TMS Movie Review: Jurassic World Rebirth
(Amblin Entertainment / Universal Pictures)
Where Joseph Kosinski’s F1 is a standard blockbuster that plays it safe in an entertaining, well-executed way, Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World: Rebirth plays the standard blockbuster in a lazy, cliché, typical way. Pure schlock that only requires you to appreciate on-screen spectacle. Which, if that’s all you want, delivers, although fairly redundantly and previously achieved better in the Jurassic franchise, as well as Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). Scarlett Johansson is now back as the lead of a major action film series following her exit from the MCU, and her supporting cast is interesting enough with character actors like Rupert Friend, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo.
After the events of Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), in-demand mercenary Zora Bennett (Johansson) is recruited by major pharmacy executive Martin Krebs (Friend) to lead a group of professionals on an isolated island with mutated dinosaurs where they can retrieve dino DNA to provide life-saving benefits for the future of humanity. The team of experts includes boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Ali), paleontologist Henry Loomis (Bailey) and security chief Bobby Atwater (Ed Skrien). At the same time, ordinary family man Rueben (Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) are attacked by dinos during a sailing trip and stranded with the DNA team on the island.
(Amblin Entertainment / Universal Pictures)
Jurassic World: Rebirth is the third movie in the franchise to be penned by David Koepp since Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1997). If anything, both Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag and Presence from earlier this year, and now Rebirth, remind us of Koepp’s range as a writer, even though Rebirth feels like the ‘greatest hits’ of the Jurassic universe most of the time. Edwards, like Kosinski, has a visual flare that can be taken advantage of nicely if the screenplay is decent enough. But here, the direction and the characters do not make the feature greater than the sum of its parts. I hate to say it, but Rebirth felt like a whole lot of nothing for most of the runtime to me. Johansson proves she’s one of our finest modern movie stars, and I enjoyed the men in the cast, although both Bailey’s and Friend’s on-screen accents could have used more effort. I also liked how the strong, awesome female lead was paired with the book smart guy instead of the suave hotshot like expected. Other than that, mutated dinosaurs are lame and if it weren’t for the movie already making a ton of money at the box office, I would say this is a clear sign to take another long break from all things Jurassic. Your move, James Gunn’s Superman.