Jurassic World: Rebirth Review

It can be a sad sight to see a once beloved franchise become re-spun and hung-dry by studio execs trying to cash-in on endless sequels. And although sequels aren’t per se a bad thing - many can build successfully on popular pre-existing material, see Top Gun: Maverick - in this current climate, it feels like studios are becoming increasingly risk-averse to green-lighting original projects. Hence, we now have the seventh installment of the “Jurassic” franchise.

I can’t exactly say I went in with particularly high hopes with this one given the previous, generally low-quality, Jurassic sequels. Although this latest installment was written by the co-writer of the original, David Koepp, it still didn’t quell my predisposition. Though, fairly quickly, my expectations were subverted: within the film’s opening ten minutes, we are caught up in a New York traffic jam caused by one of the last Sauropods in North America blocking the road, passed off by onlookers as a commonality. This seems to implicitly address the audience's feelings too: the Jurassic franchise has become too familiar; too formulaic. I saluted this somewhat bold decision.

So as to bypass expectations, the new dino-crew composed mainly of Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali and Rupert Friend - charter a mission on behalf of humanity, not profit. Instead of setting-up a new theme park, due to its cost and several previous unsuccessful attempts to do so (as addressed in the film), Scarlett Johansson’s character, an ex-military covert operative, teams up with Martin Krebs (whose name I had to search up to remind myself) who works within the medical industry, and devise a plan to retrieve biomaterial samples from the three largest prehistoric specimens to help stop deadly diseases. Along the way they pick-up Ali and Bailey's characters too and hey! - we’ve got a new dinosaur flick! This is one of the main issues of the film: the people in the film are a lame, boring, rag-tag team of intelligent, yet bland personas. Moreover, the relationships and on-screen connections feel forced.

And this pattern continues: along the way, they are forced to turn their boat around, following a mayday radio message picked-up from a family whose boat has been capsized by the Mosasaurus they have been trying to track down. Again we’re introduced to a literal raft of more uninteresting characters. 

Yet while there seems to be attempts by the filmmakers to go down a new direction with the story, there’s a multitude of Spielberg-esque callbacks along the way. As an example, in order to retrieve said Mosasuarus sample, Johansson’s character (I can’t remember the name of her character, or any of them), using her military background and a gimmicky, sample-retrieving gun to aide her, lines up a shot on the aquatic beast, right out on the bow of the boat whilst the water-dwelling beast bashes into the side. Surely I can’t be the only one who saw the Jaws likeness? Another homage comes much more towards the end of the film, where the family of four have to hide from some-sort of a genetically-mixed Pterosaur in a remote petrol station in an almost shot-for-shot remake of the orignal’s notorious Velociraptor-kitchen scene. 

Leaving aside the Executive-Producer’s marks on this film, it becomes more and more obvious that the film was thrown together in a short time-frame given its lackluster writing. Despite the various odes to the original, the film fails to recreate the same kind of tension and excitement that Spielberg was able to do so masterfully in the first. Although one can appreciate the adventurousness of the film, it never feels like the characters are particularly challenged: following an ocean battle with a group of Spinosauruses, their boat crashing ashore and several crew members being eaten alive, the core cast shrug this off as a mere triviality and keep going with their mission, with no further callbacks to such horrors. 

So while the film may be in some respects a tribute to its over thirty-year-old predecessor, the writing is dry and uninspired, lacking any sort of emotional depth. While I commend Koepp’s decision to go in a more left-field direction in its storytelling, the whole film feels like a patronisingly surface-level affair.  

6.3/10