Rogue One director Gareth Edwards takes over for the Scarlett Johansson-versus-dinosaurs sequel, Jurassic World Rebirth. Our review:
The villain in Jurassic Park isn’t the dinosaurs or the science that brings them back from the grave – it’s the pursuit of profit. In Michael Crichton’s novel and the movies that followed, we’ve repeatedly seen how greed taints everything. As the rather less sympathetic version of John Hammond said in the original book, “Nothing is going to stop me from opening Jurassic Park to all the children of the world… Or, at least, to the rich ones.”
Inevitably, commerce plays a part in the Jurassic franchise’s own existence, and the conundrum for any sequel is how it justifies its making beyond a studio’s desire to generate more cash. The series already faced this multiple times: first in the immediate follow-ups directed by Steven Spielberg and Joe Johnston, and later in Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World trilogy which began in 2015.
Now comes British director Gareth Edwards to reboot the 32 year-old franchise a second time. He’s no stranger to making blockbuster films: he’s previously brought his background in special effects to Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). For Rebirth, he’s tethered the budget and scale of those films to the travelogue feel of his non-franchise work: the indie debut Monsters (2010) and sci-fi thriller The Creator (2023). The result is a thoroughly entertaining adventure – one that doesn’t certainly doesn’t reinvent the franchise, but provides more than enough spectacle, heart and humour to make it worth the cost of a ticket.
The first thing Rebirth does is solve a problem that the earlier Jurassic World films painted themselves into: by the last entry in Trevorrow’s trio, dinosaurs had become as ubiquitous as mobile phones. And once you’d seen Chris Pratt confront a velociraptor, his arms flung wide for the dozenth time in Jurassic World Dominion, there was a growing sense that a fresh pair of eyes was needed.
To this end, Universal (and Amblin) have brought back the first two films’ screenwriter David Koepp to fashion a new story: one in which climate change and disease has seen dinosaur populations collapse across much of the planet. The only place they still thrive is around the muggy equator, where the world’s governments have created an exclusion zone which humans are forbidden from entering.
In this scenario, why would anyone venture to a dinosaur infested place like Ile Saint-Hubert, a leafy island – and former InGen gene-splicing lab – in the middle of the Caribbean? Along comes Big Pharma exec Martin Krebs (a slick-and-sleazy Rupert Friend) to provide the answer. His company’s scientists have figured out that a cure to heart disease might be found in dinosaur DNA – the catch being that to create that cure, someone will need to track down three giant reptiles and take blood samples from each.
Krebs therefore assembles his team, among them hardened mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), paleontologist Dr Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and soldier turned ship’s captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali). Krebs explains that the resulting medical breakthrough could be worth billions, and he’s willing to pay big money to get the personnel: Bennett is certainly tempted when a salary of $10m is dangled in front of her. Their mission is legally suspect, though, which makes Jurassic World Rebirth essentially a heist movie with stompy sauropods.
On their journey across the high seas, the group also picks up a weapons expert in a tight shirt played by Ed Skrein, and a family whose boat has capsized under sea monster circumstances, meaning we get a moustachioed father figure (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a cute daughter (Audrina Miranda), an older daughter (Luna Blaise) and the latter’s stoner boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono) along for the ride. In other words, Koepp makes sure to include characters of multiple ages and backgrounds to maximise Rebirth’s four-quadrant appeal.
As cynical as that might sound, at least in this grumpy writer’s rendering of it, Rebirth unfolds with a guileless charm that makes it easy to forgive the occasional jab of product placement (Snickers bars play a surprisingly key role). Edwards is an ideal fit for a film like this. His earlier films have shown off his ability to create a sense of scale and atmosphere, whether it’s the giant aliens that haunt the background of his debut, Monsters, or the silhouettes of iconic kaiju looming out of smoke and dust in Godzilla. Edwards appears to make subtle nods to both of those earlier movies in a handful of scenes – one involving amorous dinosaurs, others taking in a petrol station and a benighted jetty.
There’s real creativity in some of the action set pieces, too. There’s a quite spectacular underwater shot of a character dwarfed by the belly of a gigantic boat rolling over above him. A set-piece involving a sleepy alpha predator and a character trying to spirit away a banana-coloured dinghy, manages to be playful and tense at the same time.
Far from treating this as some work-for-hire assignment, Edwards exudes an an awe and affection for its lumbering dinosaurs that is entirely of a piece with the Amblin house style perfected by Spielberg, or the rousing Jurassic Park theme by John Williams, here revived and embellished by composer Alexandre Desplat.
As he did with Monsters and The Creator, Edwards shot portions of Rebirth on real locations in such locales as Thailand and Panama, and it’s a choice that helps ground the CGI effects in a certain level of sweaty, muddy authenticity. Given how good Rebirth looks, it’s all the more impressive how little time everyone concerned had to pull it together; the footage was shot last June, and post-production lasted a matter of months. (John Wick director David Leitch was originally set to direct; when he left, Edwards hurriedly took his place.)
The problems with Rebirth are rooted in the reality of its age: seven films in, there are only so many things you can do with dinosaurs without repeating yourself, at least within the constraints of a 12A certificate. This is also the second time the franchise has made meta references to audience apathy: Rebirth’s characters talk about the public’s weariness with big lizards, and how InGen scientists had started gene-splicing together freakish new creatures to try to attract customers back to its theme parks – something Jurassic World brought up a decade ago.
While there’s much in Rebirth that feels familiar, its characters have a spark that keeps the MacGuffin-hunting plot tripping along. Johansson gets some action stuff to do – firing off some neat blood-collecting gadgetry from a sniper rifle, abseiling down a cliff – but it’s the secondary characters who give the film its colour. Iacono’s Xavier is that rarest of things: a comic relief figure who isn’t also thoroughly annoying, and even gets something of a character arc. Bailey’s Loomis is the film’s moral conscience, slipping in some welcome anti-Big Pharma sentiments that continue the Jurassic franchise’s ‘corporate greed is bad’ theme. Loomis’s boyish joy at seeing dinosaurs roam about in the wild is also truly infectious.
Rebirth isn’t top-tier Jurassic, but then, barring a studio throwing caution to the wind and trying something truly radical, it was always going to be akin to a Universal theme park ride: technically impressive and entertaining, but also somewhat on rails. At the same time, the introduction of a new team of filmmakers has at least infused a renewed sense of energy into the long-running series.
Rebirth revels in its status as a B-movie writ large – the theme parks of the earlier films are long gone, so we’re now in the realm of The Lost World (the Conan Doyle one, not the Spielberg one) or The Land That Time Forgot. It’s a swashbuckling, rip-roaring adventure realm that Edwards and his crew dive into with evident glee.
Jurassic World Rebirth is in UK cinemas from the 2nd July.
