JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH
2025
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Written by David Koepp
Jurassic World Rebirth is a curious failure, which is distinct from its immediate predecessor, Jurassic World Dominion, which was an interesting failure, because at least reconstructing the reasons for the 2022 film's weird-ass, self-sabotaging shit could be, I believe, revealing of how readily franchises can get boxed in by their own unspoken rules; Rebirth's problems are less explicable but, just because they're mysterious, not so rewarding to suss out. Now, these movies are only failures subjectively—both of them made scads of money (indeed, from a financial perspective Rebirth was a ray of light in gloomy year at the box office, and I'll give it this much, it's the only act of IPsploitation that currently constitutes the top four highest-grossing American films this year that doesn't make me dry heave to think about it). Still, while Dominion must be reckoned "popular," I think it's safe to say Universal and Steven Spielberg had some qualms about its reception beyond pure box office—the fact that Rebirth was rushed headlong into production to shore up Universal's "basically a minor major again" release schedule likely militated in this direction as well—because after the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise-braiding and the efforts at actual closure that Dominion got up to, Rebirth was conceived as one decidedly back-to-basics exercise, in fact back-beyond-the-basics, so that it less resembles Jurassic Park (let alone any of the Jurassic Worlds) than it does the most heavily-streamlined film in the whole franchise, Jurassic Park III, despite having tapped David Koepp (the screenwriter of the original Jurassic Park as well as its first sequel, but not of Jurassic Park III) to do that conceiving.
This was pretty intriguing to me—Jurassic Park III is my second-favorite Jurassic Park movie (it might secretly be my favorite Jurassic Park movie, but at a minimum the only other one I think is good), precisely because of its stripped-down "lost world adventure that could've been made in its essentials in the 1930s and is only even a Jurassic Park movie because Sam Neill's in it" quality—and to level with you, the main reason I didn't contribute to its box office is because I was so very reluctant to do franchise catch-up with Dominion, which is what you'd call "a prison of my own making." It is, however, just as well: whatever your feelings about Jurassic Park III, and I know it's not widely considered "a good one," I think you would have to like Rebirth less; imagine Jurassic Park III with about the same number of dinosaur setpieces but 41 minutes longer, and taking Jurassic Park III's streamlining and turning it into full-on genericizing flatness, while never coming close to anchoring itself to a performance of the same caliber as Neill's in Jurassic Park III and, again, that's true no matter how you rate Jurassic Park III.
"Jurassic Park III's streamlining" I compared it to, as if this isn't, like, the opposite of streamlining. This is an utterly basic scenario, stretched to 133 minutes out of some perceived requirement, which apparently isn't what actually happened (the studio and Spielberg had even required director Gareth Edwards to bring in a sub-two hour movie, and he delivered a 119 minute cut, then they said "oh, nm" for no obvious reason). It feels like what happened.
A little annoyingly, it doesn't even feel like this at first; it gets started as quickly as you'd like it to, jamming a pointed and amusing retcon of Colin Trevorrow's would-be franchise-capping gestures in Dominion in barely more time than it takes to describe, first with a title card that brusquely informs us that, actually, those dinosaurs we saw in the goofy-but-well-intentioned coda of Dominion, integrating themselves into the Holocene ecological landscape to live free and multiply, obviously all died off except in a few isolated tropical refugia, and next in an image pulling double-duty as an homage to the 1925 Lost World, of a sad escapee from a sauropod preserve that's wandered right into the big city but isn't capable of effecting more than a particularly-gnarled traffic jam and will probably wind up euthanized. (Before either of these, we've gotten a prologue reminding us of InGen's general despicability, but mostly to set up the climactic threat of one of the deliberately-created carnival sideshows that started getting trotted out as of Jurassic World, a "Distortus rex," though I don't think that name is said in the movie. I don't absolutely hate this one like I have the other ones—I mean, Jurassic World's "showpiece" was a custom dinosaur that, uh, turned invisible—though it would probably work better as a "genuine mistake," even more freakish and deformed, perhaps actually asymmetrical. Still, "quadrupedal xenomorph thing with extra t-rex manipulator arms" is not un-freakish. As for how this prologue works, I appreciate the solid color horror lighting that attends the dino-monster escape that caused InGen to abandon this whole island—I think we're up to "Site C," now, yes?—though the particular means is pretty risible, and the Snickers product placement that's the reason for the escape should've been switched with the Altoids product placement that's a gratingly major factor in the rest of the movie, inasmuch as a metal Altoids box might have obstructed the tracks of a sliding door in a way I don't believe a 20 micrometer plastic wrapper actually would, whereas the "use" the Altoids get put to, which is killing time, would dovetail better with that whole "need a minute [while dinosaurs murder your compatriots]?" marketing campaign that Snickers has. I would suspect Altoids would make for effective dino-poison; though maybe not, because I also strongly suspect they could smell a notably-pungent food product from some distance away.)
Anyway, there's a moment very early on in Rebirth that made me grin from ear to ear with delight, which was the only time I had anything like that extreme a positive reaction to anything here (and it undoubtedly would not work if I ever watched it again), and it's not even dinosaurs, it's just a piece of expositional dialogue, which purports to be about explaining why our heroes are on a quest to the new dino-island, to obtain biological samples from animals that have basically Goddamn nothing whatsoever to do with one another—a saurischian, a pterosaur, and a squamate—while in reality it exists solely to tell you that we're gonna have this setpiece (on the land!), and that setpiece (in the sea!), and this other setpiece (in the air!), with the most flashily-insincere pretense of making sense of why this must be so, and it made me giddy with anticipation that finally a Jurassic World movie "gets it" or, at least, gets why I might want to watch it, and it's going to get to it, fast. It turns out it could've literally started half an hour later and the movie would probably only be improved, if maybe not entirely saved.
So those heroes—or, at this point, these antiheroes (will they remain so? shall perfunctory character arcs not happen to them?)—agglomerate around Bennett (Scarlett Johannsen), a mercenary hired by a smarmy Big Pharm sleazebag, Klebs (Rupert Friend), to lead an incursion onto the forbidden island of dinosaurs. Klebs personally recruits paleontologist Dr. Loomis (not that one; Jonathan Bailey) as their subject matter expert, suborning this square museum administrator who will at every single turn grandstand about it, but he accepts the payday because the fad cycle has rendered his field so desolate and hard-up he needs it (this being more a re-evocation of the deeply-unappealing metacurrent about cinema that's been in this franchise since Jurassic World rather than something that seems likely in this world). Bennett is allowed to pick the rest of her associates, who number, let's say, four, but the only one who isn't obviously there to be rapidly killed to establish some minimal amount of stakes is Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), shady boat captain. And fair enough, it's a mission movie, and now they've got their mission: they venture out to the dino-island intent on jamming big sci-fi needle-gadgets into a mosasaur, a titanosaur, and a queztalcoatlus, in order to acquire those aforementioned biological samples which in turn will let Novo Nordisk cure heart disease somehow. You know what would be an actual twist? If this just happened, since "just happening," or the details inherent to it, are the only thing the movie's actually for. You can retain this capitalist art's insistence on a socialistic happy ending if you want; the pharma exec is obviously going to die one way or another.
Nothing about that sounds too inefficient yet, probably—it's the part that might benefit from being a little more inefficient, maybe not, but either way these are some extremely hasty character sketches filling functional roles (if that). If the question occurred to you, "is Johannsen just doing Black Widow, arguably not a very interesting performance or character, even within those films' context, again?", that is the correct question, and the correct answer is "yes," and she's pretty clearly still the best in the ensemble. Ali has got nothing to do except intermittently nurture a grief arc for a kid or something and engage in an astonishingly terrible "climactic sacrifice" that feels like the seams of the reshoots from when they told them the black guy couldn't die just so the attractive white couple could sail off into the sunset were left in intentionally (possibly even emphasized to be as obvious as possible), out of sheer resentment at the imposition. (I'd probably have sacrificed Bennett; I'd probably have put Bennett and Kincaid at loggerheads; if drama was demanded of me, I'd probably have tried to come up with something.) Friend, you shan't be shocked to learn, plays it venal, though somehow even his turn into cackling evil doesn't feel supported—the mid-film reveal to the audience of Klebs's malignity is underplayed as opportunism, that is barely distinguishable from just regular cowardice, and is not entirely distinguishable from pique. Hell, I'd also be a little annoyed to be asked to save the ingrate who keeps trying to fuck up my secret illegal mission, which he elects not to do. Nevertheless, since unlike his collection of soldiers of fortune and drug smugglers and general-issue babykillers, the salaryman is the only one who remembered to carry a sidearm when heading to the dinosaur island; therefore, he's the only person in the movie who's not a moron, which is a point in his favor. Bailey, for his part, is playing his self-righteous nerd as an irritatingly self-righteous nerd, who does not seem to have internalized he is on a secret illegal mission; and if there's at least something not completely unwanted about the pretty paleontologist offering the pretty mercenary a fresh worldview, it's the only thing in the script that even works as boilerplate. I guess I'll mention that Jurassic Park III had wacky character actors and a tarzan boy, and I'll repeat that it had Sam Neill being ornery, which afforded it some humanity.
You might be aware that I've only gotten through about half of Rebirth's cast—if you're not aware, you'll wonder why those four plus the deadmeat tertiary cast from the boat aren't enough—and this is where Koepp swerves into anti-efficiency, like his fee was calculated per minute-of-runtime or something, by way of the Delgado family (Manuel Garcia Rulfo, Luna Blaise, and Audrina Miranda) and the elder daughter's boyfriend (David Iacono), who get shipwrecked by a mosasaur and retrieved by the reluctant rescuers of Kincaid's vessel (mercenaries on secret illegal missions are always eager to help; then again, I don't really know what the urgency is, the dinosaurs will still be there tomorrow, and they're all on a flat fee). Anyway, the Delgados are dire, characterized by how each is annoying in a different register—boring dad who constantly sounds more like he just woke up than he's battling dinosaurs; screeching elder daughter; younger daughter who kidnaps a toyetic baby ceratopsian that likes being petted, without accruing the consequences even The Lost World: Jurassic Park could gin up for such acts of human caprice; a literally unbelievably smug and asinine boyfriend—and by how slow-on-the-uptake they are, even when still on the boat, and by some of the worst dialogue Koepp has ever written, notably a bafflingly meandering "one-liner" comparing the vast forest before them to the deathbeds of the aged.
None of that is as bad as how this impacts Rebirth structurally—the Delgados get rescued, the boat is attacked by a mosasaur and is forced to ground, the Delgados are separated from our initial cast as soon as they've met them and spend nearly the whole remainder of the film doing their own anabasis—with what amounts to an entirely parallel movie starting at the forty minute mark of a movie that is self-evidently too long already, given that, disregarding the glimpsed horror of the prologue, we've only just now gotten a dinosaur sequence in this dinosaur movie. I don't know what's happened to Koepp's craft over this past decade, but this is just really unacceptable; and it should also be emphasized what a safe fucking movie this is, and I know Jurassic Park III didn't turn out to be any more "dangerous," objectively, but it could feel like it was, maybe as a result of those 42 superfluous minutes it doesn't possess.
Edwards isn't moving it quickly, either (unaccountably, he's an avowed fan of Jurassic Park III), and even if he's arguably pacing it better than it deserves, it's kind of hard to see the once-exciting popcorn filmmaker behind Godzilla and Rogue One in this (though at least it's a damn sight better than The Creator, a reasonable candidate for the worst release of 2023). It's maybe not impossible to see that filmmaker, and there are some things I like, some more theoretically and some more concretely. Edwards (and Koepp) decided to keep the raptors well out of this one, which sounds good though their ambient menace isn't really replaced with much of anything; then again, also theoretically, dropping the keenness of the ambient menace of a dinosaur island is a good thing, or at least sounds good on paper, and does have some good results, especially the Delgados blundering across a t-rex that's taking a nap instead of being actively malevolent, which involves a very nice little "obstruction/where'd she go?!" gag, though the entire setpiece can feel like it's being forced to happen more than either the Delgados or the t-rex need to have this conflict. Still, there's enough dinosaurs hanging out to create an effect, that I appreciate intellectually, that these are animals in an ecosystem, rather than villains heedlessly pursuing some grudge-to-the-death against humanity for creating them. And it has some space for wonderment: there's a cloying reveal of courting titanosaurs (guy loves his monsters a-courting) that, on one hand, says Edwards's previous mastery of scale has attenuated (how these 65 foot behemoths are concealed by the lay of a field is hard to conceptualize, except through editing), but on the other hand totally works as a great big heartswell. (I am slightly off-put by the design of their whip-tails, but this is as good a point as any to note that despite cost estimates ranging to less than half as much as Dominion, it has much better, and more consistently-good, CGI dinosaurs, and this, like the likeable daytime cinematography and well-disciplined nights, remains a constant for Edwards, even in his terrible movies.)
The big sea and air setpieces don't have as much to recommend them, on average; the prefatory mosasaur hunt that precedes the mercs' shipwreck is very solid with an eye for Spielbergian detail (it homages Jaws, sure, but Johanssen's stunt double dangled over a shallow mosasaur narrowing its eye in anger is great), but the vengeful counterattack has way too many moving parts thanks to the stupid Delgados and threatens to descend into chaotic slop ("mutualism!" cries Loomis of the mosasaur's spinosaur henchmen, which feels like it should at least be insane enough to be fun, but it's desultory instead). Even so, the quetzalcoatlus hunt down a cliff face and into its nest in an ancient temple ruin—so you had access to "hoary jungle adventure" mode this whole time? that's ridiculous, gimme more—is indeed genuinely fun, with just enough moving parts and well-constructed escalation, and it's the only time a death feels built-up to through good thrillmaking instincts, even if it is, as always, just one of the nobodies. The d-rex finale isn't outrageously bad, but at a certain point "scale" just changes the genre—"oops, I made a shoddier version of my own Godzilla"—and I wouldn't blame anybody for rejecting it out of hand as so "un-Jurassic Park" it has no business being here. (And while I said there are no raptors, if you're going to replace them with ptero-raptor hybrids anyhow, maybe just... do the raptors. Or the pterosaurs!) Two fully-accomplished action-adventure scenes, neither of which is even the climax, is a pretty thin reed for an action-adventure movie to hold onto, I think, and especially here in Jurassic World Rebirth, which feels like the no-budget B-movie someone made in the 1960s, that needed to pad itself to asphyxiation just to get a bare feature's length around its two good action-adventure scenes, except it's not low-budget, and it's a damn sight longer than "feature's length."
Score: 5/10
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