Jurassic World Rebirth follows a group of scientists and soldiers who need to extract the blood of dinosaurs to synthesize a cure-all drug for heart disease.Jasin Boland/The Associated Press
Jurassic World Rebirth
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Written by David Koepp
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali
Classification PG; 134 minutes
Opens in theatres July 2
There is a wonderfully unintentional metaphor baked into the bones of the magnificently awful new Jurassic Park sequel.
Mostly, Jurassic World Rebirth (no colon apparently needed) follows a group of scientists and soldiers of fortune who need to extract the blood of the biggest dinosaurs on Earth in order to synthesize a cure-all drug for heart disease. In order to do that, either lead sexy nerd Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) or lead sexy mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) must shoot a gigantic hypodermic needle into the flesh of the beasts, their mission’s success only confirmed once the vial is full of enough crimson gold to satisfy their Big Pharma bosses back home.
If this was screenwriter David Koepp’s attempt to comment on the vampiric whims of his Jurassic paymasters – producers who will thoughtlessly suck the blood of their franchise dry for the chance to reap millions – then his parasitic analogy eventually bursts into a splatter of nothingness, given just how anemic the rest of his screenplay turns out to be. Rebirth? This is a burial.
Arriving barely three years after the stupid but serviceable Jurassic World Dominion (Universal Pictures, do you guys need to hire a copy editor, or do you just really hate colons?), this semi-sequel will make even the most hardcore of dinophiles long for the days when Chris Pratt deployed a team of raptors as Jason Bourne-esque assassins. After the events of that film, in which dinosaurs spread out across the world after the closure of yet another theme park, many of the beasts have now retreated back to the tropics, where the oxygen is rich and the disease-ridden humans are few.
But that bit of narrative table setting isn’t important given the focus of Koepp’s script: Ile Saint-Hubert, another in one of the franchise’s endless supply of secret islands (which regrettably has nothing to do with Quebecois rotisserie chicken). It is here where the park’s original scientists experimented with genetic mutation, trying to create dinosaurs even freakier than the ones that spit acid into your face when aroused. And, for reasons that are never made clear, it is here where Loomis, Bennett and a few other sacks of meat – I mean, fully rounded characters – must go to get that precious prehistoric plasma.
That the group’s assignment is all manner of ill-prepared foolishness is one thing – no one involved in the job seems to recognize that they’ll be dealing with the biggest dinosaurs on earth. (Maybe pack a grenade launcher or something?) But, quite correctly recognizing that such a thin story isn’t enough to fill two hours, Koepp adds a second, even more ridiculous plot strand in which the world’s worst father Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) has taken his two young kids (Luna Blaise and Audrina Miranda), along with the eldest daughter’s stoner boyfriend (David Iacono), for a sailing adventure in the waters right near the dino’s secluded habitat.
No amount of on-location filming in Thailand can hide the fact that very little of the film makes sense.Jasin Boland/The Associated Press
Quickly, history’s stupidest cruise not involving someone named Gilligan runs into Loomis and Bennett’s mission, and from there, it’s just a matter of watching the clock until someone gets chomped in half.
Gareth Edwards, a long way from the sci-fi highs of 2023’s artificial-intelligence-baiting thriller The Creator, seems to be in pure director-for-hire mode here, desperately trying to root Koepp’s shiftless script in a world that feels both real and fantastical. But so many of Rebirth’s images and set pieces are lifeless, and no amount of on-location filming in Thailand – versus the soundstage green screenery so favoured by most of Jurassic’s blockbuster contemporaries – can hide the fact that very little in the screenplay makes logistical, narrative or emotional sense.
The characters are either idiots of the highest degree, selfish jerks, or both. Loomis, ostensibly the hero of the affair given his glasses and name-checking of Sam Neill’s Alan Grant character from the first film, seems alternately motivated by the wonder of science and the pleasures of indifference. When standing at the foot of a brontosaur, he’s in awe. But when Reuben and his girls go missing, he doesn’t seem bothered at all.
Bailey, who cannot help but slip into his natural British accent here and there, seems as lost as anyone else regarding just what it is he – what anybody, including the audience – is here for.
The same goes for a terribly dull Johansson, whose many attempts to appear as if her character is thinking about some devilishly clever plan onscreen only suggest the actress’s fraught mental calculations regarding how much this gig might pay for, say, her home renovations.
Gareth Edwards seems to be in pure director-for-hire mode.The Associated Press
And to minimize everyone’s pain, we don’t need to talk about Mahershala Ali’s thankless role as Bennett’s fellow black-ops buddy, or Rupert Friend’s moustache-twirling pharma exec, who could have learned a thing or two from the many MBA types who’ve previously punched one-way tickets to Isla Nublar.
I suppose it’s nice that Universal got its act together to complete the film in what feels like record-breaking time (the VFX-heavy movie only started shooting a year ago). But everyone was so preoccupied with whether or not they could make Jurassic Park Rebirth that no one – to borrow the words of the franchise’s original chaos-theory expert Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm – stopped to think if they should.
