Jurassic World Rebirth may rank among the most ironic film titles of all-time. Rehash would be a more appropriate subtitle. The seventh entry in the long-running Jurassic franchise offers nothing original and recycles all of the tired elements that ran the first Jurassic World trilogy into the ground. Despite director Gareth Edwards continuing to find striking visuals here and there in his work, this is yet another franchise film burdened under the weight of its predecessors.
The movie does smartly attempt to distance itself from the convoluted direction of the prior films by stripping away story elements and trying to reset with a new cast and simpler plot. The film quickly explains that after dinosaurs overtook the planet in the last film that they are now confined to a few islands around the equator that are strictly off-limits. The protagonists are a small group put together to combine their expertise to venture to this forbidden zone and gather DNA samples of the three largest dinos to help develop treatments for heart disease. Ignoring the hand-waving of the convenient re-confinement of the dinosaurs, this isn’t an entirely bad premise.
Unfortunately, the film squanders even this relatively simple set-up with one of the dumbest scripts this franchise has seen, and a bevy of dangling story threads presumably killed in the editing process. The result is a haphazard movie that sort of meanders along until the inevitable drama-free conclusion occurs. The film contradicts itself so many times that one wonders if any type of script editing was done.
The movie’s cardinal sin is the dearth of character development. Scarlet Johannson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo are all talented actors and do their best to infuse their characters with personality. But the movie is unkind to their talents. They are handed the barest of character archetypes (mercenary, boat captain, dino scientist, greedy corporate guy, father) and no further time is spent developing the characters past that. There is an early scene where Johannson and Ali start exposition dumping at each other about their backgrounds, and it immediately triggers sensors that this will be the only bit of character development to occur. The result is a movie where you care nothing about any of them, severely undercutting the drama.
The stakes, or lack thereof, are all the more undermined by absurd plot decisions. The screentime not given to characters is instead spent on one convoluted scenario after another where action scenes are predicated on silly occurrences and end simply because the film needs them to. The poor writing is apparent from the very first scene, an introduction flashback showcasing how the island the movie takes place on went wrong. Apparently, a multibillion dollar research lab and security system can all go awry because a spare Snickers wrapper blows into a door-locking mechanism made of steel. And yes, this movie has annoyingly flagrant product placement with an action scene literally occurring in a convenience store so as to showcase as many snack logos as possible despite it making no sense why a secret island lab would have such a store in the first place.
The fun doesn’t stop there. After establishing that the area of dino islands is under intense international security, a random family of four is able to sail into the area accidentally so as to be rescued by the main group of characters. Said family will serve no plot purpose whatsoever. This is despite the main group also being there illegally and having a motivation not to create witnesses. The film pretends there is a moral conflict going on here, but it makes no sense with any scrutiny. Other silly moments include a dramatic reveal of some of history’s largest dinosaurs hiding in slightly tall grass so the characters don’t see them, a boat raft surviving multiple hard bites from a T-rex, said T-rex disappearing from a shot like a slasher villain with no sound made, and a dramatic scene wherein a character discovers a crashed helicopter that is never mentioned again. Another random plot occurrence that is never discussed is uncovering ancient native ruins on the island.
All of this epitomizes the utter dearth of consequences and stakes in this movie. When a film has no discernible internal logic to operate on, and no real sense of danger, there is no drama. Jurassic Park Rebirth cannot be invested in because there is no suspension of disbelief. Despite some characters dying, it never feels in question how anything in the movie will end.
Rebirth tries to narrow the focus to more of the horror/thriller ride of the first film. But it is left relying on the same tricks in a franchise out of new ideas. We get more mutant dinosaurs and nostalgia uses of the notable dinosaurs of the past. The film does attempt to say something about ethical use of science and medicine, but any thematic ideas were lost in this cut that was more clearly focused on catering to children than saying anything intelligent about our world, as the best science-fiction must do.
Here’s hoping that Rebirth is in fact the opposite for the series, and can signal the death of the Jurassic World iteration of it. No further films should be made, absent a truly different take on the concept.
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