Movie Review: Jurassic World Rebirth
Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh entry in the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise, is almost a great film. Following Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, the franchise hasn’t come close to sniffing the quality of that masterpiece, with each entry seemingly getting worse. With Jurassic World Rebirth, it starts with a great idea and interesting characters. It even features moments that reminded me of Spielberg’s first film, which makes the “almost” even more heartbreaking.
Jurassic World Rebirth stars Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, a mercenary-for-hire who is great at extracting people and things. She is hired by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a representative for a pharmaceutical company, to help lead a not-so-legal mission to Ile Saint-Hubert, one of the last remaining places where dinosaurs can exist on Earth due to its climate to extract the DNA of the three largest dinosaurs still living, the Mosasaurus, which resides in the sea, the Titanosaurus, which resides on land, and the Quetzalcoatlus, which is an air dinosaur, to solve a major medical breakthrough. Zora and Martin assemble a team that includes Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a paleontologist who studied under Dr. Allan Grant, and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), a fellow mercenary and friend of Zora’s, who has a boat and a crew to transport them to the Ile Saint-Hubert.
The entire set-up of the film worked for me on many levels. It introduces us to familiar but strong characters with interesting dynamics. Dr. Loomis is the moral center who loves dinosaurs and doesn’t want to harm them, and Martin is the greedy businessman who will do anything to get his samples. Zora and Duncan are morally ambiguous, but see this mission as a potential last job based on the amount of money Martin and his company are willing to pay them. Even Duncan’s crew has a personality. The central plot of the film was not about hurting the dinosaurs or trying to eliminate them from the Earth, like the Chris Pratt-led Jurassic World films were, but utilizing them to help humanity. There were moments in the film, like when the crew finds the Titanosaurus only to be in a field of what seems like hundreds of them, that captured a feeling that I had only felt in Spielberg’s first film. It understood the awe and amazement that would take over a human if they saw a dinosaur in real life, especially looking at this moment through Dr. Loomis’s eyes, a man who has dedicated his life to studying dinosaurs and is now seeing and touching them up close. It’s a beautiful sequence that exudes the wonder that made Spielberg’s film a classic.
Of course, it helps that the crew is made up of good-looking actors, all of whom are shot well and look good, muddy, and in fatigues. Each actor understood their assignment and all gave strong performances. Johannson continues to prove that she is one of the best movie stars we have in Hollywood today, and I was struck by Bailey’s performance as Loomis, who is the heart and soul of the film. Watching this beautiful group of people navigate the mission and run away from terrifying dinosaurs in some well-executed action scenes is good entertainment. Is it original? Not really, but seeing beautiful movie stars searching for dinosaurs is what you want to see from your summer blockbusters.
All of this is great, and had Jurassic World Rebirth just focused on this, it honestly would have been a great film. Unfortunately, there is a B-plot about a family who are saved by the crew after they are attacked by a Mosasaurus. Because they are saved by the crew and the crew cannot turn around or ask the government for help, they are stuck with this family, and it completely brings down the movie. The family is incredibly boring. Nothing is interesting about any of the characters. They’re just there to add a little more suspense to the film, which they don’t.
The most egregious part of adding this family to the film is that they are part of the best set pieces, the most notable being a spectacular scene involving a T Rex chasing them down a river. Why didn’t they give this scene to the stars? Why did this irrelevant, boring family get to have all the fun? The addition of this family bogs down everything great about Jurassic World Rebirth and turns the film from great to just fine.
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