Paula Arevalo
I get the appeal of a series like “Jurassic World” on a conceptual level. The first film, directed with grace by Steven Speilberg off an airtight script written by Michael Crichton and David Koepp, was a landmark of visual effects (VFX) technology that dazzles to this day. Those creatives and technicians, working at the highest level of their craft, combined with the hook of seeing dinosaurs realized on screen for the first time in a photo-realistic manner was enough to create a solid baseline for a franchise to be built.
Yet “Jurassic Park,” or as it’s now called “Jurassic World,” has failed to evolve beyond the bones of that initial film. The parameters of the brand were pushed, occasionally, in “The Lost World” and “Fallen Kingdom,” but the franchise always falls back on its basic principles: scientists on an island running from dinosaurs.
Despite a shake-up in director Gareth Edwards, “Jurassic World: Rebirth” is indisputably another return to form, watching another group of wisecracking nerds fight off prehistoric beasts on the equator. How successful is it? I’ll answer that with another question: how much mileage would you get out of watching a worse version of “Jurassic Park?”
“Rebirth” is perfectly forgettable. While Edwards flexes his ability to choreograph elaborate set pieces with convincing visual effects, the film fails to deliver on any kind of consistent theme or emotional core. Koepp, returning to write the screenplay, delivers on efficiency but in the process breezes past any reason to care for these characters, with grating exposition and an overreliance on quips replacing much of any real sense of personhood.
Taking place five years after the events of “Jurassic World: Dominion,” dinosaurs have all but died out in the human world, leaving the only surviving species back on a few scattered islands in tropical regions around the world. A team of adventurers – undercover agent Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and team leader/sailor Duncan Kincaid (Mahershela Ali) – are sent out by pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) on a mission to Ile Saint-Hubert to extract dinosaur DNA to create a new medicine for heart disease. Along the way, they rescue a family stranded in the ocean by a mystery that the island holds deep within it.
In the spirit of his previous work in 2014’s “Godzilla,” “Rogue One,” and “The Creator,” Edwards has crafted a vapid work of fiction with impressive VFX. Where the script falters, his direction only makes things worse: scenes with lots of meandering exposition are jarringly cut together, Edwards’ coverage jumping around the scene with no real sense of rhythm. It’s not only boring, it’s hard to follow, leading to the first third of the film being almost unwatchable.
This isn’t helped by an ensemble of actors who feel aimless, their characters so underwritten that they all come up grasping for straws. Johansson and Ali play everything like they’re in a Marvel movie (to be fair, the former was and the latter is supposed to be), which is to say they feel like they’re constantly winking to the camera.
On the opposite hand, Bailey and Friend ham it up, their over dramatic antics harkening back to classic monster films like “War of the Worlds.” It all feels discordant with one another, which speaks to a general lack of vision guiding the ensemble. Bailey and Friend succeed more, if only that they’re treating this like a real movie, while the other pair’s apathetic comedy lands with a thud.
In all, the film’s glaring problem is that it’s not interesting. With Edwards’ other projects, there was at least the spectacle of watching his talent at VFX realize something that hadn’t been seen before blend seamlessly with the real world. But dinosaurs are nothing new. We’ve been seeing them on repeat, even outside of this franchise, since the mid-90s. “Rebirth” is, to use the internet aphorism, reheating “Jurassic Park”’s nachos. It’s a dull, poor imitation of something that was once great.