The seventh in the Jurassic series launched so majestically by Steven Spielberg in 1993 might not be quite the Rebirth its title promises, but thankfully, it’s also not a stillbirth. It’s a title well chosen; after the disappointing and deadening experiences of Fallen Kingdom and Dominion, the series has chosen, quite deliberately, to go back to its roots.
Original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp is back on board, and Gareth Edwards is behind the camera to restore the series’ sense of awe and to remind us just why we’re all so fascinated by dinosaurs and how powerful and formidable they can be on screen when they’re treated with the reverence they deserve. The human characters? Ahhhh…
We’ve (thankfully) moved on since the events of Dominion, and dinosaurs are now a bit passé; the public has long since lost interest. The creatures are now relocated to more suitable Equatorial areas (the film feels the need to dump this bit of info on us several times in the first fifteen minutes), which are off-limits to civilians for reasons largely to do with the risk of dinosaurs eating people.
Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), greedy representative of pharmaceutical company ParkerGenix, recruits former mercenaries Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali in a fairly thankless role), along with speccy mint-munching paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), to travel to Saint-Hubert, a secret (and hitherto totally unmentioned) island formerly used by InGen for the purposes of creating new mutant breeds of dinosaurs (a project that did not end well, leading to the mutations roaming free, as we see in the opening sequence).
ParkerGenix has determined that blood samples from several dominant dinosaur species can be synthesised into drugs that can prolong life by curing debilitating or fatal heart conditions. Meanwhile – and never has the word been more appropriate – Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is taking his young daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda), his older daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise) and her feckless boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) on a bonding sailing trip into forbidden dinosaur-infested waters. How? Why? Who knows!
Inevitably, the Delgados are in trouble almost immediately, their boat capsized by a giant mosasaurus. Fortunately, ScarJo and her team answer their distress call, but before long, of course, they all find themselves washed up on the jungle island teeming with all our old familiar dinosaur friends and a few new ugly-buglies too. To borrow from Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm – that’s how it starts; then later there’s running and screaming.
Jurassic World Rebirth is cookie-cutter summer blockbuster fare by any other name, and it does exactly what you might expect, but with more respect for the origins of the series than the two most recent travesties. There are a couple of wry visual references to the original film early on that pretty much warn us what to expect here, and the beats the film moves through are welcomed back like long-lost old friends.
But the film struggles during the first forty-odd minutes as Koepp does his best to establish and make us invest in his characters. Frankly, they’re so paper-thin they’re virtually transparent, and attempts at giving them depth and backstory are the dictionary definition of perfunctory – a couple of sob stories for ScarJo and Mahershala Ali are waved aside and forgotten and never referenced again.
None of this really matters, though, when the film cranks into high gear and Edwards gives us what we came here to see: fabulous dinosaurs in their natural environment, hunting, killing, and instilling absolute terror in the shipwrecked adventurers. All our old favourites are here – the stand-out sequence involving a T-rex is breathtaking and there are cameos from pterodactyl-like birds, a couple of raptors, and that spitting thing with the inflating red hood (possibly not its scientific name). The genetically created beasts rock up in the last act, and they are, as we might have expected, grotesque and massive and voracious.
In the final analysis, Jurassic World Rebirth does absolutely nothing we’ve not seen in the series before, and some may find its thin characters and derivative, by-the-numbers storytelling annoying and desperately simplistic. But Edwards and Koepp have honed in on what fans of this series really want, and more specifically, what they don’t want (as evidenced by the last poorly received films), and tried to take audiences back to 1993 when this was all new. We were oohing and ahhing along with everyone else.
But it’s not 1993 and we’re in danger of becoming a bit blasé about dinosaurs now, so while this new movie is very much a (cynical?) laser-focused reset to what made the series such a blast in its early years, it’s hard not to be swept up by the heady adrenaline rush of the slew of close encounters of the snapping-jawed kind that punctuate the film once the sludgy first act is out of the way. Just this once, why not turn off those highly-honed critical faculties and lose yourself in a big, blousy, old-fashioned monster movie directed with flair and filled with genuine old school thrills ’n’ spills? Seems this series isn’t quite ready to go extinct just yet after all…
JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH is in cinemas now.
