Jay Rohr
Jurassic World: Rebirth has everything going for it. The cast is led by two award-winning performers. Director Gareth Edwards has technically already made this movie, so he only needs to keep a steady hand on the helm. Meanwhile, there are decades of franchise history laying out a formula for success, propped up by millions of dollars in high quality visual effects. Yet, Jurassic World: Rebirth couldn’t be more dismal.
The movie opens by lumbering into two storylines. The primary plot involves a shady pharmaceutical company that needs dinosaur blood samples for a revolutionary cure. To that end, they hire a team of mercenaries to collect dino DNA from the forbidden zone the remaining animals occupy. The adjacent plot involves a grumpy dad on a sailing trip with his two daughters. The eldest young lady has brought along her loser boyfriend, presumably for comic relief, although he’s as funny as food poisoning. These two groups become entangled, shipwrecked together, separated, and conveniently reunite in time for the big finale.
Jurassic World: Rebirth feels like two films jammed together for no apparent reason. Each could have been a standalone picture. Neither narrative requires the other to reach its conclusions. The result is a motion picture unnecessarily pinballing from one plot to another.
That would be okay if Jurassic World: Rebirth was jumping between different types of action. This, of course, assumes there’re any thrills in the whole feature. Not only does Rebirth seem designed to have as little dinosaur mayhem as possible, the bits it does include are wildly underwhelming. At worst, it features poorly performed stunts during predictable calamities that rarely have an air of danger. Jurassic World: Rebirth easily has the highest survival rate in the franchise. Those who do experience demise by dino induce more yawns than terror.
Maybe if the movie bothered to build any of the roles into people that might not be the case. The best characters in Jurassic World: Rebirth are one dimensional. The rest are a bare minimum assortment of adjectives. Grumpy dad and his snarky eldest daughter have a conversation at one point that solidifies more backstory for the boat they’re sailing than their own family dynamic. The “best” roles are then left to award-winning performers Mahershala Ali (Green Book) and Scarlett Johansson (The Phoenician Scheme).
As leader of the mercenary pack, Johansson makes an interesting choice to play her part as if she’s the most dangerous member of the Orange County PTA. Furthermore, she’s supposed to be a broken, cynical individual yet Johansson and her cohorts come across like compies who ate the canary. Mahershala Ali, meanwhile, delivers Guy Who Drives the Boat He Owns. Granted, there is one scene where the two are meant to flex their acting muscles, creating some depth for the audience to connect to. What results are a recitation of clichés that feels like a chance to hit the bathroom rather than any reason to get to know these characters.
Jurassic World: Rebirth delivers most of its details in painfully repetitive exposition dumps. The opening twenty minutes involves no less than three retellings of the primary plot line. Any time the movie wants to explore a theme someone monologues. Most of the movie’s deeper notions are touched upon in passing, but audiences are never given a reason to dwell on anything mentioned. It’s as if Jurassic World: Rebirth is trying to piggyback on the themes of the previous pictures rather than reexamining them in interesting new ways or present fresh ideas. As such, viewers receive a trite film about humanity’s hubris, untamable nature, and the evils of big pharma.
Furthermore, there’s rarely a sense of anything happening organically. The plots are thoroughly contrived. The appearances of dinosaurs feel more like cued arrivals than encounters. In addition, the film’s own logic is annoyingly dumb. I can’t fully explain that last one without spoiling parts of the movie, but there are moments, from the very beginning, which insult the audience with the expectation viewers should just go with it.
Whenever something epic occurs, the music will let you know. The score is an assortment of nostalgia baiting arrangements courtesy of Academy award-winning composer Alexandre Desplat. Orchestral flares will blast the ears demanding snoozing movie goers wake up to appreciate the more majestic scenes. These include various homages to previous parts of the franchise which inadvertently highlight how awe-inspiring Jurassic World: Rebirth isn’t rather than recapture the magic of earlier flicks, especially the first film.
And all of this would be fine if the action-adventure aspect of the movie contained any action or adventure. That said, full disclosure requires me to admit I cannot fully state what happens during the big finale. I nodded off like a junkie full of Demerol while maximum dino mayhem ensued. Despite being cacophonously loud, the supposedly epic end was that boring.
Frankly, it was the exhaustion of forcing myself to endure all two hours and fourteen minutes of this road to nowhere. No film makes a better case for the extinction of the franchise than Jurassic World: Rebirth. It wastes every ounce of potential to deliver nothing remotely interesting. I can’t even recommend this as dumb fun.
Jurassic World: Rebirth epically packs a staggering amount of failure into one motion picture. It’s almost as if the goal was to make a worse movie than Jurassic World: Dominion, currently at 29% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s the only way this flick can be viewed as a success; it won whatever sick, twisted bet allowed it into existence, aspiring to be the worst.
Bad reviews didn’t stop Dominion from robbing audiences of a billion dollars. The only thing that may prevent Rebirth from doing the same is that there isn’t any dumb fun action to delight audiences. Director Gareth Edwards should easily have been able to use elements he composed splendidly in Godzilla (2014), Monsters (2010), and Rogue One (2016) to make something mildly amusing. Instead, we get Dilophosaurus spit right in the eyes.
