RATING
Director(s): Gareth Edwards
Country: United States
Author: Michael Crichton, David Koepp
Actor(s): Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonatha Bailey
Written by Tom Augustine
Much like Richard Attenborough’s God-complex billionaire Hammond in the original Jurassic Park, you’d think the studio heads continually resurrecting the franchise would have learned their lesson by now. There have been seven Jurassic films, and exactly one that is widely considered to be Actually Good — there are fans of other entries in the property, particularly original visionary Steven Spielberg’s second go-round The Lost World, but they are all cult items at best. There are far more entries that have been utterly loathed — particularly the hideous reboot trilogy that, tellingly, switched out the ‘Park’ in Jurassic Park for ‘World’. The Jurassic World films, which hitched onto the Chris Pratt ascendancy of the 2010s to their detriment, were an outwardly cynical attempt to bring the series into the modern-day, which in the waning days of the Obama-era and the beginning of the Trump era looked like soulless Marvel-style quippery fused with whole lot of fan-service. Worst was the new films’ attempted meta streak, commenting on the series’ own inherent ridiculousness and subsequently draining it of any joy. The first Jurassic World was so dire it took me years to give Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom a go (I shouldn’t have). By the time Jurassic World: Dominion lumbered into theatres, bringing back the original cast trio of Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, I felt confident I could skip it entirely — seemingly the right call. With each successive failure, the remarkable aspects of the original shone brighter: it was lightning in a bottle, perhaps the truest testament to what Spielberg was (and sometimes still is) capable of achieving — it’s not his best blockbuster (that title still arguably belongs to Jaws), but it’s the one that felt like a peak, of sorts, a machine thrumming at its highest frequency.
The fumes that the rest of the series have been huffing for decades now still have plenty of nostalgic pull, too: the Jurassic films are some of the most reliable money-makers in the business. Thus, even as the well has long run dry, the machine has chugged onward, and the desperate attempts to lure in new audiences within the world of the series reflect ever more the desperate attempts to sell to us, too: namely, in introducing ‘hybrid’, ‘mutated’ dinosaurs, experiments gone wrong that wreak havoc — because the only thing scarier than a T-Rex apparently is a mega-T-rex. To my mind, this is a misreading of what really works in Jurassic Park — the wonder of natural history, born again in a way that is both unholy and utterly transfixing. It was Neill’s Alan Grant, as much as the dinosaurs, that sold the magic of the moment he beheld the Brontosaurus for the first time — that sense of impossible wonder has long been lost. What’s left without it is hard to quantify, because there really isn’t much there at all. Increasingly, I doubt even Spielberg himself could find something interesting to do in this sandbox anymore: though many lesser directors seem eager to try. The latest is Gareth Edwards, who vaulted from the microbudget Monsters into megabudget properties before really honing his storytelling ability. A gifted visualist, Edwards has brought his expansive sensibility to the Godzilla franchise with the 2014 reboot and Star Wars with his troubled, hamstrung Rogue One. His last film was The Creator, the rare original blockbuster that squandered the opportunity with Edwards’ now customary inability to execute a satisfying narrative, no matter how impressive or intricate the imagery involved. Edwards’ career up to now has been littered with zeitgeisty images — those iconic red flares deployed by parachutists dropping into Godzilla’s disaster zone; the tropical warzone of Rogue One — but in watching these films, said moments are undercut by a story that struggles to get us to care.
After the dismal failure of the previous Jurassic World trilogy, director Gareth Edwards attempts to resurrect the tired bones of the mega-popular dinosaur franchise once again with this reboot. Equipped with a starry new cast, it is a handsome-looking blockbuster that nevertheless falls flat through dismal plotting and the inescapable feeling of covering ground already well trod.
Edwards can now add Jurassic World: Rebirth to that motley crew — though Rebirth arguably comes closer to the Spielberg flavour than Colin Trevorrow’s efforts in the previous trilogy. Scarlett Johansson, in autopilot, stars as Zora, a mercenary who is hired by Rupert Friend’s shady businessman to lead a team on an expedition into dino territory (in the world of Rebirth, dinosaurs have largely migrated to a few spots around the equator where it’s warmest) to collect samples from the three largest dinosaurs — the water-based Mosasaur, the airborne Quetzalcoatlus, and the land-based Titanosaurus. What they’re seeking are vials of blood from living dinosaurs for the scientifically dubious reasoning that the size of the dinosaur hearts will help researchers find a cure to human heart disease. Meanwhile, in the same waters, a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) has unwittingly led his two daughters into dinosaur-rich waters, their yacht overturned by the same Mosasaur Zora and her team are hunting, putting the two on an inescapable collision course. It is pure pulp through and through — original Park screenwriter David Koepp, slumming it, barely bothers to justify the silliness of the quest, which would be fine if Edwards was attuned to the scuzzy necessities of such a story. But Edwards is committed to chasing the Spielberg high — handsome expansiveness, an air of desperation clogging repeated attempts to recall and remix iconic moments of the original. To his credit, the film looks wonderful — Edwards has committed to real-world locations, which is key to ensuring the visual effects land and feel less weightless. Would Rebirth have been better if it had maintained some element of the animatronics of the original rather than the diminishing returns of CGI? Probably, but Edwards does a better job visually than the other Worlds can attest to, at the least. The first act, Rebirth’s strongest, draws tension from its sun-drenched tropical oceanscape, recalling Jaws in the strongest Spielberg ode of many in the film.
Following that promising start, one watches the wheels fall off in slow-motion. By the time the team crash land on the island they’re seeking, we get a sense of the energy and momentum of the story flagging. It doesn’t help that the assembled ensemble are turning in some of the most charisma-free, commitment-phobic performances I’ve seen in a blockbuster in years. Johansson, whose character frequently jokes about not getting enough money for the operation gone awry, is given very little to work with and doesn’t seem inclined to inject any personality of her own into the role either. Of her band of friendly mercenaries(?), the best is Jonathan Bailey as Dr Loomis, the one scientist in the team and the only genuine dinosaur lover among the congregation. Bailey, who largely impressed in Wicked: Part One earlier this year, is the only interesting or likeable character, a traditional ‘hot nerd’ who is nonplussed at the lack of enthusiasm for revived prehistoric lizards that everyone else in the company, and the world at large, demonstrate. The rest are barely worth mentioning — even Mahershala Ali, a face I could watch for hours, is totally adrift here as yet another mercenary, giving us virtually nothing of note for the entire runtime. Worst are the family, whose sequences are entirely perfunctory, adding nothing of value except for the (one assumes, studio-mandated) grafting in of cute children being menaced by big, sharptoothed creatures. Theirs is a panoply of scenes of grating, funny-adjacent dialogue intermingled with plot conveniences and useless sequences of adventure (another scene involving a T-Rex and an inflatable raft feels rammed into the story for the express reason that a Jurassic movie must have a T-Rex, even if there’s no real reason for it to be there). By the time an eye-rollingly cutesy mini-dino named Dolores starts following the family around (at perfect shin-height for punting, which I wished someone would do at multiple junctures), it feels as though Rebirth can’t even be bothered trying to disguise the creature’s purpose as simple merchandising fodder. As with so many other by-the-numbers, committee and test-audience-led blockbuster products of the modern era, the final note one leaves with is exhaustion, another eerie echo of the film’s text. Who would have imagined we’d live in a world where dinosaurs were boring?
Jurassic World: Rebirth is in cinemas now.