Do people still like dinosaurs? The box office data would seem to say so, but the deflated characters of the new Jurassic World movie aren’t so sure. “Nobody cares about these animals anymore,” bemoans Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), the curator of a prehistoric museum with flagging attendance. Shortly before, we learn that a brachiosaur has escaped from confinement in New York City, yet while the sight of a mighty beast roaming the Big Apple’s sidewalks might have once provoked astonishment or panic, now it results in a simple traffic jam. The return of ancient “terrible lizards” to contemporary civilization is no longer cause for wonder or terror. It’s just an annoyance.
The chief innovation (or regression) of this latest episode in the Jurassic World franchise—which is subtitled Rebirth, and which has been directed by Gareth Edwards from a script by David Koepp—is that it’s aware of its own potential obsolescence. Now that hulking computer-generated monsters are pro forma in mainstream cinema, a new Jurassic flick has little hope of conjuring the sense of majesty that accompanied Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic. So despite some cheeky references to that picture—the shot of a car’s mirror with its famous “Objects are closer than they appear” warning; a faded banner proclaiming “When dinosaurs ruled the earth”—Rebirth doesn’t attempt to match its conceptual grandeur or vast ambition. It’s a blockbuster about huge creatures that keeps things relatively small.
This is arguably sensible, even if it’s also limiting. The original Jurassic Park may be most memorable for its brilliantly orchestrated set pieces, but Spielberg also imbued it with a brittle humanity; more than just a terrifying medley of chases and maulings, it was an ecological fable, exploring how man’s quixotic desire for technological advancement intertwined with his inevitable doom. Rebirth, with its much narrower scope, is unpretentious, which also means it’s unimaginative. In bypassing the absurdity of the theme-park conceit (yeah, I’m sure that one electric fence will prevent a tyrannosaur from munching on customers), it also forfeits attempts at greater resonance; despite some natter about climate change and a dubious subplot involving the healthcare industry, it has no provocative ideas. It’s just an action movie that happens to feature dinosaurs.
Not a terrible one, mind. Edwards may not possess Spielberg’s visual flair (nobody does), but as he’s repeatedly demonstrated (Godzilla, Rogue One, The Creator), he has a sure hand with special effects and digitized mayhem. If the developers of Jurassic Park (and Jurassic Park, non-italics) were dreamers who longed to show people things they’d never seen before, Edwards is more of a deliveryman, doling out the anticipated moments of fighting and fleeing. Particularly in its stronger second half, Rebirth features a number of sequences that, while hardly revolutionary, execute their assignment—the imperative to stimulate viewers’ nerves more than their brains—with clarity and competence.
Naturally, Edwards requires a handful of human souls to serve as targets for his dinosaurs’ wrath. Remember Owen and Claire, the nominal leads of the three prior Jurassic World films played by Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard? Don’t worry, neither does Rebirth. It instead contrives an entirely new cast of equally forgettable characters, led by Zora (Scarlett Johansson), a paramilitary operative with a vaguely haunted past and a gift for infiltrating forbidden spaces. Her special set of skills catches the eye of Krebs (Rupert Friend), a drug-company suit who’s hatched a scheme to invade the quarantined equatorial island where most living dinos currently roam—not to market them as exotic attractions, but to harvest their blood and use it to concoct a lucrative pharmaceutical. After Krebs murmurs a few seductive words involving a whole lot of zeros (“Including the one in the ten?” “No.”), Zora agrees to lead his foolhardy mission, bringing along the aforementioned Dr. Loomis as the requisite zoological expert, plus Duncan (Mahershala Ali), a blustery boat captain who definitely doesn’t steal any lines from Jaws. Duncan also has a couple of gritty crewmembers, but they aren’t played by famous actors and I don’t feel like looking up their names because they die pretty quick.
About that: It isn’t quite fair to say that Rebirth is wholly indifferent to its human personnel; there are plenty of dialogue scenes, along with some strained debate about whether our heroes should wield their impending scientific invention for private profit or public welfare. (Big pharma: evil or really evil?) But the characters remain comically thin, and their lack of depth may inspire you to engage in a bit of tawdry speculation, pondering which of them will survive this escapade and which will be turned into monster meat. Zora is presumably safe on account of being played by a movie star, while Krebs’ venality renders him a marked man, but others’ fates are less certain. Might Duncan perform a noble sacrifice? Is Loomis too much of a nerd, or do his spectacles hide a knack for jungly derring-do? What about the Delgado family, comprising a father and two daughters whose maritime voyage turns into a shipwrecked nightmare; they all seem too sweet to be eaten (the youngest adopts an adorable critter as a pet), but will the teenager’s boyfriend be felled by his laziness, or is he secretly a man of stout heart and valor?
These are admittedly stupid questions, if only because they’re immaterial; it simply doesn’t matter who lives and who dies. What’s significant here are the vividness of the creature design and the caliber of the set pieces.
Which, again, are pretty solid overall. The first big sequence, in which an aquatic giant wreaks havoc on the crew’s vessel, is more functional than suspenseful, but once everyone gets marooned on the island, Edwards finds his form. He’s clever with framing and depth of field, often introducing his dinosaurs in the background and out of the characters’ sightlines, creating a Hitchcockian sense of dread; he also enjoys using smoke and fog to obscure potential threats, only to then brighten the image with flares and flames. A mating ritual between two mammoth herbivores briefly conjures some of the beautiful magic and wide-eyed awe that typified this franchise’s progenitor, while the trusty T-Rex arrives and finds itself in a surprisingly well-matched battle with an inflatable raft. In addition to Alexandre Desplat’s sturdy score, that famous John Williams theme plays on occasion, and its soaring melody catches your breath every damn time. And at least part of the climax takes place not in the wide-open space of the forest but in the cramped confines of a convenience store, where it unfolds with tension rather than noise.
The toothy foes in that final sequence are technically mutants—bastardized hybrids born as the result of reckless experimentation. It’s a curious concept. At the risk of once again referring to cinematic predecessors, the initial Jurassic Park movies were products of paleontological fantasy, resurrecting long-extinct but real species and loosing them upon the modern world. In the disenchanted worldview of Rebirth, such replication is insufficient; to be truly wowed, audiences must witness never-before-seen monstrosities.
Must we, though? These newfangled amalgamations look ferocious enough (though they’re less scary than that fucking bear from Annihilation), and it’s fair for Edwards to suspect that he needed to invent novel leviathans rather than just replay the scaly hits. But these aren’t upgrades so much as pointless tweaks, and their undistinguished character feeds into the film’s general irrelevance. Jurassic World Rebirth is a decent enough monster movie that fails to pay proper tribute to its subjects. Dinosaurs have fascinated people for centuries, but in operating as a straightforward actioner, Rebirth has already aged itself into yesteryear—not a new species, but a fossil.
Grade: C+
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.