I didn’t mean to see Jurassic World Rebirth and I certainly didn’t intend to write a review on it. But sometimes these things just fall into your lap and you can’t NOT write about it. Let me explain.
AMC Theatres offers a ‘Screen Unseen‘ showing every few weeks. You pay a discounted ticket price and get to see an unreleased film usually weeks before it opens on the big screen. The catch is that you have no idea what you’re going to see. The only thing revealed in advance is the rating and the run time. It’s a brilliant and inexpensive marketing strategy to get some advanced word-of-mouth press by regular moviegoers.
When I sit in the audience, even for my own viewing pleasure, I can’t help but put my movie reviewer hat on. Both times I’ve previously attended a Screen Unseen showing, I ended up writing about the films I saw because I was pleasantly surprised by both of them and hadn’t seen many reviews out for either (see my reviews on Fly Me to the Moon and Skincare). I was hoping for another good gamble and it’s clear everyone else in the theater was too.
Just before the film started, we were greeted by a video clip of Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey sitting in front of the Jurassic World Rebirth film logo welcoming us to the screening. The cat was out of the bag to many cheers in the theater, myself included. I’ve seen most of the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World movies and had to planned to put this latest installment on my summer blockbuster list.
When it comes to summer movies, I’m not looking for Oscar contenders, necessarily. I’m looking for an escape from the midday sun or raucous entertainment on a warm summer’s evening. I like the laughs to be big and the action even bigger in the summer. And it’s with these expectations that I, too, gave out a happy little yelp when I realized what the surprise screening was.
I soon traded my happy yelp for lots and lots of groans. There may be some spoilers ahead but this muck is so predictable, you probably could guess it all anyway.
Here’s the premise: It’s been five years since the last movie, Jurassic World Dominion. In that time, the entire world has somehow lost complete interest in dinosaurs. In fact, at the start of the movie, we see a brontosaurus (or similar looking dinosaur) wandering the streets of New York having escaped from a zoo. New Yorkers’ only concern seems to be that he’s blocking traffic. As for the rest of the dinosaurs, they are now self-contained in the equatorial region where the climate there seems to be the only appropriate environment for them.
Since the dinosaurs are obviously unmanaged and unrestrained in this region, it’s just too dangerous to go there and any travel in that zone is illegal. Unless you have a really good reason.
Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) is a pharmaceutical executive who has grand plans to create a life-saving medication for those with heart disease. But to complete his research, he needs blood samples taken from three very specific dinosaurs. Very living dinosaurs. So he hires Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a mercenary of sorts who has a reputation for extracting things.
So far, so good. Pharma guy with a heart of gold needs a risk taker to help him save lives… for a price. ScarJo negotiates a life-changing sum of $20 million and recruits her longtime pal Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and a ragtag crew for the mission. Oh, and they’ve also invited along the bumbling, nerdy, but adorable paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey).
It’s a sound premise. It’s got all the makings of a fast-paced, high action, energy fueled blockbuster. Get in, battle some dinosaurs, change the world, get rich. But… I’m pretty sure you’ve seen this exact story. I don’t know where you’ve seen it but if you follow any sort of tropes in entertainment, you’ve definitely seen it.
As the crew sets out by boat, there’s time for “character development.” Zora and Duncan have heart to heart talks about their past in what is clearly meant to set them both up for “tough emotional decisions” in the hours to come. We also find that Zora is a hooker with a heart of gold mercenary with a moral conscience. During a casual conversation, Dr. Henry even suggests that Zora should give up the $20 million payout when she acquires the blood samples so they can just “open source the data” and save the world free of charge.
This is clearly a setup to portray Martin as Bad Corporate Man. I mean, nobody likes Big Pharma but if they could actually prevent or cure heart disease, maybe we’d like them a little more.
No matter. The die is cast and Martin quickly devolves into the trope of the amoral money man. The story picks up steam when they pick up a random family that just happens to be sailing in a tiny little boat in these very same illegal waters. Next, dinosaur success! Dinosaur failure! And everyone ends up in the water within swimming distance of the very island they had planned to go to.
Oh yes. There are fatalities as well. You’ll know who’s going to get it too. Remember the “red shirts” in Star Trek? These were the no name actors who maybe had a line or two. But we all knew they were expendable. Same concept here.
Now, I forgot to tell you about this island. It doesn’t just house the dinosaurs from which they need blood samples. It’s also an island where they were developing MUTANT DINOSAURS! Whoops, we forgot to tell ScarJo that. The mutation facility shut down 17 years ago when a guy was eating a Snickers in a clean room and the wrapper accidentally shorted the entire electrical system. Now the mutant dinosaurs roam free. What could go wrong?
I’m going to skip to my favorite part. It’s the part that made me realize I could be a screenwriter for today’s blockbuster movies. As Bad Corporate Man realizes things are going south, he grabs the suitcase of blood samples and handcuffs it to himself for “safekeeping.” At this point, I turned to my son and said, “Well, I guess a dinosaur is going to eat him but miraculously his arm will fall off with the briefcase still attached.”
Nailed it.
Now, listen. I like a big dumb action movie every once in a while. In fact, I actually enjoyed The Meg. But Jurassic World Rebirth feels like the kind of movie that is churned out when you ask ChatGPT to write a script for a surefire sequel that incorporates all of the elements of the earlier movies. In other words, we still need good human writers and none of them seemed to be involved in this project.
It’s clear that they tried to make some callbacks to the original movie that started the whole franchise. Alexandre Desplat’s score nearly mirrors the original John Williams music. When reaching a field of titanosaurs, Dr. Henry Loomis stops in awe, in much the same way that Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) did. Even the escape scene with Martin and the blood samples mimics the scene where Dennis (Wayne Knight) attempts to escape with his shaving cream.
What’s ultimately missing is the slow build up and tension that earlier movies mastered. We don’t need to see a T. Rex ripping someone apart to feel the fear. We just need to anticipate it. It’s something that original director Steven Spielberg mastered and what director Gareth Edwards is lacking.
The only real head scratcher is how in the world they got award winning actors like Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali to perform in this flaming pile of garbage? My guess is big money. Johansson is rumored to demand $15-20 million per action film. The big budget salaries and multitude of product placements ironically overshadows the films anti-capitalist message.
In case you hadn’t figured it out by now, Jurassic World Rebirth ranks pretty low on my list of bad movies – and I’ve seen a lot. The actors do the best they can with the script they’ve got. We just don’t end up caring about the characters and aren’t left wanting more – from them or the dinosaurs. In the end, recycled movie tropes, predictable storylines, and cute kids with baby dinosaurs won’t save this franchise. It’s time to let it go extinct.
