When Jurassic World premiered in 2015, it had been 14 years since the release of the previous installment in the series, the very polarizing Jurassic Park III (2001). So it only made sense that we’d meet a whole new cast of characters. Today, only three years have passed since the last film, the infuriatingly bad Jurassic World Dominion. So a soft reboot, while certainly welcomed by diehard fans of the franchise, such as myself, felt a little premature.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy all 133 minutes of the new Jurassic World Rebirth, which is so tantalizingly close to just being named Jurassic Park: Reboot that one feels it is a missed opportunity. As for the content of the film itself, the news is good. Everyone will eventually agree that this is the third-best Jurassic film — Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) is the best, obviously, followed in a distant second by Jurassic World. Still, coming so close on the heels of the failures of the recent World entries, I just wasn’t quite emotionally ready to invest in a brand new storyline and characters.
Yet, emotional investment is what the filmmakers seemingly want from us this time. Or, rather, require from us. We need to really care about ex-military covert operative Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), whose mother died of heart disease and whose husband (or boyfriend, or maybe he was just a close friend) was recently killed by a car bomb in Yemen. We need to empathize with Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), whose marriage ended because he and his wife could no longer look at each other without seeing their dead son. And our feelings must be tied up with Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the single father struggling to raise his two daughters. And don’t forget about poor Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), the paleontologist who just lost his dream job. By the end of the film, we’re even supposed to care about the mutant dinosaur’s feelings. It’s all just way too much, especially for the audience of a summer blockbuster. That’s not what we signed up for, damn it. We came here to watch dinosaurs eat people.
Thankfully, there still ends up being plenty of that to go around. After a gratifyingly toothy cold open, Rebirth picks up five years after the mutant locust outbreak that occurred in Dominion (don’t ask). Climate change has gotten worse, and the dinosaurs are dropping dead. The only species still thriving are those living in oxygen-rich locales near the equator.
Which is why, to kickstart the plot, Evil White Male Capitalist
Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) recruits Bennett, Loomis, Kincaid, and a few others to travel to a restricted island near Barbados. Someone’s figured out that the blood of the three largest remaining dinosaurs is the key to curing heart disease. And Krebs, seeing dollar signs, wants the team to collect samples. The crew’s first target will be the giant aquatic carnivore, the Mosasaurus, followed by the 70-ton, land-dwelling Titanosaurus. And the final boss will be the flying Quetzalcoatlus. Easy peasy?
Not exactly. The island, the team learns far too late, is the site of a secret InGen lab where a bunch of Frankensteins spliced up mutant dinosaurs that (oops!) escaped and ate everybody. So not only do our protagonists need to evade the Tyrannosaurs and the Velociraptors, but they’ve also gotta watch out for the raptor/pterosaur hybrids, and the Distortus rex, a deformed (hence why it deserves our pity) but still super-deadly mutant T. rex.
David Koepp, who wrote the screenplays for Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), penned the script for Rebirth. Similar to the original, the characters are separated into two groups not long after they arrive on the island. This was a smart creative choice back then, and it works again here. As soon as one group’s storyline starts to dip, we’re back to the other just as it’s building to a crescendo.
HERETIC AND THE HORROR OF CONFORMITY
Now for the woke factor. On a scale from one to 10 — one being a NASCAR race and 10 being a Queers for Palestine rally — I’d give Jurassic World Rebirth a five. So it’s actually not all that bad. Yes, there’s the aforementioned unnecessary and very unsuccessful pulling of the heartstrings. And of course, the evilest character is a white man, and the noblest are a black man and a Latino family. And Dr. Loomis is giving off really strong Zohran Mamdani vibes. (“Not for some of us, for all of us,” he says to Bennett in one scene, fantasizing about a socialist utopia in which all pharmaceuticals are free.) But the woke moments are mercifully brief, and what we’re left with is an adrenaline-fueled, immersive summer movie with a tight storyline and some top-notch acting despite the sappy script.
During the film’s press tour, both Johansson and Bailey spoke repeatedly about how they’d always dreamed of being part of the Jurassic franchise. Bailey, who’s played the clarinet since he was 5, loved John Williams’s original score so much that he joined the 105-piece orchestra so that he could play the clarinet solo for his own character’s theme. It’s clear they were having a blast, which is exactly what the audience wants to have. Fortunately, for the first time in a while with the Jurassic films, that’s what we got.
Ben Appel is a writer living in New York City. His memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic, is forthcoming. Find him on Twitter @benappel and at benappelwrites.com.
