The long holiday weekend usually comes with a big Hollywood release for fans to flock to theaters. This year it’s not aliens attacking the world on Independence Day, but a return of dinosaurs in another Jurassic World Movie. Jurassic World Rebirth is the 7th movie in the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise and fans are hoping for another epic adventure with dinosaurs. Unfortunately, the movie banks a little too hard on the nostalgia factor and familiar format that the movie just doesn’t deliver on anything that it promises.
Set in present day, the movie starts out showing (yet another) lab that was working with the dinosaur embryos. The twist this time, they’re doing genetic modifications to make mutant dinosaurs. This is probably as smart of an idea as bringing back Dinosaurs in the first place, but of course there is an failure of epic proportions due to a random Snickers wrapper. Yes, it’s that absurd.
Years later, we meet our current cast – a group of mercenaries (with heart!), a scientist who studied under Alan Grant (way to name drop that) and a family that is the wrong place at the wrong time. The movie is full of bad choices made by all of the characters, and let’s be frank – the writers as well.
In this world, Dinosaurs can’t live in the same areas where humans are. The climate and the air just aren’t the same, so they can’t make it. Which, that is plausible enough. But the only surviving dinosaurs are all near the Equatorial region where the temperatures and humidity and air are closest to what they would have lived in. Slightly questionable science there, but of course this is where the family has decided to take a boating vacation without the thought that they would be at risk. And after almost dying in a dinosaur encounter, they are saved by the mercenaries who quickly put them back in harms way as they are on a quest to collect blood samples from the three largest dinosaurs to sell to a pharmaceutical company. There’s some protentional for a good story, but the movie just doesn’t deliver.
Instead, we just get what is a movie that follows the same format as all of the original movies – pretty people put in perilous situations, large dinosaurs and jump scares. But Jurassic World Rebirth tries a little too hard on making this movie with touches of nostalgia that it fails to get its own footing. Even from the beginning the movie brings in the banner that the classic movie has about dinosaurs ruling the earth, has the child put in a near death situation that makes her go catatonic and mute, and people distracting dinosaurs with flares to save the day. It seems like the writers just mined the original movies for elements and shoved in them in the story to try to piece together a loose plot.
One main sticking point the movie keeps trying to make is when Dr. Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) mentions that there is no longer an interest in dinosaurs so the museum has to close. Even if dinosaurs were in a zoo like situation there will always be kids and adults who love the creatures and fascinated by them. But the movie doesn’t really focus on dinosaurs, instead the island is the Island of Misfit Dinosaurs where the were created in the lab, but on the screen look like they were pulled from any general monster pack and tweaked just slightly before rendering to make the monsters if this film. It’s a sloppy and bad return to the world of Jurassic Park.
Fans no doubt will rush to theaters and the air conditioning this holiday week and weekend to check out Jurassic World Rebirth, but if they’re looking for a relaunch of the franchise or a new exciting chapter they’re going to be disappointed.
Jurassic World Rebirth is in theaters everywhere today.
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About Jurassic World Rebirth
A new era is born. This summer, three years after the Jurassic World trilogy concluded with each film surpassing $1 billion at the global box office, the enduring Jurassic series evolves in an ingenious new direction with Jurassic World Rebirth.
Anchored by iconic action superstar Scarlett Johansson, Emmy and SAG nominee Jonathan Bailey and two-time Oscar® winner Mahershala Ali, this action-packed new chapter sees an extraction team race to the most dangerous place on Earth, an island research facility for the original Jurassic Park, inhabited by the worst of the worst that were left behind.
Also starring acclaimed international stars Rupert Friend and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, the film is directed by dynamic visualist Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) from a script by original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp.
Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures across land, sea and air within that tropical biosphere hold, in their DNA, the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.
Academy Award® nominee Johansson plays skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett, contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission to secure the genetic material. When Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos, they all find themselves stranded on a forbidden island that had once housed an undisclosed research facility for Jurassic Park. There, in a terrain populated by dinosaurs of vastly different species, they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that has been hidden from the world for decades.
Ali is Duncan Kincaid, Zora’s most trusted team member; Critics Choice and Olivier Award winner Jonathan Bailey (Wicked, Bridgerton) plays paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis; Emmy nominee Rupert Friend (Homeland, Obi-Wan Kenobi) appears as Big Pharma representative Martin Krebs and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer, Murder on the Orient Express) plays Reuben Delgado, the father of the shipwrecked civilian family.
The cast includes Luna Blaise (Manifest), David Iacono (The Summer I Turned Pretty) and Audrina Miranda (Lopez vs. Lopez) as Reuben’s family. The film also features, as members of Zora and Krebs’ crews, Philippine Velge (Station Eleven), Bechir Sylvain (BMF) and Ed Skrein (Deadpool).
Jurassic World Rebirth is directed by BAFTA winner Edwards from a script by Koepp (War of the Worlds), based on characters created by Michael Crichton. The film is produced by Oscar® nominee Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley, both longtime Jurassic franchise producers and of last summer’s blockbuster, Twisters. The film is executive produced by Steven Spielberg, Denis L. Stewart and Jim Spencer.