Early on in Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film in the Jurassic Park series, a New York billboard depicting T-Rexes in the wild is being whitewashed, the creatures getting airbrushed — well, roller-painted — out of history. While it’s a plot point — we are now in a fictional world rapidly losing interest in dinosaurs — it could also serve as a metaphor for the franchise itself. For, after the Colin Trevorrow era, Gareth Edwards’ film is wiping the slate clean. New characters, new species, new mission, new locales, same reliance on the original John Williams theme for instant wonder. The result, despite the fresh start, adds very little that is novel, but emerges a brisk, uneven, mostly enjoyable romp.
For all the new newness, Rebirth courses with an infectious love of Spielberg’s original. Edwards and original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp have lots of fun playing with the staples of the series: jungle treks, breathless chases, close calls, awe at nature’s power, ethical discussions, low comedy, a cutesy dino for the Happy Meal crowd, and waving flares to distract behemoths are all present and correct. (What there isn’t here is a truly delicious, talk-about kill.) There are also lots of delicate nods — a wing mirror here, a famous banner there — without ever straying into Alien: Romulus get-away-from-her-you-bitch egregiousness. Thankfully, Scarlett Johansson never implores anyone to hold on to their butts, or any other part of their anatomy.
Gareth Edwards’ filmmaking is consistently on point, crafting a colourful quest.
After a tense prologue set 17 years prior, which introduces a laboratory R&D into creating hybrid creatures for the original park that is important later, Rebirth shifts into inelegant exposition mode. The salient points are these: Unscrupulous Big Pharma wonk Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), surely a graduate from the Carter Burke school of Corporate Shithousery, hires Special Ops leader Zora Bennett (Johansson), her right-hand man Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and palaeontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to extract the DNA from the three biggest dinosaurs — the sub-aqua Mosasaurus, the land-locked Titanosaurus, the flying Quetzalcoatlus. Extracted by a nifty DNA-extracting dart thingie, the blood will create a medication for treating heart disease that will save trillions of lives and make millions for Krebs’ company. The catch is, the DNA has to come from living animals who have now congregated near the equator line, a tropical locale illegal for humans to enter.
Bennett and Kincaid are more mercenary than dynamic pricing on a stadium gig. Loomis is a nervy science type whose most prominent character-trait is chewing mints loudly. So, to add some human relatability, we also get the Delgado family, sailing from Barbados to Cape Town, who are pulled into the action when their boat comes under attack from Jurassic sharks. There are family tensions at play — dad Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) dislikes daughter Teresa’s (Luna Blaise) boyfriend Xavier (David Iacano); little Bella (Audrina Miranda) is running out of liquorice — that all get put aside when later chased downstream by a big-ass T-Rex in an exciting set-piece lifted from Crichton’s original novel.
The search-for-three-creatures gambit engenders a certain predictability but it guarantees some different flavours. The hunt for the Mosasaurus is an entertaining 20-minute cut-down of Jaws’ sea hunt — Johansson could well be standing on the bow firing yellow barrels into the prehistoric Bruce. While much of the impact of the original’s Brachiosaurus intro was tied into the thrill of new technology, the search for the Titanosaurus is a sterling attempt to deliver an authentic sense of wonder, as Loomis marvels at a pair of nuzzling, horny Titanosaurs who should really get a room. The battle for a Quetzalcoatlus egg is the less effective of the three set-pieces, an abseiling adventure let down by the feeling it is studio-bound.
The characters might not lodge in the memory (MVP: Mahershala Ali lending weight to the shenanigans), but Edwards’ filmmaking is consistently on point, crafting a colourful quest full of striking images, some clever staging and an unusual-for-the-series use of pop music (cue Primal Scream and Ben E. King). Rebirth is a good time, but perhaps we need new ideas, new hybrids. It might be time to cross-pollinate with other Universal franchises. M3GAN versus robotic Raptors (‘M3GAN 3: Oh They Do Move In Packs’)? Or A Dilophosaurus versus Vin Diesel (‘The Fast And The Poisonous’)? Maybe not, but come number eight, the series needs less a rebirth and more a rethink.
