Reboots are nothing new in Hollywood. Milking nostalgia for the classic movies of the past to generate money in the present is, perhaps, the most common type of film we have now. But a reboot of a reboot is much more special. To be diplomatic, “special” is perhaps the kindest word that could be used to describe Jurassic World: Rebirth, the fourth and most recent Jurassic World film, and the seventh in the Jurassic Park franchise.
In real life, exterminating invasive species that damage natural ecosystems is established public policy.
As you may recall, at the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom there is an insane decision made to release dinosaurs into the world rather than kill them. Aside from the fact that there were small amounts of them from various species, almost certainly not enough breeding pairs to be genetically viable, somehow they’ve multiplied and have spread across the planet by Jurassic World: Dominion. And the humans just let them do it apparently. In real life, exterminating invasive species that damage natural ecosystems is established public policy. But we just have to assume that people in this world decided to ignore all of the environmental damage and danger to human well-being because dinosaurs are cool, I guess.
But, hold your horses. Rebirth tells us that the modern climate is not suited for dinosaurs, so after spreading across the world without issue, now they’ve all died off except for a few Caribbean islands. It’s such a shameless retcon you almost have to respect the brazenness of it. Maybe it’s a necessary step to correct the wacky choices of the previous Jurassic World films, but the premise is immersion-breaking.
“Immersion breaking” also applies to the thing that each subsequent Jurassic Park movie more and more urgently needs to address: why, after every previous attempt has ended in disaster, are people still trying to send expeditions into dinosaur territory? Do they not have access to the news? This time, the excuse is that despite dinosaurs having been ubiquitous for decades, a Big Pharmaceutical Company™ needs DNA from some of them to make a cure for heart disease.
But the most unbelievable thing about Rebirth is the notion, introduced with the subtlety of a gunshot in the opening of the film, that the public has grown bored with dinosaurs. The absurdity of that idea can be seen in the fact that the Jurassic Park franchise is still hugely successful despite not having produced a good movie in over 30 years.
I’m sure you can guess the plot without having even watched the film: people decide to go to an area with dinosaurs, things go wrong, some of them get eaten, and the survivors make an escape. Characters make bizarre and inexplicable decisions to split up. There’s a random family that gets roped into the story because they’re casually sailing through the part of the ocean that’s so restricted that the Big Pharmaceutical Company™ needed to hire a mercenary team at an extortionate rate to go there. Their plot is almost entirely separate from the main team, and their primary function seems to have been to facilitate a version of the T-Rex river raft scene from the original Jurassic Park book. Which, to be fair, was a good set piece. Shame about the story though.
The characters, too, are stale. The only one they even attempt to develop is Scarlett Johansson’s Zora. And listen, I’m not going to object to casting Scarlett Johannson in anything. Unfortunately, her character makes no sense. She’s verbally portrayed as a mercenary girlboss-style character who’s only in it for the money. Her “development” consists of being asked three times by Jonathan Bailey’s Dr. Henry Loomis about betraying the Big Pharmaceutical Company™ and publishing their heart disease cure as open source, forfeiting the massive payment that was originally agreed to. The first time she says no, the second time she says no after thinking a little bit longer, and then the third time she says yes. But the golden rule of storytelling is show, don’t tell, and what’s shown in her actions is always altruistic. She doesn’t ever betray another character for greed or power. She doesn’t ever fail because of a selfish choice, nor go through anything that would change her outlook on life. In short, there’s nothing about her actions that shows that she ever was the avaricious person the story tells you she is. The only change is how she superficially presents herself.
And then there’s the action. How does a Jurassic Park movie mess up the action? Like a drug junkie that needs a bigger and bigger dose to get the same high, this franchise keeps needing to up the ante with dinosaurs. Jurassic Park III introduced the Spinosaurus by unsubtly having it kill a T-Rex. Earlier Jurassic World films brought in genetically modified dinosaurs like the Indominus Rex and the Indoraptor. And now, we have mutant dinosaurs.
I take the argument that even in the original Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs weren’t really dinosaurs, but theme park monsters pieced together from bits of DNA from various creatures. But if it looks like a dinosaur, walks like a dinosaur, and sounds like a dinosaur… the facsimile of authenticity, even if feigned, was the selling point of Jurassic Park. It was a product they were selling, but it was going to sell only because people could buy that it was real.
Set aside how it doesn’t make sense for any of these mutants to have existed in the first place, set aside how it doesn’t make sense that they’d have been released and still been alive all these years later, these “dinosaurs” simply don’t pass the smell test as real things that you could accept existing. The Mutadons, a cross between raptors and pterodactyls, for some reason, look absurd and never come across as particularly intelligent or threatening the way Velociraptors did. The D-Rex looks more like Godzilla with radiation poisoning than a dinosaur of any sort.
In short, this is the worst Jurassic Park film yet, and that’s saying something. If you need something to scratch your dinosaur movie itch, I’d recommend you rewatch the original. I’d actually give the same advice to the writers of Jurassic World: Rebirth. Personally, my favorite scene is Ian Malcom’s famous monologue where he outlines the problem with Jurassic Park as a concept.
“I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you’re selling it… Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t start to think if they should.”
There’s a lesson there that you could just as easily apply to storytelling as to science. It’s a shame nobody at Universal has figured it out.
READ MORE from Stephan Kapustka:
How to Create a Mediocre Remake
As She Mulls Her Future, Kamala Harris is Withering on the Political Vine