There are many eternal questions of the universe that we have still yet to figure out. Who was D.B. Cooper? What’s inside Area 51? Is there such a thing as a good boxed wine? And most recently: how the f*ck is it so hard to make a good sequel to Jurassic Park. I refuse to believe that a movie about dinosaurs running amok is such a lightning in a bottle idea that it is simply impossible to even come close to the magic of that first film.  But Lord, has Hollywood tried, first with a spiraling trilogy that started strong but soon spiraled out, followed by another trilogy that started off decently only to nosedive to the center of the Earth. 

I didn’t think things could get worse after Jurassic World: Dominion unless you were actively trying to torch this franchise. That bloated nostalgia-fest pretty much sealed the deal for me that this franchise was eternally stuck in the past, cursed to spin its wheels in place until the next warranted meteor hurtled our way. But like a fool, I had hope. Gareth Edwards is a director that understands scope and grandeur. Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali are phenomenal actors. Maybe, surely, this time will be different, right? 

Alright, bring on the meteor.

Jurassic World Rebirth is the farthest thing from a rebirth. It’s less of a rising from the ashes a bright and proud phoenix and more of a regurgitation of those leftovers you knew you should have thrown out, but curiosity got the best of you. The story is painfully flat, while the characters are devoid of any worthwhile personality or character traits that makes them worth caring about. Sure, the dinosaurs and environments look great, but the magic and wonder of the original is artificially recreated in a way that elicits no real emotion. Everything about it is so redundant and pointless, bringing nothing new to the table except new strains of mutant dinos, which isn’t even a new concept for the series. Nothing about this movie warrants its creation, so, well, you know the Jeff Goldblum line.

Ten years after the events of the last film, a pharmaceutical exec, a paleontologist and a few mercenaries travel to a restricted island to retrieve blood samples from three dinosaurs that may hold the key to curing heart disease. Their voyage inadvertently coincides with a sailing family, and the group shipwrecks on the island, now at the mercy of the dinosaurs that inhabit it. But there’s far more than regular dinos to deal with, as the island is actually a testing facility that was used to create new, nightmarish monsters the world has never seen. Because, you know, science.

For a series called Jurassic World, they sure do love returning to the same old kind of locals. At the end of the last film, dinosaurs inhabited nearly every corner of the world, hinting that man and beast would have to find a way to co-exist. So what does this film do? It kills almost all of them off because of the inhospitable climate and makes our main characters go to another Jurassic Park. Why are they so afraid of making a movie that doesn’t take place mostly in a jungle setting? For all of its flaws, Dominion at least toyed with the idea of dinosaurs being in different areas of the world, but this film quickly walks that back. Do we really need another movie about researchers wading through tall grass and tall trees while avoiding dinos? Where is the world part of Jurassic World? This franchise should have been in full-on apocalypse dominated by dinosaurs by now, but whoever is calling the shots seems so afraid of pushing the envelope even the tiniest bit. 

Maybe this would be a bit more forgivable if the characters were memorable, but these have to be some of the most nothing characters the series has seen yet. Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Johnathan Bailey are great talents, but this movie does absolutely nothing with them. Johansson and Ali are mercs with shoehorned tragic backstories and squeaky clean moral compasses for guys who break the law for money often. There’s no real character arc to them, their tragic past is never really expanded upon, and overall, they’re just planks of wood repeating lines. Jonathan Bailey’s character doesn’t even feel needed. He’s just there to tell us what a dinosaur is and why it’s doing things. There’s no emotional stake to his decision to go; he just needs to be the guy to explain everything because all of these movies have that. There’s a family that gets entangled in their mission, and honestly, the movie should have just been about them. The overprotective dad and the slacker boyfriend are the best characters in the film, and they could have benefited from more of the film’s focus. Honestly, just swap the groups from side characters to main characters and vice versa, and you’ve got a much more interesting movie.

The film also has a really weird pacing problem. The setup for the main characters is painfully rushed, breezing past any semblance of personality or reason to get behind the characters. Once they arrive at the island, however, everything slows down and the film really begins to drag. There’s just too much downtime between each dinosaur encounter, which wouldn’t be an issue if it was padded with some half-decent writing. But every attempt at humor or earnestness is so painfully dull and unoriginal. It’s time to move beyond the environmental and nature subtext of the series, because there truly seems to be nothing left to say about it. The film vomits word salads about humanity’s place in the world, but can’t manage to say one thing that felt original to the series or even somewhat thought provoking. But while it’s trying to call upon the past, it fails to nail what made the original so endearing. The dinosaur encounters are a mixed bag, ranging from retreads to reheated nachos from the first film. That terror and suspense just doesn’t come through despite some admirable attempts, while the more adventure-y moments don’t really surprise you or blow you away despite the ever-consistent special effects. The rancor/Cloverfield-esque mutant dino is cool, but it’s hardly used in a way that makes it memorable or scary, appearing near the tail end of the film to do a whole lot of nothing.

In an attempt to simplify and go back to basics, Jurassic World Rebirth has consequently forgotten to present anything new that warrants you wanting to watch this over the original or any of the others in the franchise. Devoid of any human identity and coasting off admittedly beautiful visuals, Rebirth is the kind of safe, nothing movie that will no doubt succeed at the box office off of name recognition alone, but will struggle to find a space in any corner of your mind. I just cannot understand how these aren’t better. It shouldn’t be that hard, and yet here we are. This is less of a rebirth and more of an afterbirth; the discarded waste left behind by an actual miracle that you should probably pay more attention to instead.

RATING

SPINOSAURUS

Everyone’s got their favorite dinosaur, from the t-rex to Barney. For me, I’ve always been partial to the Spinosaurus. It’s incredibly intimidating, but knows how to stunt on the other dinos with it’s cool back frill. Spinosaurus’s actually have a pretty fun sequence in this film, so I decide to base the cocktail around their appearance. The drink itself is a bit of a mai tai riff, containing the flavors of coconut, pineapple and a healthy does of rum. Don’t forget your half of a cocktail umbrella to give the drink the signature spine, and get ready to turn any shipwreck into an island adeventure.

INGREDIENTS

• 1.5oz pineapple rum
• 3/4oz orange curacao
• 3/4oz lime juice
• 1/2oz cream of coconut
• Float: 1/2oz dark rum
• Garnish: Half of a cocktail umbrella

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Add ingredients to a shaker and shake with ice.
2. Strain into cocktail glass over ice.
3. Slowly pour the dark rum over the back of a spoon over the drink to create the layer effect.
4. Use scissors to cut off the bottom half of a cocktail umbrella, then garnish the drink with it.

★★★★

The ingredients for a dynamite entry into the Jurassic Park canon are no great secret. They’ve been in the public domain since 1993, after all. Quite why it’s taken thirty years and six attempts to remix them into a genuinely thrilling, and legitimately original is less clear. To be clear, 2015’s Jurassic World was good fun but a legacy remake if ever one were. No matter. Not content with gifting LucasFilm the best Star Wars film of the twenty-first century, Gareth Edwards has done it again for the Steven Spielberg’s Franchisousaurus Rex. Putting a new tranche of stars through hell, Jurassic World: Rebirth is nothing short of a hoot.

Credit where due, Colin Trevorrow’s 2015–22 sequel trilogy, in which “Park” became “World,”must have been doing something right to keep the flame so well alight. Dominion was a dino-bore but still topped a billion at the post-Covid global box office. And yet, bar a retention of the   “World” moniker in its title, Rebirth bears far closer resemblance to Park era in scope and ambition. The notion that dinosaurs now rub shoulders with rush hour on the streets of New York, an inheritance of 2018’s Fallen Kingdom, remains a fun one but a return to the playpen of deadly jungle tropics is more fun still. In the thrash of leaves and rising mist, where your visibility is a pithy three metres ahead, anything could be – and absolutely is – hiding.

The influence of Spielberg himself is flush in Rebirth. It’s in the lightness of touch, the familial core, and the scene that finds a young girl trapped in an abandoned convenience store fridge, cuddling the dino-puppy hidden in her backpack, as a mutant raptor breathes on the all-too-thin glass between them. The script is that of David Koepp, coaxed into return to the series with a Spielberg treaty, having penned the original with the late Michael Crichton himself. It would be madness for any root-able character to head back into the fray six films in but capitalism throws the ball every time. This time around, it’s caught by big pharma.

Specifically, it’s Rupert Friend who dons the film’s serpentine skins as suitably slimy ParkerGenix representative Martin Krebs. It is he who dangles zeros before the jaded eyes of covert operative cum mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and the opportunity of a lifetime for doe-eyed palaeontologist De. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) – a student of Alan Grant no less. The pitch is as contrived as it is conveniently straightforward. Infiltrate the forbidden and foreboding Ile Saint-Hubert, locate the three largest remaining prehistoric species from land, sea, and air, collect their DNA and cash the cheque. 

To keep things playful, the Ile Saint-Hubert is home also to an array of grim, mutated and blood-thirsty dinosaur experiments, the failed remnants of InGen’s time on the island some seventeen years prior. These include winged raptors, ring-tailed diplodoci and a blob-headed, six-limbed and ruddy enormous Distortus rex for the grand finale. Each enjoys thunderously weighty realisation across the screen, bolstered by a pleasingly callous attitude to picking off the excesses of Koepp’s early character count, which depends initially on a certain economising of character. When the climax comes, the whittling process is sufficient to ensure you care for the final band…mostly.

A score by the mighty Alexandre Desplat finds fluidity enough in the original John Williams melodies to allow the necessary swells room to feel earned, without ever taking away from the urgency of his more dynamic additions. For his part, Edwards is in no rush to land his punches. Pitch perfect pacing blends breathing room with a half dozen breathtaking sequences, never losing sight of the tenderness required to make the latter count. An emotional encounter that places Loomis in the heart of the world he has so long studied from afar is gently done and all the stronger for it. 

While it is true that much of Rebirth does have a certain ring of familiarity, Edwards want is to find the future in the pre-history. A director well acquainted with maximising the limitations of his toolbox, he proves a smart pick, even with a much inflated budget on the likes of Monsters and The Creator. Of course, his characters lean heavily on those pre-established but it matters not a jot when those cast prove so well deployed. To similar ends, watch for the film’s mandatory T-Rex encounter. It’s blisteringly shot and edge-of-the-seat exciting. It can be done.

T.S.