After the vaguely haunted house-esque shenanigans of Fallen Kingdom and the inexplicable focus on crop-eating superlocusts in Dominion, it appears the powers behind the Jurassic Park movies decided that enough was enough with the nonsense conceits and things needed to get back to basics. So now we have Jurassic World: Rebirth, the seventh installment in a franchise that’s mostly a degraded clone of other, better entries (although much debate remains over whether any of them are any good after Spielberg’s original).
In the world of Rebirth, it’s now five years after the events of Dominion, which saw dinosaurs finally loose in the world at large. And even though that movie already basically ignored that idea, this latest entry brushes it aside entirely. Instead, we find that the dinos are dying off en masse due to climate change, and are now only really surviving in a stretch of equatorial islands. Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is a battle-hardened mercenary who is contracted by obvious Big Pharma scumbag Krebs (Rupert Friend) to head to one of those islands, where she’s to extract DNA from three specific hybrid dinosaur clones. It’s a pathway to treatment for all manner of illness, not to mention the assured massive profits. Zora recruits paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who, like all scientists who eventually find themselves trapped with the dinosaurs, simply longs to see them in person after years of study from afar (something which, yes, makes no sense in the context of this story — Loomis even says he studied under Alan Grant, Sam Neill’s character). Also along for the mission is Zora’s right-hand man Duncan (Mahershala Ali, getting that bag). Off we go.
Returning to the relatively simple structure of getting some folks stuck on an island with man-eating monsters would seem like a direct path to some cheap, chompy thrills, especially with original screenwriter David Koepp returning for script duties here. But Rebirth is unceremoniously bogged down by endless exposition that fails to lead to much meaningful monster activity. There’s an entire subplot about a civilian family that winds up stranded with our crew of badasses, which mostly means there are four extra characters who could have been excised completely from this movie without any material change — except, of course, that Universal wouldn’t be able to sell plush toys of the cute little baby dinosaur that gets adopted by the little girl. Spoiler alert: as a testament to how superfluous and inconsequential this all in, nobody even dies amidst the dino mayhem except for a couple of red-shirts and the bad guy. It’s an utter waste of time narratively.
The saving grace, such as it is, is director Gareth Edwards. While the filmmaker has always had relatively lousy taste in material, he has proven to be in possession of a tremendous sense of spectacle, and he’s dutifully experienced in melding digital VFX with practical elements. Together with DP John Mathieson, he’s concocted in Rebirth a lot of arresting images (many of them cribbed straight from Spielberg’s time on these islands) and wondrous sights; just look to a notable set piece that takes place in a Pteranodon nest, for example. But despite such visual delights, it’s tough to escape the problem of the story around all that stuff being complete vapor, and by the time we get to a finale featuring a bizarrely Giger-esque gigantor called the Distortus Rex (who comes up with this stuff?), it all just feels completely perfunctory. Even the characters in the film lament that the world doesn’t care about dinosaurs anymore. Rebirth makes a strong case that this franchise doesn’t either.
DIRECTOR: Gareth Edwards; CAST: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: July 2; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 14 min.
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