I’m normally the type to respond to films like Jurassic World: Rebirth with a resigned “what did you expect?”
I can usually shrug my shoulders and say “well at least the dinosaurs were cool.”
I’m really good at thinking “I was nine when the original film came out, so I need to view things through the lens of a nine-year-old.”
What I’m saying is that seven movies deep in a franchise that stopped being objectively good five movies ago, and which is now happy simply being “good enough,” it almost feels selfish to expect anything as transcendent as Jurassic Park out of its sixth sequel. We all know how these things go: the studios milk a concept for all it’s worth, destroying everything good about it, happy to deliver diminishing returns because fuck it, people will show up.
And show up we do, over and over again.
But ya know what? I’m done showing up. Maybe I’m just salty because the world is falling to pieces and I’m never ever going to be able to retire or own a home, or because cruelty and wanton stupidity are proving, in real time, to be a more profitable method of survival than being a half-decent person. Maybe I’m mad because like everything else in this godforsaken country, movies are getting more and more expensive while the experience steadily declines in quality despite assertions that “we come to this place for magic.” Maybe the wide-eyed, precocious youngster who loved dinosaurs has been replaced by a stressed out middle-aged man whose knees hurt.
Whatever the case, I’m done sitting idly by as studios pump out shiny dreck that costs an insane amount of money while the stuff that actually makes movies worth watching (craft, story, character, vision) is ignored despite costing relatively little compared to what it must take to render the image of a glistening T-Rex and have it chase a bunch of pretty people around for two profoundly boring hours of nothing. I’m done clapping my hands together like a trained seal and forking over my hard earned money to consume a product made by a system that simply does. Not. Care.
Now to be fair, Jurassic World: Rebirth is far from the worst movie I’ve seen in recent memory (that distinction still goes to Wicked, another cynical cash grab that coasts on “good enough”), but it’s certainly the worst Jurassic Park movie, and that’s saying something. This was supposed to be a “return to form” of sorts, moving away from the self-seriousness of the previous World entries, as well as from the “all your favorites are back” nature of Dominion (a film that squandered the exciting promise of the prior entry’s batshit ending in a near-legendary bag fumble), yet there’s nothing about this turgid, ugly flick that conjures even an ounce of what made Spielberg’s game-changing Frankenstein tale such a blockbuster — not even the incessantly busy score that leans on John Williams’ iconic melody like John Hammond on his amber-topped cane.
Rebirth takes place five years after the previous entry, and seventeen years after a disaster at yet another of InGen’s breeding facilities in which a scientist, who is likely not himself when he’s hungry, drops a Snickers wrapper and inadvertently frees a super mutant hybrid dino (essentially the Rancor from Return of the Jedi, but with lil T-Rex arms), thus shutting down the facility and setting it up as an eventual setting for the film’s third act.
Meanwhile, here in the present day, a company wants to make new heart medicine which must be sourced from the hearts of three living dinosaurs: one land dino, one fish dino, and one flying dino. Why? Because science! Said company has hired a mercenary or something (Scarlett Johansson in a career worst performance) to obtain the samples, as well as a scientist (Jonathan Bailey) who needs to be there to identify the dinosaurs, and who is sad that no one likes dinosaurs anymore (meta much??). You see, our climate is not hospitable to the once-extinct animals, so the bulk of them live around the equator in regions that humans are no longer permitted to visit. A few others join the team (Ed Skrein, Mahershala Ali, and a couple of people you don’t recognize and who exist just to be eaten by dinosaurs since dinosaurs don’t eat leading actors), and before long our heroes and criminals are off on an adventure. Oh, and at some point they meet up with a father, his two daughters, and his older daughter’s boyfriend — all of whom were stranded at sea after a fish-dino attack. You don’t care. I don’t care. The screenwriters don’t care.
The dino action itself is middling. Action beats are well-designed but blandly executed, and none carry any sort of weight character-wise or in the realm of physics. A dino attack here, a forced and failed moment of “wonder” there, and hey, there’s that iconic melody yet again! It shouldn’t be this easy to make a boring “dinosaurs attack” movie, but here we are. No surprises, no tension, no characters worth caring about, and worst of all, there’s no actual fun science to be had. A staple of Michael Crichton’s work is that you always emerge from it with a better understanding of some sort of heady concept. Heck, an entire generation of people can only conceptualize DNA because of Jurassic Park. Even the previous World movies make some weak attempts at this, but here, nope. The dinosaurs are all hybrids too, so it’s not like you can even learn about dinosaurs. But boy oh boy do we have some action figures to sell you!
The real lesson here is that if we really want to go “back to basics” we should get out of the Jurassic brand entirely and just deliver a killer dinosaur movie with an R rating and some balls. And animatronics. Remember how much honest-to-god filmmaking had to be employed to hide the seams of the original film’s stellar puppetry??? I miss that, and now that we can just show a full dinosaur in all its “glory” there’s a dearth of movie magic. Just money being thrown at a computer until everything looks good enough. And that’s exactly how these dinos look: good enough. The effects in Rebirth are the best of the World portion of the franchise, and yet they remain wildly subpar to the effects in Jurassic Park, which came out over thirty years ago.
All said, I guess it is thematically appropriate that Spielberg made a masterpiece, inadvertently creating a monster that grew out of his control and won’t stop until it destroys itself and everything around it.
So I’m done. No more, please. Stop trying to sell me McDonald’s at gourmet prices. Stop dangling keys in front of me and hoping I get distracted by how shiny they are. Write a damn movie, direct the heck out of it, and put a little thought into it. Until then, I don’t care. Why should I? The people making these things stopped caring long ago.
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Written by David Koepp, based on characters created by Michael Crichton
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend
Rated PG-13, 134 minutes
