Jurassic World Rebirth will bring in a billion dollars at the box office. Which makes this review mostly inconsequential. Look in your heart; you know this to be the case. Despite unanimous critical consensus that the franchise's previous film Jurassic World Dominion (2022) is execrable, it still made somewhere around $1.4 billion. You don’t need me to tell you whether or not to pay for a ticket to Jurassic World Rebirth; you statistically will anyway.
Maybe this is just another sign that critics are meaningless vestiges of the movie industry. As some folks on the internet like to say: Facts don’t care about your feelings. In the place of discerning taste and nuanced discourse, there is only the knowledge that there will always be another Jurassic movie, another summer blockbuster overrun by more immense and scarier monsters than the last one, motivated by one more fictional rich asshole ignoring history to spit in God’s face, accompanied by one more A-list actor with an eight-figure price attached to their dignity. At the end of my screening for Rebirth, a movie that sucked shit, the audience clapped.
Oh well. This is the march of progress unabated, manifest in franchises that never end, in successive features with titles that become more and more interchangeable and sometimes use colons like gateways to subterranean barrel bottoms heretofore unscraped by directors who are more project managers than anything. Except Jurassic World Rebirth, like Dominion, doesn’t have a colon in its title (ironic, because it’s so full of shit, etc.), and, like Dominion, isn’t even really a dinosaur movie anyway.
Rebooting three years after the “events” of Dominion, Rebirth uses overly expository TV news coverage to catch us up on the prehistoric creatures who, following the disasters of Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, broke free of containment—nature “found a way” as franchise philosopher Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) opined—and, for a short time, coexisted with humans.
Now, the remaining dinos who weren’t wiped out by climate change and disease have congregated along the equator, mostly on small tropical islands where we’re told that the hot, “oxygen-rich” environs best match that of the Cretaceous period, or something.
We’re also told that public interest in dinosaurs is waning, that people just aren’t romanced by the same old spectacles anymore. As the world moves on from getting gobsmacked over what was once a technological miracle, uber-wealthy wads like pharmaceutical exec Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) must find new ways to exploit the creatures.
Luring her in with the promise of a small fortune, Krebs convinces Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a mercenary riddled with PTSD, to accompany a small team into the equatorial Dino-Zone—no humans allowed, according to “every” country on Earth, a collaborative international decree that is a more fantastical concept than dinosaurs coming back to life—and retrieve some samples of dino DNA for the purposes of pharmaceutical research.
Zora knows the trip is a huge risk, especially because the dinosaurs whose DNA they must extract are supposedly the largest animals to ever exist on the planet, a statement the audience just sort of accepts because every new Jurassic film introduces the newest, worst, and/or best dinosaur varietal. Hyperbole has lost all meaning when the same shit just keeps happening. Every attempt to harness genetic power, to build one more bigger and assuredly better theme park attraction, has been met with mass death and generational punishment. But also: That money’s just too good.
Archetypes aggregate. Krebs talks the obligatory self-righteous paleontologist, Dr. Henry Something (Jonathan Bailey), into joining the expedition, providing a beautiful nerd to conjure up the basest unrequited sexual tension with ScarJo’s ceaselessly competent soldier. Soon, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), an old mercenary cohort of Zora’s with comparable trauma, signs on as well, because a broken man must nobly sacrifice himself at some point in these films. And he has a boat they can use.
Completing the crew are a smug hot-shot (Ed Skrein), a quiet and helpful French-speaking man (Bechir Sylvain), and a woman whose personality swaps between Dancing and Murdered (Philippine Velge), all requisite dinosaur fodder. Thusly, we embark on a jungle cruise, vaguely reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, into the heart of darkness, i.e., an unnamed island in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of French Guiana.
Meanwhile, a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), adorable young daughter (Audrina Miranda), college-bound daughter (Luna Blaise), and the oldest daughter’s dipshit boyfriend (David Iacono) use that same summer to sail across the Pacific Ocean on a 40-ft sailboat, because that’s a reasonable thing to do. The family inevitably crosses paths with Zora’s team, the cast ballooning to more paper-thin characters than any brain can conceivably care about. So when they make it to the island and discover that it’s teeming with genetically cross-bred dinosaur mutants and everyone starts dying at the jaws of hyper-real digital freakazoids, you may also feel dead inside.
Director Gareth Edwards has proven capable of spectacle, especially in conveying an upsetting sense of scale in something like 2014’s Godzilla, but in Rebirth, every incomprehensibly huge beast is immersed in a surreal melange of uncanny environments. Edwards affords a few fleeting moments for characters to soak in what they’re witnessing with astonishment—refuting the film’s earlier claim that people can’t feel much for these dinosaurs anymore—but then pulls the frame back to a giant vista covered with giant dinosaurs, and suddenly the weightlessness of the vision takes over. The magic’s extinguished.
Completely gone is the awe of Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Jurassic Park—gone is the cosmic terror and jubilation of seeing a dinosaur. Maybe that seems quaint in retrospect, now that we have the power to “see” anything we can ostensibly imagine. But if that first film is about the visceral power, and irrevocable cost, of creating such a momentous spectacle, then every sequel since has been about what a bad idea it is to make sequels.
Because sequels are inherently evil. I’m sorry to put this so bluntly, but it’s true. The Jurassic World movies act as if they are warning against our idiotic nature to take everything good about popular art and grind it down to the nub, but that’s exactly what those films and those filmmakers are doing, giving into the loudest morons and the elemental forces of capital to ruin all beloved cultural artifacts via lifeless, juiceless rebirths. We cannot leave anything well enough alone.
Toward the beginning of Jurassic World Rebirth, Dr. Henry sighs, "Nobody cares about these animals anymore. They deserve better." It's hard to disagree. Dinosaurs—the real creatures who represent so much fascination and curiosity and wonder that we’ve pretty much ejected from our collective dreams—deserve so much better than this.
In fact, you deserve so much better than this.
Jurassic World Rebirth opens in wide release Fri July 4.
