The seventh film in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World series, Jurassic World Rebirth is definitely a film with dinosaurs in it. The original 1993 Jurassic Park was a revolution in cinema and its depiction of dinosaurs. It was also a self-contained story with a strong moral arc. The first two sequels were reasonable horror films in their own right, but obviously just money-grabs. When the series was revived with 2015’s Jurassic World, it took a slightly meta direction, with the dinosaurs clearly representing the series as a whole: Resurrecting an ancient theme-park attraction with some genetic tinkering to pull back the crowds. With that level of postmodernism, the two sequels that followed could not be and were not good. With Gareth Edwards at the helm, can Jurassic World Rebirth do any better?
Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is a mercenary who’s contracted by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to secure some blood from dinosaurs on a forbidden island where dinosaurs are holding out against the changing climate. She teams up with Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a palaeontologist, and mercenary Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and head towards the off-limits Ile Saint-Hubert. Meanwhile, Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his daughters are on a summer yacht trip when they are attacked by a gigantic mosasaurus.
If you’d never seen one of these films, Rebirth might be quite an impressive action adventure spectacle, but in the context of the series it’s merely okay. We can’t really be impressed by sights unseen anymore, so everything relies on writing. There’s really nothing new here, but it’s more competent than the last few films. The cast is good, if not great, and the various set pieces are decent. There is a pervasive feeling of fan-service throughout, with lots of shots being lifted directly from prior installments in the series. Like Alien: Romulus, much of the structure and look of the film feels decidedly like a game, with a series of fetch quests, scenery that makes you follow clues toward a destination, and handy items like flares and guns being just where you need them. There is also a repetitive quality to the dinosaur scares: We see a character facing the screen and they are unaware of a very large animal out of focus behind them. There are times when this obliviousness beggars belief, like when a character falls over, looks up and is surprised by a crashed helicopter that he would have seen from a mile away. You generally know exactly who’s getting eaten as the character is introduced (with one clever exception). It’s your basic Jurassic Park sequel.
Where the first Jurassic World made messing with the DNA of a dead beast an allegory for its own role in the series, Jurassic World Rebirth hopes you won’t notice just how much DNA it’s stolen from other films and video games. You won’t hate it, there’s nothing terribly wrong with it, but there’s nothing you’ll remember a few days after seeing it.
