‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ is mostly dumb, sometimes fun
Some cool dino setpieces can’t save a sinking ship
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The first time I saw Jurassic Park, I was about seven years old and my older cousin fast-forwarded through all the dialogue scenes to get to the dinosaur attacks quicker. And while that’s not how I’d recommend first seeing Steven Spielberg’s masterfully paced dino epic, it might not be a bad way to experience Jurassic World Rebirth—Universal’s latest attempt to wring some more juice from its ever-popular (or at least profitable) dinosaur franchise.
To its credit, Rebirth features some of the best dinosaur setpieces the rebooted World series has ever delivered. Unfortunately, it also has some of the most annoying characters and plotting in any Jurassic installment to date. That makes it quite a tricky film to recommend. It’s less overtly toxic than the Jurassic World trilogy that starred Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard as blockbuster cinema’s most gender regressive duo. But it’s also less, well, anything—especially when it comes to its supremely boring new set of characters. It turns out Scarlett Johansson cracking jokes and Jonathan Bailey wearing wire-framed glasses can only get you so far.
The good here comes from director Gareth Edwards, who’s proven to be a real master of scope and scale in movies like 2014’s Godzilla and (at least some of) Rogue One. Rebirth opens with an almost Final Destination-style prologue where one misplaced candy bar wrapper causes a horrifying chain reaction in a dinosaur breeding lab. And there are similarly memorable sequences featuring some territorial Pterodactyl, a napping T-Rex, and a giant sea-dwelling behemoth (Rebirth has a lot of fun with water).
The slow-to-be-introduced hook of the film is that this is the first time we’re truly seeing dinosaurs running wild in their natural habitat, rather than stomping around human-created environments. Though I’d totally forgotten that 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion established a status quo where dinosaurs were living among humans everywhere from Sierra Nevada to Malta, Rebirth tweaks that idea a bit anyway. It turns out dinosaurs can’t actually thrive in the colder extremes of the globe and so the remaining wild ones have all migrated to the equator. Don’t worry, though—in case you didn’t catch that factoid the first time around, the movie repeats it three times in its first 30 minutes. (Dinosaurs like to be where it’s warm seems like it would be obvious to anyone who passed fourth grade science, but okay!)
Of dumb plot points to parse after you’ve seen the film, however, that one barely even makes the top five. The other hook of the movie is that an evil pharmaceutical company has cracked the code on health care. You see, big dinosaurs apparently had really long lifespans because their hearts were so strong. So, surely, if you were to take a sample of their blood you could CURE HUMAN HEART DISEASE FOREVER, right? And, naturally, you’d need to get blood samples from one water dinosaur, one land dinosaur, and one air dinosaur—you know, for Pokémon science. And, of course, the evil pharmaceutical big shot (Rupert Friend) would personally take this life-or-death voyage into equatorial dinosaur territory to ensure the samples are collected. Because if there’s one thing pharmaceutical reps love more than going on The Bachelor, it’s heading straight into dino danger.
Also on hand are mercenaries/old friends Zora Bennett (Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who promise they’ve got safety on lock for anyone who joins this mission—a fact the movie seems to deliver earnestly. They’re presented as cool, swaggy badasses and yet their much-hyped protection includes a small boat that’s quickly capsized by some swimming Spinosaurus and a couple of handguns they basically never use. Though I hate to praise anything about the last Jurassic World trilogy, at least Pratt’s character seems like he had some basic situational awareness about dinosaur safety. Zora, meanwhile, doesn’t even have a backup plan for if she misses her first attempt at nabbing some impossible-to-grab blood from a briefly surfacing sea monster.
The only person who really makes sense to join this mission is Bailey’s Dr. Henry Loomis—a nerdy paleontologist who can tell the big dinosaurs apart and has always secretly longed to see them running around their natural habitat. Unfortunately, his burgeoning friendship with Zora must share the screen with an interminable subplot involving a single dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Bella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono), who reluctantly join the mission when their sailboat capsizes.
The Delgados are so detached from everything else, I was half wondering if they were added in reshoots—especially when they wind up getting separated from the mercenaries as soon as everyone hits land. It feels like the smart move would’ve been to mix up the two crews, to add more stakes and character dynamics to both halves of this bifurcated story. But for some reason the movie doesn’t do that, even though Ali’s character is literally grieving the loss of a child and would have fit right into a paternal role. Instead, the only real emotional arc the Delgados get is the dad and boyfriend bonding over how well they protect the girls, which feels like quite an ignoble use of the first pair of Jurassic sisters.
But wait, there’s more! In case that isn’t enough premise for one movie, all the characters eventually wind up on a secret island base that’s home to all the weird mutated creatures that were hatched in InGen’s various attempts to create hybrid dinosaurs for the Jurassic Parks. (Think a Tyrannosaurus with six arms or a flying Velociraptor.) Though Dr. Henry earlier proclaimed it would be a sin to kill a dinosaur, he’s immediately aghast that these failed dino mash-ups weren’t destroyed at birth. (Pick a lane, dude.) And the final act of the movie pivots away from the “dinosaurs in nature” concept to something that feels more like a full-on monster movie in and around an abandoned gas station, of all places.
It's in that gas station that it really becomes clear just how much this movie is trying to pay homage to the iconic 1993 original—including a shot-for-shot recreation of several moments from the famed raptor kitchen scene. Universal even got original Jurassic Park co-screenwriter David Koepp back to pen the script. Yet while Koepp and the team succeed at making this film a little less unwieldy than Dominion (a low bar), they’ve lost sight of what makes the first movie so special. Instead of likable, competent characters surviving tense dinosaur attacks, we’ve got a frustrating, incompetent ensemble who just feel like they deserve to get eaten.
Going into Rebirth, I honestly wouldn’t have said the human characters are all that important to the success of a Jurassic movie—a nice bonus but not strictly necessary. But this film really made me question that assertion. As awe-inducing as it is to watch a T-Rex stalk a raft down a river or a herd of Titanosaurus migrate through a valley, those exhilarating moments lose their luster when the scenes between them are actively frustrating to watch. While Johansson and Bailey are clearly having fun subverting their big screen personas (she’s sunny instead of wry; he’s bumbling instead of dashing), that’s just not enough to carry a story that can’t even find a tenuous emotional center for its way-too-large ensemble.
The dinosaur setpieces are cool enough that Jurassic fans should probably still check out Rebirth at some point. There’s enough wonder here that the franchise doesn’t feel totally dead in the dino-infested water. Just maybe do it when you can fast-forward right to the dinosaur scenes—or, better yet, Mystery Science Theater your way through the dialogue ones.
Grade: C
Jurassic World Rebirth is in theaters now.