Set over a decade after the events of “Jurassic World” and well into the time when dinosaurs have begun to re-roam the Earth again, the film follows covert ops expert Zora Bennett, played by Scarlett Johansson (“Marriage Story,” “Jojo Rabbit”), as she’s recruited by pharmaceutical exec Martin Krebs, played by Rupert Friend (“Pride & Prejudice (2005),” “Anatomy of a Scandal”), to lead a secret mission to Ile Saint-Hubert to extract the DNA from three living dinosaurs to synthesize into a drug to prevent heart disease. Her team consists of nerdy paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis, played by Jonathan Bailey (“Bridgerton,” “Wicked (2024)”) and team leader Duncan Kincaid, played by Mahershala Ali (“Moonlight,” “Green Book”). While on the island, they also run into a shipwrecked family consisting of father Reuben, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (“A Man Called Otto,” “The Magnificent Seven (2016)”), his daughters Teresa and Isabella, played by Luna Blaise (“Manifest,” “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe”) and Audrina Miranda respectively, and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier, played by David Iacono (“The Summer I Turned Pretty,” “Dead Boy Detectives”).
Given his experience playing with large scales in previous works, it's no surprise that director Gareth Edwards (“The Creator,” “Rogue One”) has an excellent handle on the chaos as it unfolds in this tale. His film has a very clear-sighted vision, ditching any semblance of shaky-cam effects or muddied action. It’s a gorgeously shot film as well, that plays with camera angles in plenty of ways that would make Spielberg proud. The musical score from Alexandre Desplat (“Little Women (2019),” “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) maintains a playful tone, mixing in well-trodden themes from previous “Park” films while still mixing in new material throughout.
Davis Koepp’s (“Spider-Man (2002),” “Jurassic Park”) script, meanwhile, is a less than excellent affair. While the moment-to-moment dialogue is fine enough, with a handful of clunkers thrown in, the overall plotting is nothing the series hasn’t seen before. It’s fine enough, but it feels as though it’s a stitched together movie made from chunks of previous films. It doesn’t mean they don’t work, but there’s a pervasive feeling of deja vu throughout the whole picture. Johansson is great, but feels like a female version of Chris Pratt’s character. Ali is great, but he feels like a slightly more sane version of Bob Peck’s character from the original film. Bailey is one of the film’s largest saving graces; his charism and genuine interest in the dinos and material shine through and deliver one of the best characters in the series. But at the same time, there are clear and obvious shades of both Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler in his character that are hard to overlook.
Worse than that, the family sharing the film’s spotlight are unfortunately just plain boring. Anytime the film cuts away from the main team to them, the tension dissipates, and their scenes feel as though they have zero consequence on the overall plot. They’re performed fine enough, and Garcia-Rulfo is doing some great work with a fairly generic character, but so much of their screen time is spent wondering what the other, more interesting and complex characters are up to.
But does any of this really matter? This is, at the end of the day, another “Jurassic World” movie. If it delivers the dinos, then the audience will come, and they’ll enjoy it. There is certainly fun to be had as the film does deliver the goods. A moment in the middle of the film involving Bailey’s character and a Titanosaur is moving and wonderful. The entire last thirty minutes inside of an abandoned company town are a lot of fun. But it's all grizzly, bloody, mean fun. The whimsy of the original film and even the first “World” film are completely gone. The fun of the parks and seeing humans interact with dinosaurs is completely absent, save for the one scene with Bailey. The dinosaurs are also borderline alien at this point, with most being bizarre hodgepodges waved off as “mutations” without their own names. It just feels disheartening to see a series that used to be about science gone wrong combined with the joy of the Jurassic age turned into a glorified kaiju film series.
This latest film opens with some text describing a world “disillusioned with dinosaurs” and it feels as though the filmmakers are as well. “Jurassic World: Rebirth” is a film that can’t be called bad, but nothing about it stands apart. Koepp’s script is a stitched together combination of various other elements from other films in the series with a boring familial subplot for good measure. The technical elements are great, and Edwards clearly has a directorial passion that equals that of Bailey’s excellent character. But for a series that started with one of the greatest blockbusters of all time, it's disheartening to see it come to this. It is still a massive step up from “Dominion,” but the film executives were so concerned with whether or not they could keep the series going, they never stopped to think if they should. 2.5/5
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