving on land for a bunch of more dino action. There’s a certain B-movie charm in how it embraces classic action-adventure tropes, leaning into its role as a jungle-set creature feature. But the in-between moments tend to lag. Among the glut of characters, not one really registers as more than a stock archetype, which makes the quieter beats feel like perfunctory padding. The film ping-pongs between its two groups — the dino hunters and the family — the latter transparently shoehorned in to justify more set pieces and to up the stakes by putting some kids in danger (and to give the young daughter a cute baby dinosaur for audiences to “aww” at).

That’s not so much bad as it is merely clunky, because things pick up considerably once the characters are in real peril. This may still be reasonably hollow spectacle, but I’d hesitate to call it weightless. Edwards brings his signature talent for conveying scale and perspective to bear: puny humans hunted by monstrous beasts, rappelling down cliff faces, a modest boat tossed by a deep-sea leviathan — it all lands with a satisfying sense of size and tension, and there’s always a kick to seeing someone get ruthlessly devoured whole. 

Still, if Rebirth aims to recapture the magic of the original Jurassic Park, it falls short of that film’s sense of awe and wonder — a product of Michael Crichton’s heady source material, compelling characters, and the seamless blending of practical and digital effects. If any in-camera creature effects were used here, they’re plainly imperceptible. This world, just like the other World films, feels more remote and digital than the tactile, lived-in feel of that original park. Admirably, though, cinematographer John Mathieson shot on 35mm anamorphic lenses, lending the film a warm texture that lightly evokes ‘90s sci-fi thrillers.

I have a pet theory that general audiences keep flocking to Jurassic movies because they’re the closest many moviegoers come to watching a horror film (and, of course, little kids love dinosaurs, and there are a lot of little kids). These viewers may not typically seek out the genre, so they’re drawn in by the jumpy creature-feature thrills, comfortably sandwiched between broad, familiar studio beats. Jurassic World: Rebirth will satisfy those base cravings. It’s essentially a $180 million B-movie that just happens to be another entry in a wildly popular franchise. There’s not much to take away from it — except, probably, for Universal during their next earnings report. “The dinosaurs may be done with us, but we aren’t done with them,” a character proclaims at one point. It’s doubtful we ever will be.

Universal Pictures will release Jurassic World: Rebirth only in theaters on July 2.