The “Jurassic” franchise has long become a lot like the bioengineered mutant dinosaur — amusingly dubbed “Distortus Rex” — that escapes from an InGen research facility in the series’ loud nap of a new installment: Pointless to keep alive but impossible to kill.
The mere existence of Gareth Edwards’ “Jurassic World: Rebirth” would have been enough to clarify that condition, and yet this back-to-basics standalone — arriving just a few summers after the franchise’s bone-dumb second trilogy ended with a billion-dollar blah — takes pains to remind us that the “Jurassic” period won’t stop printing money just because Universal doesn’t know how to spend it. To misquote a certain mathematician: “Your executives were so unpreoccupied with whether or not they should, they didn’t stop to think if they could.”
In that sense, and in that sense only, I have no choice but to admit that Edwards’ installment lives up to its much-advertised promise as a tribute to the 1993 masterpiece that started it all. “Rebirth” certainly isn’t any better than the previous five sequels that have already hatched from the original (though I’m relieved to report that it’s less bloated and self-impressed than the last three), but the sheer nothingness of its spectacle — combined with a complete non-story that feels like it was 65 million studio notes in the making — allows it to become a singularly perfect legacy for Steven Spielberg’s classic about how people lack the power to control their own creations.
Life finds a way, and no “Jurassic” movie since the first one has more convincingly illustrated how, in the absence of evolution, survival is forced to become its own reward.
That idea is baked into the premise of David Koepp’s script, which takes place 32 years after “dinosaurs came back,” and roughly a decade after people grew bored of them (Koepp very much included). Parks aren’t profitable, museums are empty, and the fine citizens of DUMBO just honk their horns at each other when a massive herbivore escapes from the zoo for a nap under the Brooklyn Bridge. And as if things weren’t bad enough for our cold-blooded friends, it turns out that global warming isn’t the best vibe for prehistoric lizards, and most of the remaining dinosaurs have retreated to a handful of equatorial islands whose climate more closely resembles the ancient world. We don’t bother them, they don’t bother us, and nature is left to run its course — or it would have been if not for all of those meddling corporations.
This time it’s a pharmaceutical giant called ParkerGenix, whose scientists have discovered that a trillion-dollar cure for heart disease could be cultivated from the blood of the three biggest dinosaurs left on Earth. Naturally, they want to brand it before anyone else gets the chance (nothing revs up the imagination like a race for medical patents!), which is why they’ve given sleazebag goon Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend, serving yassified Dennis Nedry) the blank check necessary to hire a team capable of going to Skull Island — or whatever the abandoned InGen testing site is called — and getting the samples ParkerGenix needs.
Leading the pack is former special-forces operative Zora Bennett (a pathologically chipper Scarlett Johansson, often rocking some casual Linda Hamilton cosplay), who’s allegedly still reeling from the death of a beloved colleague on her most recent mission. I say “allegedly” because she never shows a hint of human emotion, even after witnessing the death of a beloved colleague on her current mission, but everyone makes a point of paying their condolences for her loss. After walking away with $200 million of ParkerGenix’s money, Zora will be able to pay for them herself.
Her Suriname-based war buddy Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali, whose role is all presence and no acting) is hoping for a similar reward. Getting rich wouldn’t ease the grief he feels for his dead son, which is a mighty cheap device for a movie so uninterested in its characters (Koepp’s script doesn’t exactly follow through on the notion of people internalizing “life finds a way” on their own terms), but getting chewed alive by dinosaurs wouldn’t hurt the guy anymore than he already is. Ed Skrein is definitely also there, along with Bechir Sylvain and Philippine Velge, who might as well be wearing t-shirts that say “eat me first.” Styled to look like Steve from “Sex and the City,” “Wicked” star Jonathan Bailey rounds out the team as the bookish paleontologist Henry Loomis, who studied under franchise icon Dr. Alan Grant, but is still dumb enough to go to an InGen island full of untamed dinosaurs.
Adventurous dad Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) might be even dumber for thinking he can sail around it, as the known existence of prehistoric species doesn’t stop him from steering his two daughters — and the older one’s wastoid boyfriend — straight through Mosasaurus territory as they make their way across the Atlantic. (These characters are introduced with a Vampire Weekend song, which is an amusingly multiplex-brained way of teeing up the fact that Reuben’s eldest is going to NYU in the fall.) Zora’s crew bails them out from the inevitable attack that follows, but the dinos return with a vengeance, and it isn’t long before all of the film’s characters find themselves stranded on the same island where the Distortus Rex escaped from its enclosure during the film’s prologue (a sequence that bears an uncanny resemblance to the prologue from Edwards’ own “Godzilla,” and is worth noting in a movie that betrays almost no other trace of its director’s fingerprints).
From there, the rest of the film adheres to video game logic: If Zora’s team can successfully extract blood from a swimming dino (the aforementioned Mosasaurus), a land dino (Titanosaurus), and a sky dinosaur (Quetzalcoatlus), they’ll unlock the secret fourth boss you’ve spent the whole movie waiting to show up. Spoiler alert: It does! Distortus is a big ugly chungus, and it basically does so little that its enormous paw tracks are the only impression its capable of leaving behind.
That would be disappointing in and of itself, but it’s even more so with an effects wizard like Edwards at the helm, whose “Godzilla” remains among the most sweeping and majestic monster movies of the 21st century (in addition to being an unfathomably perfect audition reel for directing a “Jurassic” sequel). It’s no secret that Edwards joined “Rebirth” just a short while before it raced into production, and that Universal targeted “The Creator” creator because he was one of the only proven filmmakers capable of delivering a CGI-fest like this in time for its predetermined summer 2025 release date. And as we all remember from “Jurassic Park,” there are never any negative consequences for operating on a timeline that prioritizes shareholder value above structural integrity.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that “Rebirth” is totally deprived of tolerable setpieces and/or well-engineered thrills; the T-Rex cameo has some fun with an inflatable raft, while the Quetzalcoatlus sequence introduces a high-flying pinch of “Indiana Jones” into a movie so desperate to coast off Spielbergian magic that it doesn’t seem to care where it comes from. Edwards might have done better to set his sights on Joe Johnson-level fun, as “Rebirth” — which channels the straightforwardness of “Jurassic Park III” — would kill for a single moment that matches the aura of the Pteranodon emerging from the fog. Alas, to a less explicit but similarly enervating degree as the previous “Jurassic World” titles, this movie is undone by its need to make dinosaurs feel modern enough to compete against the rest of today’s multiplex fare.
Much as I appreciate Edwards’ decision to shoot on 35mm film, his facility with CGI ends up being less of a feature than a bug in the context of a franchise that requires your brain to believe in the context of its franchise. The dinosaur attacks in the original movie are so terrifying because of how palpably they collapse 65 million years of animal instinct — and how credibly they straddle the line between nightmare fuel and waking life.
When the T-Rex runs its claws along the unelectrified fence of its paddock, our intellectual discomfort at the idea of playing God suddenly crystallizes into the stuff of clear and present danger. When the kids are hiding from the Velociraptors in the kitchen, the suspense is rooted in the bone-deep belief that the dinosaurs are as real as the humans they’re trying to eat and vice-versa, and that belief was sustained by the simplicity of the action at hand. “Jaws” works because the shark didn’t, and “Jurassic Park” endures as a movie for the same reason it failed as a destination: People could only exert so much control over the attractions. “Rebirth” has a scene where a pair of Titanosauruses make out.
It’s great that Edwards can make a Mosasaur look tangible enough to touch as it glides under the surface of the ocean, but his film’s pencil-thin characters betray the reality of the CGI dinos chasing them, who seem that much faker as a result of the ability to make them do whatever the director wants. It’s no wonder that none of the kids in “Rebirth” are ever sufficiently petrified about their situation, or that “Jurassic Park” continues to be the only one of these movies that doesn’t feel like watching people enjoy a theme park ride second-hand.
Needless to say, “Rebirth” doesn’t do itself any favors by so frequently harkening back to the original. Bad as some of the previous sequels have been, none of them have been so eager to measure themselves against Spielberg’s masterpiece. Nothing in this movie is quite as maddening as the second trilogy’s attempt to make audiences invest in a specific Velociraptor (though Edwards half-heartedly tries to sweeten us on an adorable baby Aquilops named Dolores), but the extent to which this franchise is just fending off its own extinction has never been more obvious than it is in during the “Rebirth” sequence that pays homage to the kitchen encounter from the first movie. The “Jurassic” sequels were bad enough when they made an effort to evolve — they’re even less worth seeing now that they already come pre-fossilized.
Grade: C-
Universal Pictures will release “Jurassic World: Rebirth” in theaters on Wednesday, July 2.
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