In Steven Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park movie, there’s a brief meta moment where the camera pans along the shelves and aisles of the park’s official merch shop, filled as it is with Jurassic Park-branded lunchboxes and other logoed memorabilia. It reads as a deft little swipe that Spielberg’s aiming straight at himself, teasing his own role as the father of modern blockbustering in the eighteen years between Jaws and Jurassic. Tellingly, this shot comes right before John Hammond’s speech to Dr. Sattler about his imaginary flea circus>—and how, as she replies to him, it was his sense of control that was always the illusion. Neither Spielberg nor Hammond had control over these monsters they’d created. They’d been loosed. Rampage is nature.
Over the course of the six Jurassic sequels that followed that thread of meta became, alongside all of the series’ ambitions, confused—chaos reigned, and not just in theory. By the time a cloned little girl and militarized velociraptors were running around 2022’s bottom-of-the-barrel Jurassic World: Dominion, the ideas the franchise once espoused, however lightly, were goopy gristle at the base of a blender. Pulp churned beyond meaning. If they can’t even just make a fun movie about people fighting dinosaurs anymore, then what are we even doing here?
And so, a soft reboot. Three years have passed, and here’s Jurassic World: Rebirth from Godzilla director Gareth Edwards. Featuring an entirely new cast of characters, a brand new monster island for said characters to traverse and get chomped upon, and a few fresh dino faces too, Rebirth really just wants to tell an old-fashioned B-movie story, the less complicated the better. And, despite a few too many complications—movies just cannot seem to help themselves anymore and so what should’ve been a 90-minute ride rolls out into a 2 hours and 13 minute experience, making this the series’ second longest runtime after Dominion—that’s basically what Rebirth delivers. No, it’s not the smartest animal in the zoo, but it’s a perfectly fun ride if you hand yourself over to it.
Which I’ll admit upfront is a lot for me, given how thoroughly Dominion had finally crushed my spirit. It’s entirely possible that I might’ve just been happy to not be miserable when the end credits rolled here. As I explained at length in my review of Dominion, Jurassic Park was my Star Wars. It was the blockbuster that hooked me at the exact right age and helped me fall in love with the grander possibilities of Hollywood movie-making. It’d all been steadily downhill ever since—even the few creative blips of fun in J. A. Bayona’s Fallen Kingdom in 2018 (the scene where the velociraptor is hunting the little girl in her mansion really is killer) wasn’t enough to obscure the sense that this franchise felt as doomed as the dinos themselves. Gareth Edwards has, in an ever-so-slight manner, seemingly nudged the series back on course. Or in the right direction of the course, at least.
And it all begins with a Snickers wrapper. In a scene let’s say borrowed from Edwards’ Godzilla, Jurassic World: Rebirth kicks off with a flashback that takes us to an entirely new island in the InGen chain (I think it’s the third island now but don’t hold me to that) called Isle Saint-Hubert, where our god-complex scientists have been trying (and mostly failing) to genetically engineer new hybrid dinos for the park. Apparently, the richie-rich tourists have grown bored by all the usual Tyrannosaur nonsense, and are demanding bigger, badder beasties—and yes, if you stare real hard at that, you can see the series’ sense of meta peeking its snout around the corner.
It’s admittedly not a note that wasn’t played here and there in the previous films. People’s burgeoning boredom with the miracle of the awesome return of these ancient creatures has been played for laughs in earlier entries. But it kinda feels as if Rebirth hits that note a little differently—the dinos, which had over the course of all those sequels begun to make their way off the original Park and out into the wider world, are dying off once again, now because of our fucked up climate. Their spread’s been halted, and the survivors are forced to stay with a band of sea and land near the equator. For the most part. We do see one sad elderly Brontosaurus tagged with graffiti who has escaped a zoo in Brooklyn and is annoyingly blocking traffic in New York. But there’s a melancholy and meaning here that the previous three Chris Pratt movies did their primitive best to stomp out at every turn.
That goes for the laboratory, where the InGen scientists are seen creating Frankensteining mutant beasts as well. A line-up of gigantic test tubes—reminiscent of the deeply disturbing scene in Alien: Resurrection where we see a wall of deformed Ellen Ripleys, shudder—showcase all their failed genetic meddling. Big ick. And their work seems, in Edwards’ hands and in the screenplay by original Jurassic Park writer David Koepp, more cruelly preemptive than it does immediately necessary. Nobody’s clamoring for these horrors. They’ve sciencing just for the sake of it now. It’s A.I., outta the bottle just because they could.
Which brings us back to that Snickers wrapper. One slob scientist (shades of Dennis Nedry) is cramming his face full instead of paying attention to scientific protocol, and in a series of light mishaps that carry big Final Destination vibes one thing leads to another and we’ve got a replay of that Juliette Binoche scene in the Edwards’ Godzilla on our hands. (We do love to watch a world-class thesp snatch a quick check and run.) Wham bam Isle Saint-Hubert becomes uninhabitable.
Or not so fast! We’ve still got an entire movie here. Uninhabitable though it might be, we flash-forward to Present Day and the island is about to find some dum-dum inhabitants to get in way over their heads. The setup’s blessedly simple. An obviously shady big pharma rep named Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) recruits a ragtag gang of mercenaries and scientists (led by Scarlett Johansson as Zora and Mahershala Ali as Duncan on the mercenary side and Jonathan Bailey as Dr. Loomis on the scientist’s) with a Triceratops-shit tall pile of money to go to the island and to get some blood samples from the dinos, saying they might just be able to stop human heart disease in its tracks.
A cause we all can get behind! Nevermind that the words “big pharma rep” might just be the modern equivalent of “Nazi Doctor” in the pantheon of movie villains—everybody hops on a boat for their varying reasons (mainly money) and books it to the equator stat. How hard can it be anyway? Dr. Loomis—who I feel the need to point out is, in a throwaway line, identified as “a student of Alan Grant” meaning that, as in Part III with Alessandro Nivola’s hot Dr. Billy, Grant has again been proven to always keep all the hottest boys by his side—helpfully yet ridiculously lays out that they’ll need blood samples from the largest of the beasts that occupy water, land, and sky. Maning the Titanosaurus on land, the Mosasaurus in the water, and the flying Quetzalcoatlus in the air. Because of the size of their hearts, or whatever.
And who cares, really? It’s a dumb little plot device that shapes the film’s narrative right off the bat and tells us what to expect. And sure enough, the film’s acts are pretty much dominated by these three individual quests, which each offer up neatly tied-up scenes of varying settings and dangers. And this is where Edwards really shines—save Bayona’s aforementioned single scene of excellence in Fallen Kingdom, the action sequences in Jurassic World: Rebirth are as good as any that’ve come since Spielberg sat in the director’s chair.
Picture multiple boats fighting off the blue-whale-sized Mosasaurus and his band of giant dolphin-esque snapping sidekicks, as everyone veers through a rocky coastline. Picture the bus-sized beak-clacking Quetzalcoatlus, swooping like bats outta hell to pelican-gulp down red-shirts with rather succinct single swallows. (And here Edwards tosses in the old-fashioned adventure-serial staple of an ancient temple carved into a cliffside because why not? I don’t need to know why it’s there. It looks cool dammit.)
And also picture the sky-tall Titanosaurs (making their first Jurassic appearance), singing to one another high up above the tree-tops, their mile-long whip-thin tails entwining as they gift us with a wondrous little slice of the awe we once felt while watching the original Jurassic Park and feeling like we were seeing dinosaurs for the first time. Edwards knows that motherfucking dinosaurs should make our jaws hang open, and his movie treats them as such. And he wisely hands the exuberant and charismatic Jonathan Bailey the reins on getting across that sense of wonder and joy to us, the cynical audience. And it works! I was moved anyway. (The swell of John Williams’ iconic score into this scene probably helped.)
But no, none of these characters are much more than sketch-thick, even if Johannson and Ali have a couple of nice moments together bonding over their shared dark histories. But let’s be honest—Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler aren’t exactly the richest character studies that Sam Neill and Laura Dern have ever been tasked with, ya know? And I haven’t even gotten to the entire family of five who end up being forced to tag along on Rebirth’s voyage after their wayward schooner gets caught up in that big Mosasaur battle. That family’s emotional beats are even thinner than the ones our starrier cast gets, and so they seem to have been dropped into the movie for two reasons—one, it apparently just wouldn’t be a Jurassic movie if there wasn’t a little kid in danger. (Although shout out to “Dolores” the baby Aquilops that the littlest girl adopts for being more than just adorable but a useful pal to boot. We dig Dolores.)
And two, it gives us a couple of extra action scenes to enjoy. Yes I complained upfront that this movie’s too long and I do stand by that. But you couldn’t get this movie’s best action scene of all without the family, so whatcha gonna do? A scene out of Michael Crichton’s original book that Jurassic lovers have long clamored for—the one that sees several people riding a little yellow life-raft down a river forced to fight off an angry, hungry Tyrannosaur—has finally and triumphantly made its way onto the screen. And my god Edwards shoots the hell out of it. Seamless effects (watching the T-Rex swim alongside them a la Jaws is chilling) and real stakes—we like that little girl dammit!—make this sequence one of the franchise’s true (sorry) high-water marks.
But let me step back to that inciting Snickers bar again to finally bring this review home. There’s a lot, I mean a lot, of junk food in Jurassic Park: Rebirth. And I mean that literally. That baby dino Dolores gets fed Twizzlers. Dr. Loomis is addicted to Altoids. And in one of the film’s lower moments where it suddenly feels the unnecessary need to recreate the famous “velociraptors in the kitchen” scene from the original film (why even do that to yourself?), we find our characters being hunted in between the shelves of a full stocked convenience store—bags of potato chips exploding about their heads!
The cynical take on this all is the mega-money that rolls in from product placement, of course. And surely there’s something to that cynicism. But it could’ve been extended close-ups on Scarlett’s expensive adventure wrist-watch or whatever—it didn’t have to be a Snickers bar, ya know? So excuse me while I give the film credit it might not have earned by saying that all the junk food is literal but also not. Like Spielberg’s pan across those JP-logo branded lunch-boxes, Jurassic World: Rebirth knows and accepts its place as movie junk food. It’s a goofy B-movie extravaganza that never asks us to eat vegetables. It’s a Snickersaurus Rex. And after all the bullshit this franchise has been serving for so long, what can I say? It hit the spot.
