As the year draws to a close, it’s worth looking back and remembering those things that impacted our lives, be it something that made you smile, or cry, or even something that had been nearly forgotten as time passed. However, something that I would decidedly like to forget is last summer’s dinosaur action flick, Jurassic World: Rebirth, which managed to pilfer almost $869,000,000 from theater audiences the world over, despite having painfully middling reviews and a fleeting cultural impact. With many families getting ready to bundle up inside, and rent a fun movie to watch together, it may do good to examine one of the most financially successful films of the year as a contender.
Released last July and directed by Gareth Edwards, Rebirth opens with a flashback sequence, set well before the meat of the story and on a remote island laboratory. This serves as backstory for the villain of the story – littering. See, while the marketing for the movie clearly showed off the bigheaded D. Rex as a sort-of antagonist, the true villain was a Snickers wrapper, which, in a secure and highly advanced facility full of scientific professionals, is unceremoniously dropped on the floor. Then, this obnoxious piece of product-placement is sucked up into an inexplicable vacuum door, which not only breaks said door but completely disables all security systems and allows the D. Rex to escape containment, setting the events of the movie proper into action.
Without delving too far into spoiler territory, the main plot is as follows – mercenaries Zora Bennett and Duncan Kincaid (played by Scarlett Johansson & Mahershala Ali, respectively) lead dinosaur expert Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) across the never-before-seen lab-island loaded with the biggest dinosaurs, trying to gather dino blood samples so that corporate husk Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) can use them to synthesize and sell a cure for heart disease. Ordinary civilian Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), as well as his daughters (Audrina Miranda, Luna Blaise) and older daughter’s boyfriend (David Iacono), are all dragged in, too. This allows the story to be shown through the distinct framing devices of the mercenaries (there on a mission) and the Delgado family (just trying to leave the island alive). In order to fulfill their quest, the mercenaries need to get the heart-healthy blood samples from the biggest dinosaurs of the land, air, and sea (the Titanosaurs, Quetzalcoatlus, and Mosasaurus, respectively), which conveniently only exist at this singular island.
Anyone familiar with the Jurassic World franchise, and particularly with the third installment, Jurassic World: Dominion, may have already detected an issue; namely that by that film’s end, genetically engineered dinosaurs (most notably, two of the three quest dinosaurs in Rebirth) were loose in about every part of the world, as a functional part of global ecology. Why would these mercenaries need to go to some laboratory island just to get at big dinosaurs? This is answered pretty early on – since dinosaurs had evolved for a very different version of Earth, they have all just straight-up died in their new climates, with only the only survivors being in tropical, equatorial areas that have now been banned from all human access. To top it off, no one even cares, because everyone has collectively moved on from dinosaurs after them having been back for so long. The former point is especially vital to Rebirth’s story and very conception, but both points together indicate a departure from the Jurassic World franchise, and not necessarily for the better.
Standing on its own, this film is fine. The writing is usually flat, and the characters are two-dimensional at their best, resulting in forced interactions and a plot that doesn’t flow so much as it just happens. The digital effects aren’t anything groundbreaking, there’s an annoying animal sidekick, the ‘moral dilemma’ presented has an obvious solution, and the message is almost excruciatingly basic. There are several of what I believe qualify as fakeout deaths, all of which are stupid and contribute nothing. Plus, for some reason the dinosaurs appear and disappear at random in a scene – that is to say, they seem to teleport, and rather frequently, which is goofy. That all said, Rebirth has its strengths; for example, a lot of the dinosaur scenes are actually pretty tense, at least when not deflated by obvious plot armor or jokes (some of which are good). The set design is pretty solid, with one location in particular looking a lot like those from Portal, and with seemingly minimal CGI. That said, the movie as a whole has far more digital effects than one would expect (in the opening moments, some pointless monkeys are animated in, as is the nefarious Snickers wrapper), made all the worse by the fact that the practical effects present tend to be quite good. On its own, Rebirth is little more than a generic action movie, complete with a barren story and – worse – MCU-esque quips.
Where Rebirth really begins to fall short is within the context of the Jurassic Park franchise. For some background, it is generally common consensus that Jurassic Park is the only great Jurassic Park movie; its two original sequels were unable to recapture the first movie’s magic, and Jurassic Park III especially was messy. When the series rebooted in 2015 with Jurassic World, things began to look back up critically, though the film is notably more action-heavy, and initially caught some heat for treating its dinosaurs as either controllable sweeties or hybrid monsters, instead of as animals. This angle was pushed even further with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, in which most dinos are innocent critters, except for the villainous and dastardly hybrid one; this was also the film that introduced human cloning, which was indeed a decision. It was Jurassic World: Dominion, the second most recent, that seemed aimed at capitalizing off of the franchise as a whole, leaning hard into the human cloning as well as nostalgia from all five other movies, while attempting to pivot away from hybrids and other non-locusts. Dominion was generally seen as derivative, poorly written, and too full of bugs, but left the door open for sequels with free-range dinosaurs.
However, just as Jurassic World was made to revive the franchise, and Dominion was made to sell the franchise, there is evidence that Rebirth was made to reset the franchise. First and most obviously, it completely undoes the events of its predecessor, implying that human cloning cured no diseases and that all the dinosaurs just died off, despite the last two films hinging on saving them. There are actually a number of reasons that climate change doesn’t work as a dino-killer, mostly that Jurassic World dinos were specifically engineered not to die to a cool breeze and were, in fact, choosing to live in cold climes as of Dominion. Rebirth also features an entirely new location, cast, writer, and style, the latter of which applies to the dinosaurs, too; many familiar species have gotten touch-ups, with the Spinosaurus in particular seeming to have been redesigned specifically to avoid the occasional dweeb calling it scientifically inaccurate. Dino designs cannot be discussed, however, without mentioning the mutants, which are horrendously ugly dino experiments that exist for the sole purpose of pivoting from hybrids after that trend went down swell. Despite attempting to distance itself from the Jurassic World movies, though, Rebirth is perfectly happy to reference Jurassic Park, and be it a one-for-one scene or just a detail, these callbacks are never once subtle and take you out of any immersion you had.
While perfectly fine as an exercise of the action genre, Jurassic World: Rebirth is a failure as a Jurassic World movie. Its attempts to differentiate itself have not only undermined its own franchise’s story, but are undone by the film’s need to leech off of its predecessors, riding off the name, face, and trappings of Jurassic Park while leaving the strengths behind. It only succeeded at two things: getting people into seats (thanks to franchise appeal), and shooting that franchise in both of its feet. It can’t easily move forward, because Rebirth ends without anywhere for a sequel to go, and it can’t step back and rely on previous story beats, since this film undid most of them just because the writers couldn’t think of any other way to get people onto an island. This movie is little more than a fetch-quest featuring prehistoric setpieces, frustratingly flat characters, elementary logic, pointless fakeouts, nostalgiabait, a blatantly marketable animal sidekick, and no cohesion between any of it. For its crimes, I have no choice but to bestow Jurassic World: Rebirth the ranking of 1.5 stars out of five, and will not recommend it for your viewing pleasure this holiday season.