So, let’s get this out of the way: they will never stop making Jurassic Park movies. Never. Thus, Jurassic World Rebirth (no colon). All you can do is choose not to go see them. But, for the rest of us—and that’s a lot of us based on that $322.6M worldwide opening—we still get a kick out of seeing dinosaurs on screen. And since the whole Jurassic World offshoot of the franchise thrives on “bigger is better,” the dinosaurs of Jurassic World Rebirth the biggest yet. And that’s…pretty okay!
There is a plot, which you can choose to care or not care about. We learn that dinosaurs were being developed at what seems like every single island near the equator, including on one where the unwittingly evil scientists are working on genetic cross-breeding to make them even bigger and better! And as in literally every other Jurassic Park movie, the biggest, baddest one gets out, eats people, and causes the whole operation to shut down and the island to be abandoned. Until…
Seventeen years later, the world seems kind of bored of dinosaurs and the dinosaurs are dying off because they really can’t survive in zoos in places like Cincinnati (who knew?) and can only thrive on those equatorial islands. Along comes the evil pharmaceutical guy (because of course) who needs to put together a team to go back to go that abandoned island. The mission? Get blood samples from a living specimen of each of the largest land, sea, and air dinosaurs living there to make some wonder drugs (because that’s a real thing that will work). So we get the mercenary (Scarlett Johansson—seriously), the hot science guy (Wicked’s Jonathan Bailey), the salty boat captain (two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali), and a few others who you know are gonna get eaten by dinosaurs at some point. They go, things go wrong, they have to survive while still doing the job they’ve been hired for. Oh, and there’s a family sailing in the ocean who gets capsized by dinosaurs who also wind up on the island, as there can be no Jurassic movie without a kid in peril. We get plenty of dino action, plenty of suspense, and plenty of kinda fun banter by our heroes, just like in every other Jurassic movie.
When it comes to the story and action, there are no real surprises here. And that’s actually fine. Jurassic Park movies work best when they don’t stray too far from the formula (see, e.g., the dreadful Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom for what happens when they do). And that the formula works here is due to executive producer Steven Spielberg bringing in original adaptor David Koepp to write the screenplay. Plus, director Gareth Edwards (credited director of the sublime Rogue One) knows his way around an action sequence. The action set pieces surrounding two of the hunts for the blood sample—one at sea and one on the side of a cliff—really are exhilarating. And the big emotional moment of the movie involving the biggest, sweetest dinos ever actually will touch your cynical heart a little bit (thanks to an assist from composer Alexandre Desplat reworking all the John Williams goodness).
While the human characters are really there to move us from one dinosaur to another, they have their moments. Johansson and Ali get to try to inject some actual human emotion into things. Rupert Friend (TV’s Homeland) is just the right kind of slimy without being too over the top. Even the family is fine—one kid is certainly better than the standard two. But the best performance belongs to Bailey. Impossibly handsome with charisma to match, he provides a good amount of the humor and the wonder you expect from these movies. That guy a gonna be a star if he isn’t already.
Jurassic World Rebirth is not original or groundbreaking. It’s not provocative or insightful. You probably won’t remember that much of it in a couple of weeks. But it will keep you entertained for a couple of hours and may even give you some of those old-school vibes once or twice. And in the season of soulless summer blockbusters, that’s perfectly fine.
