No film, even including dinosaur-free movies, will likely have the impact that the first Jurassic Park film (based on the book by Michael Crichton) brought to audiences and critics alike back in 1993. Until then stop-motion and rough, cut-and-paste green screen was king but Steven Spielberg, like the film’s fictional entrepreneur John Hammond, seemingly did the impossible. You’ll believe a man can fly? Peh, peanuts. Now you’ll believe a T-Rex can live again! Very few films could boast creating such an industry-wide sea-change and summer blockbusters were forever altered, having to raise their game to even vainly compete.
Five films in the franchise would follow: The Lost World, Jurassic Park III, Jurassic World, JW: Fallen Kingdom and JW: Dominion, though it was, perhaps inevitably, a law of diminishing returns. Now there’s a new entry: Jurassic World: Rebirth and despite it being originally released to cinemas ahead of the crowded superhero marketplace to cinemas in July (and now hitting streaming platforms barely a month later, once an indicator of monetising a loss, now almost standard procedure) there’s absolutely nothing devastatingly inadequate or wrong with it. However, given the circling the centrifuge drain of recent outings, that isn’t exactly high praise either. What Rebirth does fine with is the all-important course-correction. Quite purposefully it goes back to the DNA of the Jurassic Park trilogy of films, rather than the Jurassic World extensions and it says ‘Let’s not take too many risks – let’s not reinvent the wheel or get too silly, let’s just start with the greatest hits and go from there…‘ and then proceeds to do just that. What Rebirth is, is less a rebirth and more a sprightly retread – shiny, star-packed , yet remembering that the CGI-creations need to be both the icing on the cake and the main attraction to the munchable ensemble. Here, we’re not bafflingly racing raptors across stately-home rooftops (or worse turning them into party-tricks) or hiding cloned kids from nefarious forces, no… we’re back in familiar territory: an island jungle (actually filmed in Thailand), where man is the interloper and there’s some kind of o’saurus waiting to kill you around every o’corner.
Right out of the paddock, there are easter-eggs, homages and outright steals from those early movies. Alongside the now signature music cues greeting us at every turn, there’s a bus that bares the name ‘Crichton Academy’, a banner familiarly flutters down in front of a T-Rex skeleton, a Ray Harryhausen video plays on a museum monitor as director Gareth Edwards unapologetically sets the stage for plenty of decent legacy thrills if few genuine new surprises. The story distances itself from the ‘dinosaurs amongst us’ set-up of the last three films, explaining (with some ecological logic) that such beasts were never meant to exist in our cooler climate and therefore a massive percentage have died or retreated to islands near the equator. Even once-crowded exhibitions have seen their box-office and queues diminish as a fickle public moves on and is more likely to complain about downtown traffic than homegrown T-Rexs. Instead, a rather dubious businessman Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) wants to hire a group of under-the-radar operatives to get him and a small group to one of the original facilities that was used for bio-engineering dinosaurs (old and mix-and-matched) in able to get specific blood-samples that might revolutionise medicine. It’s a dangerous, illegal operation but one with a large budget and so an illicit but capable team is assembled. Meanwhile, a single father Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo fresh from playing Mickey Haller in Netflix‘s The Lincoln Lawyer) is taking his two daughters (and his eldest’s ne’er-do-well lazy boyfriend) on a sailing trip that goes massively off-course when they encounter an underwater threat. They are rescued by our lovable mercenaries… and then all hell breaks loose as the two groups are separated again and fight for survival against the dinosaurs in their respective paths. Short of the ‘theme-park’ aspect, it’s a very similar mission-statement to the first trilogy: get off the island without getting eaten.
The recent Jurassic World films seemed less like National Geographic and more like off-road vehicles for Chris Pratt (and co-star Bryce Dallas Howard, currently making a name for herself behind the camera for several Disney projects). Scarlett Johansson is the big name this time, but she – and the story – are smart enough to know she’s safe on unsafe ground. Her Zora Bennett is a kick-ass mercenary we can cheer for – the cinematic kind for whom money is almost everything but who has enough humanity left to stare wistfully into sunsets thinking about late loved ones and wondering if she’s working for the wrong side. Mahershala Ali’s Duncan Kinkaid (still set to play Marvel‘s Blade if and when it happens) is, likewise, a wise-cracking, risk-taking guide, a long-time platonic friend of Zora and whom we learn has also suffered a tragedy – the loss of a child. (For a moment, you may wonder if we’ve missed a franchise entry along the way that chronicled their adventures). Jonathan Bailey is the bookish, but capable Dr. Henry Loomis, coming along for all the right reasons and unable to turn down the opportunity to see a dinosaur in its native habitat, but quickly realising he’s mostly out of his depth. Elsewhere, Garcia-Rulfo is far from the confident lawyer we’ve come to know, but essays a desperate father well enough.
The cast is expansive enough that you know some won’t survive the first act and, obligingly, we carelessly lose a handful of further-down-the call-sheet mercenaries before we’re barely off the boats and on the beach. Several boo-hiss players are clearly getting marked for inevitable evisceration before we’re done – though most of those deaths are of the long-shot, minimum blood type, after all this retains the PG-13 status of all the previous films. There’s a couple of characters that you might suspect would perish immediately that don’t (one I felt was immediately annoying and stupid and would have to be sacrificed to the idiot box, but which the film slowly sought to redeem, though never in a way that convinces. Another character would seem destined for a heroic exit, but turns out to have made it after all – however, I’d bet there’s early versions where both characters did meet their end only to have their fates changed along the way).
Even if some of the novelty is gone, the dinosaurs do okay, there’s raptors scurrying through the undergrowth and through facilities and an obligatory T-Rex chase (this time along a river). Doubling down, as the Jurassic franchise is wont to do, there’s some overtime for the VFX department to produce some new DNA’d monstrosities from the ether rather than fossils (one introduced in the ‘cold open’ before the titles, highlighting disastrous events at the soon-to-be-abandoned base two decades earlier and, of course, reappearing for the climax). Quibbles… there’s a cute baby dinosaur that we could do without, but isn’t too distracting, and one wonders why the risk-averse Krebs wouldn’t just let everyone else go off to the island and do the dangerous work for him while he then reaps the financial whirlwind needs to be glossed over later…but this is a don’t-think-about-that-too-hard aspect that never really gets in the way of the romp itself.
It’s hard to know if this will successfully spawn another era of the dinosaur diorama, but the Rebirth did well enough on the big-screen ($780 million worldwide is nothing to be sneezed at) and one suspects it will find an even wider audience now that you can dodge raptors from the safety of your couch…
- Story7
- Acting8
- Direction8
- Production Design / VFX8
