‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’ Is Perfectly Okay (Making it the 3rd Best Jurassic Park Film)

“You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could that you didn’t stop to think if you should”.

This iconic line delivered by Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm in the original Jurassic Park is advice that should have been taken on board when developing Steven Spielberg’s landmark ’90s blockbuster into a franchise. Having undergone both a hard reboot and self-exalting legacy sequel with the Jurassic World trilogy, this line still underscores and curses this franchise as, time and time again, they just cannot recapture the magic and awe of the original film. Despite being reviled by critics, fans, and wider audiences alike, all three films cracked $1 billion at the global box office, weaponizing hollow millennial nostalgia to keep the franchise from extinction when it should probably just be left to die. But leave it to Universal to squeeze every last drop from the teat of their prized cash cow and course-correct once again with yet another reboot, better yet, rebirth this franchise desperately needs.

The ending of Jurassic World: Dominion has humans and dinosaurs peacefully co-existing. Rebirth smartly cleans up the mess Dominion made for it by not just undoing its ending, but also addressing a plot hole fans of the franchise have been talking about since ’93. After the cold open depicts a flashback to a lab meltdown caused by some very bizarre Snickers product placement, we’re told via opening text that in the 5 years since the events of Dominion, the Earth’s climate has proven to be inhospitable for dinosaurs. Climate change and disease have killed most of the dinosaur population on Earth, with those surviving now only found in the remote tropical islands of equatorial regions, as their climate is closest to what the Earth’s was 65 million years ago.

Traveling to these islands is outlawed, not to mention extremely dangerous. But for Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a covert ops mercenary (or as she calls it, “situational security reaction”), it presents a glorious opportunity. Willing to put any morals or ethics on the back burner for a seven-figure payday, she is recruited by corporate Big Pharma suit, Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) for a top-secret research expedition, alongside paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and fellow mercenary and old friend, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali). Their mission? Collect DNA samples of the three largest remaining dinosaur species that could unlock the key for a revolutionary drug to cure heart disease. The catch? The island they must travel to is a former InGen research facility for Jurassic World and has become overrun by a rogues’ gallery of failed experimental mutant dinosaurs.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is a welcoming and refreshing change of pace for this series. Shedding itself of the overblown nonsense of the previous Jurassic World films and embarking on a new stand-alone adventure. The only real callback to any previous film is a throwaway line from Dr. Loomis that he was a student of Dr. Alan Grant. Director Gareth Edwards’ work on Godzilla, Rogue One, and The Creator demonstrated he is a true acolyte of Steven Spielberg, and with Rebirth he captures the epic scale and awe-inspiring majesty and terror of the dinosaurs that made the original such a beloved classic and what the previous trilogy sorely lacked. The stakes are much lower than previous films, the level of violence is still aggressively PG-13 and it doesn’t lean enough into the horror of the premise, but the sense of danger and urgency Edwards imbues is palpable and makes the set pieces a lot of fun.

The story is structured and unfolds less like a film a more like either a video game or a tabletop RPG within the world of Jurassic Park. It’s not just the mission-oriented plot, but the fact that the characterization doesn’t develop beyond stiff archetypes, actions and motives of characters change on a whim, and the three dinosaurs they are tracking down are all in different environments: one land, one air, and one sea. It also has, to stick with the gaming parlance, annoying side quests that the film goes down, like rescuing a shipwrecked family in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean who subsequently hang around for the rest of the movie, even when they get separated from ScarJo and the gang. While the family is involved in arguably the best sequence in the film involving a T-Rex and whitewater rafting, they are two characters too many. Perhaps if it were just the father and his teen daughter it would work better, but we need to have the daughter’s clueless boyfriend come along for some bad comic relief and a younger daughter so she can befriend a cute baby dinosaur that will inevitably be sold as a mass-produced plushie. It feels like there were two separate scripts for Jurassic World sequels that got crammed together. As a result, the inclusion of the family makes the film overstuffed and also kills any tension because you know the film won’t have the guts to kill anyone in this family.

To say Jurassic World: Rebirth ultimately stands on the podium among the best of the Jurassic Park series is the faintest of praise given the dearth of quality this franchise has produced since the turn of the millennium. It’s an enjoyable, yet unremarkable action-adventure popcorn flick that, at the very least, isn’t tempted by the poison chalice of empty nostalgia-pandering, yet comes closest to capturing the essence of the original Jurassic Park than any of the sequels while taking the series in a cool new direction. It’s doubtful there’s enough here for Gareth Edwards to build a new trilogy he is reportedly pushing for, but if Rebirth is a taste of what we can expect, I say give him the keys to this franchise because the only way is up from here.

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