The entire point of Jurassic World Rebirth is to get the franchise back into audiences’ good graces with a new set of characters and a story meant to tap into the spectacular energy that made the original such a huge hit. All the same ingredients are there — dinosaurs running amok in a tropical paradise, humans running for their lives, and a sizable enough VFX budget to, theoretically, make it all look dazzling on the big screen. But for all of its attempts at being thrilling crowd pleaser, there’s a limpness to Jurassic World Rebirth that makes it feel like a film that might have been better suited for one of the streamers.
Set a few years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, Rebirth follows as a fresh group of overconfident humans find themselves travelling to Ile Saint-Hubert, an island populated with genetically engineered dinosaurs that refuse to be controlled. Because the world’s climate has become so drastically different in the time since dinosaurs first walked the earth, the island is one of the few places that the creatures can still thrive.
People generally understand that the island and its surrounding waters are too dangerous to venture into because there are few ways to really fight back against a hulking reptile with an innate urge to chomp at anything that moves. But there is plenty of money to be made from the wonder drugs that can be derived from the dinosaurs’ genetic material. That’s why pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) is able to convince paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and tactical experts Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) to go on a secret mission that goes sideways.
It’s far less clear why divorcee Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is so intent on sailing near the island with his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono). The family is helpless when their tiny boat is ambushed by a group of aquatic dinos that see the humans as a tasty snack. And once the family manages to get themselves onto the shore, they seem not to understand how much easily avoidable danger they’ve put themselves in.
Though Rebirth brings all of its human characters together rather quickly, the movie never does a very good job of tying their arcs together in a way that makes it seem like this is the story screenwriter David Koepp and director Gareth Edwards originally set out to tell. Bennett’s team and Delgado’s family both feel like groups of people from very different films. They’re all riffs on characters from previous Jurassic projects in a way that speaks to Universal seeing this latest installment as something like a soft reboot. That wouldn’t be so bad if Rebirth could match its predecessors’ energy and present its mutated dinosaurs in more imaginative, exciting ways. But, aside from one stressful set piece on the side of a mountain where pterosaurs nest, the movie plays things surprisingly safe.
That safeness underlines how straightforward and video game-y Rebirth’s central narrative is. Bennet and Loomis need to take samples from three specific kinds of dinosaurs that each live in different parts of the island. And as the humans collect their prizes, it becomes increasingly clear that they are wandering into a series of death traps.
For a while, it seemed that Universal was embracing the idea of putting dinosaurs back at the top of the food chain. Jurassic World was full of promise because it implied that the franchise was going in a new direction that could lend itself to different kinds of big budget spectacle. But Rebirth takes things back to square one, and its flatness points to a tame, relatively boring future for the series.
Jurassic World Rebirth also stars Ed Skrein, Philippine Velge, and Bechir Sylvain. The movie is in theaters now.
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