Jurassic World: Rebirth
Reviewed by Jeremy Elwood
In 1993, Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park redefined what CGI could do, and made it perfectly acceptable for adults to have a favourite dinosaur again. It’s almost impossible to explain to a post-Avatar generation just how awe-inspiring the first dinosaur reveal was to cinema-goers at the time, who stared in disbelief alongside Sam Neill’s Dr Alan Grant at what we were witnessing. The original may not have held up as a true classic the way Spielberg’s other monster movie, Jaws, has, but it earned its place in cinema history, and a series of sequels.
Jurassic World, Rebirth is the seventh, and while it’s both a reboot and a clear improvement after 2022’s tedious …Dominion, it’s far from groundbreaking.
Set in “real-time” within the series timeline, it’s been 32 years since Dinosaurs came back to life as a theme park attraction, and their 15 minutes of fame is nearly up. The world at large seems to have finally figured out that dinosaurs co-habiting with humankind is a terrible idea, so their dwindling numbers are allowed to roam free in a no-go zone around the Equator.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Jurassic movie if there wasn’t some kind of scientific meddling involved, and this time it comes from Big Pharma, in the form of Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) who has a plan to use dino-DNA in designer drugs. He enlists a team led by mercenary Zora Bennet (Scarlett Johansson), all-around adventurer Duncan Kincaid (Marshala Ali) and civilian Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), ostensibly a palaeontologist but, as usual in adventure cinema, one of those well-rounded academics who turns out to be equally adept in biology, engineering and mountaineering.
The plan is to extract three samples from three distinctly different dinosaurs who rule over the sea, land and air. It’s a promising set up that doesn’t survive the journey.
With dinosaurs and science-gone-rogue duly accounted for, that just leaves the third franchise staple of “children in peril” to go. This literally sails in, in the form of the Delgado family. For some absolutely inexplicable reason, Reuben Delgado (TV’s Lincoln Lawyer, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his two daughters, and the eldest’s boyfriend are making a trans-Atlantic crossing straight through the danger zone, and into the path of our prehistoric friends.
From that moment on, the movie becomes one elongated chase scene, with occasional pauses to admire the fauna. What made the first Jurassic Park stand out from other creature features, apart from the cutting-edge effects and the actual basis in science that came from Micheal Crighton’s novel, was the way each new creature had its own distinct behaviour, and therefore its own way of ramping up the peril. At this stage, the only way each sequel can up the ante is by introducing a bigger, badder version of something that we’ve seen before. This time it’s the “D-Rex”, a genetically modified version of you-know-who who appears in a prequel scene to begin the movie that again wastes it’s Alien influenced promise. And therein lies the first problem; you could swap these dinosaurs out for any other monster, and the film wouldn’t suffer. Aliens, sharks, lions, killer tomatoes – if it’s relentless, and hungry, it would work equally well here.
A much more surprising problem is the unevenness of the visual effects. (It’s worth noting, I watched this on Hoyt’s Xtreme Screen, and it is possible the sheer scale of that amplified this issue). The dinosaurs look great, but there is something really off about the depth of field and greenscreen backgrounds. Think of one of those scenes where two characters in a car obviously have the streets behind them being projected, but on a massive scale. It’s so commonplace in other films that’s it’s not usually distracting, but this is a Jurassic World movie, where great effects are kind of the whole point, and scanning the background for the next surprise attack is a key part of the fun. It’s particularly unexpected given director Gareth Edward’s history as a visual effects artist himself, and his excellent track record behind the helm of Rogue One and the under-rated The Creator.
Other than that quite significant glitch, Jurassic World, Rebirth does exactly what you’d expect, but no more. The cast are solid, without pushing themselves in any way. (Scarlett Johannson has reportedly been angling for a role in the franchise for years; having achieved that dream you can forgive her for just going along with the ride). There are enough thrills to justify the price of admission, but none of them are anything new. Rebirth isn’t the fresh beginning it had the potential to be, but it does enough to suggest that the franchise isn’t extinct, yet.