This summer… you will believe… more people could make the terrible mistake of visiting a Jurassic Park! But in Jurassic World Rebirth, they’re at least doing it classic Michael Crichton style.
Directed by Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla) and written by famed screenwriter David Koepp (whose dozens of credits include Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park), the new movie finds mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) on a mission to a Jurassic Park breeding research facility to recover DIIIINO D-N-A that scientists hope is the key to a miracle drug. Joining Zora on the adventure are gun guy Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and pharmaceutical red shirt Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) — all of whom are guaranteed to get seriously torn up by a mess of razor-clawed dinos by the end of the picture. There’s even a new hybrid dinosaur that looks kinda like a rancor? Should go great with popcorn.
As a long-time fan of Crichton’s Jurassic Park book and Spielberg’s first movie (and a dwindling fan of the Jurassic World series, but so it goes) the new trailer for Rebirth checks a lot of boxes — brontosaurus majesty, growling predators, etc. — and has one major hook for the devotees. Around the 40-second mark, we catch a glimpse of a T-Rex stalking some bystanders as they paddle like hell down a river. The scene is a direct riff on a chapter from Crichton’s novel, which Spielberg ultimately cut from his adaptation due to budgetary constraints. We know he got close, because there’s been concept art from illustrator Tom Cranham floating around for ages.
Koepp seems particularly excited by the addition. Talking to Variety earlier this year, he noted that he “reread the two novels to get myself back in that mode though. We did take some things from them. There was a sequence from the first novel that we’d always wanted in the original movie, but didn’t have room for. We were like, ‘Hey, we get to use that now.’ But just to get back in that head space 30 years later — is it still fun? And the answer is yes, it still really is. Dinosaurs are still fun.”
Hard agree. Jurassic World Rebirth arrives in theaters on July 2.
