With all due respect – and respect is certainly due for a franchise that has earned just over $6 billion over its lifetime – the Jurassic Park/World franchise is something of a one-trick pony. To be sure, it’s a fun trick. Humans recreate extinct dinosaur species confident that they can control them. Dinosaurs show then the folly of their hubris. Much running and screaming ensues as humans try to stay off the dinosaurs’ menu. Wash, rinse, humans fail to learn their lesson, repeat.
Such it is for the latest entry into the series Jurassic World: Rebirth. And yes, it is something of a rebirth as the franchise is looking to launch a new storyline following the arc of the last three Jurassic World films. But it is really more of a rehash, stealing elements from both the aforementioned recently completed trilogy and the original set of three films for its storyline.
It is five years since the events of the last Jurassic World film and since then most of the dinosaurs that had been freed to roam the modern world have died off, their 65 million year old physiognomy totally unsuited for the climate of the 21st century. Only a small group remain, living in a band that runs along the equator. And it is these survivors that fall under the eye of a biomedical research company who feel that there could be something in the dino DNA that could be beneficial to curing certain types of heart disease. Mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is hired to put together a team together to escort scientist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to one of the research islands where dinosaurs were created for the long abandoned Jurassic Park to collect the needed DNA samples.
Of course, the best laid plans of men are almost immediately confounded by dinosaurs. Following their boat crashing ashore, the group struggles to make their way across the island towards a pre-arranged extraction point, gathering the needed DNA samples as they go. Complicating things are a family – father, two daughters and the teenage daughter’s boyfriend – who were shipwrecked by an aquatic dinosaur and who the group of mercenaries find themselves having to take in. Of course, not everyone is going to make it to film’s final moments.
Not that this isn’t entertaining. Director Gareth Edwards certainly knows his way around giant monsters; he was the one who launched Legendary’s MonsterVerse franchise with 2014’s Godzilla. And teaming up with original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koep, the two have some fun moments throughout the film. A sequence where the lost family is chased in a raft by a T-Rex down a river contains a number of thrills, as does a cliffside sequence involving a winged dinosaur and a finale in which a number of dinos converge to try and stop the group from escaping the island. It’s all good popcorn fun.
But the danger is only really tangible as an audience member if we care about the characters. And there really is only given some perfunctory moments of characterization for many of the cast, some of it more clunky than others. Johansson and fellow mercenary Mahershala Ali share a moment before all t he mayhem begins to catch each other up on what has been going on in their lives since their last outing together and feels about one step short of just having them directly address the audience and tell us their backstories. Still, there are some moments that are genuinely effective, like the arc that Xavier, teen Teresa’s boyfriend, goes through.
Like a couple of other installments of the franchise, Rebirth does touch on the theme of bio-ethics. The idea that the corporation bankrolling the mission raises questions about performing illegal acts in pursuit of a larger good. And that’s not to mention the profit motives involved. (A conversation touches on this somehow without invoking Jonas Salk.) It also seems to echo a theme in the first two Alien films in which a mega-corporation is only too willing to sacrifice the crews of their spaceships in order to get a captured alien xenomorph to study and exploit as a potential bio-weapon.
The idea of monstrous dinosaurs mutated by scientists to be bigger and scarier attractions for the visitors to Jurassic Park is a concept that originated in the previous trilogy of film. Since they up the stakes from the original trilogy of films for the characters in the subsequent movies, it is hard not to read these man-made grotesqueries as a commentary on the idea of sequels themselves, whether the filmmakers intended it to be or not. In the never ending quest to give film-goers bigger and scarier on screen thrills, the Jurassic Park/World moves have to create bigger and scarier monsters, no matter how implausible the in-movie explanations tend to be. And the films themselves always seem to be on the verge of getting out of control and overwhelming any kind of story they are telling.
