'Jurassic World Rebirth' film review: Time to let the franchise go extinct
Lacking the wonder of the original 'Jurassic Park' or even the focus of the maligned 'Jurassic Park III,' 'Jurassic World Rebirth' (in theaters everywhere July 2) is a fetch quest filled with thin characters running from monsters.
In short: Five years after the events of 'Jurassic World: Dominion,' an expedition ventures onto a remote island to obtain blood samples from living dinosaurs to create a medical breakthrough. Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo star.
'Rebirth' posits a world once enamored with dinosaurs, but the public is now bored with the ubiquitous prehistoric animals. And the dinosaurs - once thought invincible - are in rapid decline. So a small band of mercenaries and capitalists go on one last hunt - their goal: extract what they can from a dying clade of animals before the dinosaurs return to extinction.
Oh how art imitates life. Virtually everything about 'Rebirth' reeks of a cynical effort to wring every last dollar possible from the waning 'Jurassic' franchise - a series that hit its apex more than 30 years ago with the first film and never again came close to reaching the greatness of 'Jurassic Park.' Unfortunately, the filmmakers took the worst lessons from the preceding six 'Jurassic' movies to create their own D-Rex of a mutated creation known as 'Jurassic World Rebirth.'
Even as a standalone movie, 'Rebirth' stumbles through the motions of a patently exploitative adventure. The core of the entire 'Jurassic' franchise is crystalized by Ian Malcolm's "should/could" speech regarding the inherent dangers of genetic research. Strip away the exotic locales and the dinosaurs and the thesis of the franchise as a whole deals with either the unintended dangers of recreating dinosaurs or the irresponsibility of amoral businessmen exploiting science for money. 'Rebirth' somehow almost completely avoids this thesis entirely - opting for a walking tour through a monster island instead.
The movie almost feels like two half-cooked stories welded together into one misshapen movie. The main plot driver is a pharmaceutical suit (Rupert Friend) hiring mercenaries led by Zora Bennett and Duncan Kincaid (Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali) for an illegal operation to steal blood from living animals for pharmaceutical riches. Plot B involves a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) captaining his boat in the Atlantic when his ship is capsized by dinos - and he's just trying to keep his children alive. Either story could work as their own dedicated standalone stories - but squishing these two plots together doesn't work.
The main plot - essentially a pharmabro heist - misses every opportunity to explore the ethics or potential unintended consequences of just stealing dino DNA for medical research. Yes the research could potentially save countless human lives - but the 'Jurassic' thesis has always been: undisciplined research endangering humanity. Instead, 'Rebirth' is seemingly resigned with just being a fetch quest that brings their little squad of mercs to cross paths of some of the largest prehistoric animals on the island.
Meanwhile, the second plot involving the father trying to keep his two daughters (and one of their boyfriends) alive - just feels tacked on -- as if added by some producer's note about the story not having characters the audience can connect with. But even here, the notion of an everyman who is accidentally estranged on a dinosaur island could have tapped into unintended consequences aspect of the 'Jurassic' thesis. Almost every other 'Jurassic' story involved some business suit's misguided attempt to control forces of nature that led to a body count of victims. The simple story of a father just trying to survive the island with his family, surrounded by creations of ill-conceived genetic research that shouldn't exist, is a purely emotional thriller. And honestly, these sequences are the most affective because it pits a woefully unprepared family against massive superpredators in their desperate bid to escape. Instead, 'Rebirth' just uses the family as a means to inject some emotional connection from time to time - because it's legitimately difficult to care much about the survival of the mercenary expedition.
Scarlett Johansson brings some unexpected lightness to the role - it would have been easy to paint Zora as a weathered and weary merc on one last mission. The script attempts some half hearted efforts at fleshing out Zora's backstory with lore about losing a partner on a recent mission or losing her mother - but these efforts are shallow. This is especially disappointing because Zora could have been the most internally conflicted character leading a morally and ethically ambiguous expedition to steal biological material. Virtually every other character is pretty thin - which isn't surprising as the script crams eight central characters from two plot threads and smooshes everyone together. There's simply not enough time or heart or brains to explore any of the heady or emotional beats - rendering 'Rebirth' as just a group of people running around an island, sometimes running away from killer dinos.
Final verdict: Welp, at least 'Rebirth' isn't as bland or silly as 'Fallen Kingdom' or 'Dominion.' But ‘Rebirth’ doesn’t revitalize the franchise - it just keeps the ‘Jurassic’ franchise on life support. In the spirit of Dr. Malcolm, the filmmakers were so preoccupied with whether they could make another ‘Jurassic’ movie that they didn’t stop to think if they should just let the franchise quietly go extinct.
Score: 2.5/5
'Jurassic World Rebirth' opens in theaters nationwide July 2. The action adventure has a runtime of 134 minutes and is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language and a drug reference.
