Gareth Edwards' scaled-down approach resets the franchise and delivers its leanest, meanest entry in years.
Releasing Jurassic World Rebirth near the 50th anniversary of Jaws feels like a fitting gesture given how much inspiration Gareth Edwards’ film borrows from Steven Spielberg’s pioneering 1975 blockbuster — in some ways even more than from Spielberg’s other pioneering blockbuster, the one from 1993 that actually launched this franchise.
In a landscape of aspiring summer tentpoles, a filmmaker openly stealing from the best seems to me like a better tactic than pretending that what they’re doing is somehow original. (One imagines it’s also a bit of a necessity for a director to deliver a reported $180 million film by a release date set just over a year after his hiring.) Regardless, Jurassic World Rebirth operates in a more classical mode than the “this is cool… but what’s next” interconnected mythmaking of too many modern franchises, as Edwards nakedly wears his influences (and wields his technical virtuosity) to tremendously crowd-pleasing effect.
Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, Earth’s dinosaur populations have precipitously dwindled due to adverse environmental conditions. (Imagine the Simpsons episode where Homer travels back in time to the prehistoric era, only to wipe out all flora and fauna after sneezing on a T-Rex.) The remaining creatures mostly live in tropical zones near the equator where conditions most closely resemble their pre-Homer Simpson habitat, and they’re broadly protected by international laws forbidding travel to those areas.
Despite this, corporations still hope to harness the power of dinosaurs to fuel their moneymaking endeavors: pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) believes that their size and genetic resiliency can unlock the secrets of a life-saving drug. In order to circumvent those restrictions, Krebs hires black ops expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), her colleague Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to travel to Ile Saint-Hubert, the abandoned site of an InGen research laboratory, and retrieve the biomaterials of the three largest remaining prehistoric species.
En route, they encounter a shipwrecked sailboat carrying a father, Reuben Delgado (Manuel García-Rulfo), and offer him and his family a lifeline to safety. Not long after rescuing them, however, the seasoned military operatives vividly discover how unpredictable (and deadly) one hundred-ton dinosaurs can be, and end up crashing on the shores of Ile Saint-Hubert, where miles of inhospitable terrain and countless unknown beasts stand between them and the facility’s sole landing zone — which may or may not still be intact.
Not intending at all to damn the film with faint praise, Jurassic World Rebirth is good precisely because its ambitions are modest by contemporary standards. Every summer film not only seems to harbor aspirations to build to the biggest action set piece moviegoers have ever seen, but use its story as an engine to drive a multimedia multiverse where every character is worthy of his or her own side quest or leads to future life-changing canon events. Returning to the franchise for the first time since 1997, screenwriter David Koepp focuses on the two ideas that first captivated viewers — the majesty, and the terror of dinosaurs — and discards the corporate politics, ecological (pseudo-) complexities and larger existential possibilities unlocked by the franchise’s genetic experiments (no clone children this time). Similar in aim if better-executed than Jurassic Park III, Rebirth wisely dumps all of the world-building of the previous Jurassic World films and just tries to impress (and scare) you with its animal encounters.
The mosasaurus boat chase sequence (for obvious reasons) owes the greatest debt to Spielberg’s Jaws, but the influence extends deeper than simply pitting human characters against an underwater leviathan: there’s a joyful thrill, even among the danger, that buoys Zora and her team’s pursuit of its blood. Moreover, though the world (theirs and ours) exists in a post-Jurassic Park reality where dinosaurs are known to exist, Edwards holds back on showing the mosasaurus (or almost any of the creatures) for as long as possible so that when we do encounter them there’s an actual reverence for their size, presence and power. Complementing the choice, the score by Alexandre Desplat shrewdly deploys John Williams’ iconic theme only to amplify and underscore the majesty of the creatures, rather than the way that past few films would use it like stolen valor to stir ticket-holders when the filmmakers weren’t getting the job done.
Koepp’s script assembles an ensemble that will invariably feel familiar to Jurassic fans — including a money-grubbing suit, a scientist tagging along for the love of the creatures and a hired mercenary inevitably confronted about what they value more, their paycheck or a human life. But he wields those types with a scalpel rather than a hatchet: Johansson’s Zora, for example balks at the prospect of being described as morally flexible, and she lives up to that conviction across the film. Too many earlier films featured one or more scientists or other characters who were technologically inept, inexperienced in the field or socially awkward (e.g., Justice Smith’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom computer wizard). But even beyond the humanity Bailey injects into a character like Henry, he seems to love his field of study and embrace each new challenge in the film with a zeal and a technical aptitude.
Johansson leads the ensemble onscreen with believable authority, but also a distant bemusement that keeps proceedings light even when they’re extremely intense. Building from a light-touch expository chat about their characters’ individual and mutual losses since last working together, she and Ali complement each other effectively as people in a risky but rewarding vocation who consciously maintain their humanity in spite of its dubious legality. In a skillfully effervescent performance, Bailey particularly recalls the clear-eyed optimism of a character like Laura Dern’s Ellie Sattler, and it’s his tearful reaction to seeing a titanosaurus for the first time that fully captures the film’s respectful, admiring attitude about dinosaurs. Meanwhile, the various members of the rescued Delgado family prove unexpectedly charming — especially including Xavier (David Iacono), eldest daughter Teresa’s buffoonish boyfriend — as they provide more opportunities to endanger characters with dinosaur hijinks.
That said — and perhaps to contradict my earlier point — the film does lead to the unveiling of a new dinosaur, a mutated, genetic hybrid that is disturbing to look at (though it moves pretty much like the Tyrannosaurus did in previous chapters). It’s the only choice in the film that kind of kicks audiences out of the experience, because if you’re just going to make something up, why not really go for it and fold all of this business into a reality where there are giant apes or mechanical dinosaurs or alien kaiju? There’s something about the plausible (if not quite real) science of the Jurassic film series that sets it apart from all of those other ones, and veering into pure fantasy lessens its uniqueness.
Then again, outside of dinosaurs that have become franchise staples, how many people know or have firsthand knowledge of the existence of every single species that has since been introduced? (Titanosaurus sounds pretty made-up as well, if you ask me.) Again, what defines this film and series is not those tremendous flights of fancy — the impulse to go so grand that it forgets the building blocks (humans + dinosaurs + danger) that made its predecessors creatively and financially successful. And in fact, Edwards seems to understand that what each of these animals mean in telling his story (in other worlds, helping him juggle those building blocks) is more important than what they individually do.
In the shadow of a couple of overly serious title combinations (Fallen Kingdom? Dominion? Lighten up, Francis), calling this one Jurassic World Rebirth feels like a more honest acknowledgment of what this film is trying to do — namely, to kickstart the franchise anew. Not only should it handily accomplish that goal, but it creates several characters that are intriguing (and likeable) enough to bring back for another round with a mosasaurus or Quetzalcoatlus. Despite that inevitable outcome, it never feels like it’s more interested in setting up future stories than telling this one in the present. Perhaps that’s because like the adventures and auteurs that it draws upon, its filmmaking feels uniquely uncynical: after too many movies where the magic of dinosaurs felt like it was taken for granted, Gareth Edwards seems to have real respect for the power of a pair of jaws, and for the first time in decades he manages to rekindle that feeling for audiences as well.
