5/12 ForReel Score | 2/5 Stars

At the sight of a collapsed sauropod, a slimy pharmaceutical executive who’s trying to rationalize a highly illegal get-rich-quick scheme claims that, “They might be through with us, but we're not through with them.” That might as well have been a boardroom of producers of the Jurassic franchise talking about the audience, attempting to lure us back into its gaping maw. After the failure that was 2022’s Jurassic World: Dominion, it seemed that the franchise was dead and buried for a while, but when it was announced that journeyman director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla (2014)) was to direct a script written by Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, my interest was most definitely piqued. I was worried that Gareth Edwards wouldn’t surpass the franchise’s most recent entry, the beyond-dreadful Jurassic World: Dominion, and, while Jurassic World: Rebirth certainly isn’t worse, it doesn’t seem to be a fantastic improvement either.

Scarlett Johansson stars as Zora Bennett, a mercenary hired by the pharmaceutical exec (Rupert Friend), who bands together with fellow merc Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) on a suicide mission to fetch life-saving blood samples from three of the largest dinosaurs, only to be joined by a marooned family whose boat capsized in the Atlantic. The group ends up stranded on Ile Saint-Hubert, a research and development facility for Jurassic World that was abandoned after an incident involving a mutated dinosaur. It’s an Indiana Jones-y Spielbergian setup that offers a lot of promise, despite the obvious “Really? Another island?” concern, especially after Dominion teased human co-existence with dinosaurs on the mainland. Instead, the dinosaurs have been driven to equatorial climates, and the world has moved on. And, with this being the seventh total entry and fourth film in the last ten years, I think it’s time for us to move on, too.

Jurassic Park was the movie that got me into movies, so it’s not an understatement to say that it defined who I am today. I’m even partial to its sequels, The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, but I can’t lie and act like the quality hasn’t been dipping from each subsequent entry. Jurassic World was barely passable, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was pretty stupid outside of two scenes, and Dominion was almost everything wrong with contemporary franchise filmmaking wrapped into a two-and-a-half hour paint-drying session. Rebirth had promise, with Gareth Edwards up to bat as director and David Koepp returning as screenwriter, with additional reports of Edwards demanding to shoot on 35mm film and of Koepp implementing an unused raft scene from Michael Crichton’s original novel, but, even then, the bells and whistles only exist in a vacuum when you’re faced with the riskless monotony of the final product.

Neither Ali nor Johansson are given much to work with, as the latter is introduced with the baggage of a lost comrade as quickly as it is tossed away. Jonathan Bailey is easily the standout as the film’s moral compass, even if he falls heavily into the “dork who says long words” archetype (I was waiting for someone to say “English, nerd!”). Even if it’s a pleasure to see Mahershala Ali back in theaters after Marvel held him hostage for the still-unmade Blade film, but I kept wondering why both mercenary characters had little-to-no moral complexity. Every character, including Rupert Friend’s portrayal of “The Greedy Guy,” is a cardboard cutout of either an existing character in the Jurassic franchise or any other blockbuster fare. Every character who I predicted to die died, and everyone else’s plot armor was ironclad.

Adding insult to injury, the B-plot following the shipwrecked family that tags along with the main group is almost exhaustingly tacked on. I don’t know why Koepp couldn’t have streamlined the screenplay to just focus on the big fetch quest at hand, because it breaks the pace so goddamn much. The romance between the eldest daughter and her douchey boyfriend is truly grating, and the youngest daughter merely exists to scream and feed a baby Aquilops (who was most definitely added-last minute to sell toys) various product placement candies. The reconciliation between the boyfriend and the father is as predictable as they come, with the mandated “I was wrong about you” exchange that I could predict by the line. Every forced dramatic beat was as forced as the last, and I didn’t really care for them at all.

That’s not to say that there isn’t some good buried under all of this hogwash, because there are some genuinely thrilling and awe-inspiring scenes in Rebirth. One notable scene is when Loomis reacts to seeing a live Titanosaurus and touches it, a moment fueled with the same wonder as when Sam Neill listened to the Triceratops breathe in Jurassic Park. The more intense scenes where the team is trying to fetch the DNA from the meat-eating dinosaurs are as thrilling as they are massive, with Edwards’ trademark sense of scale playing such a huge role in making the dinosaurs as physically imposing and threatening as possible. Even if I loathed the characters involved in the raft scene, it’s still an exciting and tense sequence that honestly reminded me of the recent Godzilla: Minus One. All the trademark Jurassic dinosaur action is certainly there, even if the narrative and characters aren’t.

For a film that was marketed as a return to form for the franchise, the series' obsession with hybrid monster dinosaurs is becoming aggravating at this point. The wonder of Spielberg’s and Joe Johnston’s entries of seeing fossils brought to life is gone, and we’re instead introduced to non-dinosaur monsters that almost function as self-satire. The idea of mutated or hybrid dinosaurs has been explored in the first Jurassic World trilogy to minimal effect, except for what director J.A. Bayona did with the Indoraptor in Fallen Kingdom in its quasi-gothic horror third act. It simply baffles me that they’ve now tripled down on this completely unwanted trend in Rebirth, with the “D-Rex” (insert penis joke here) or the “mutadons,” which are essentially just velociraptor cop-outs. I could name so many real carnivorous dinosaurs that could’ve fit the bill just fine, but Colin Trevorrow unfortunately used the Giganotosaurus for his “Joker”.

It almost gave me whiplash going from Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, a film wholly unafraid to try new things, to Rebirth, which refurbishes old material with slightly new presentation. Gareth Edwards attended the Steven Spielberg and James Cameron schools of blockbuster filmmaking (look no further than his stunning work on The Creator), but his visual flair can only go so far. Towering images of canoodling Titanosaurs or the predatory eyes of Mosasaurs can’t change how unfortunately derivative the film is from previous entries. The concept of mercenaries hunting dinosaurs alongside a golden-hearted paleontologist and a scheming tech executive is fully lifted from The Lost World, leaving me starving for anything new that Koepp’s screenplay could bring to the table. Nowhere in Rebirth is there a scene as wild as when a couple of T-rexes bisect Richard Schiff Lady and the Tramp-style in The Lost World, with the former boasting a kill count lower than that of the original.

I didn’t have high hopes for Jurassic World: Rebirth, but somehow I still came out of it feeling disappointed. It certainly doesn’t hit the egregious lows of Jurassic World: Dominion, but nowhere at all does Rebirth justify its existence. Gareth Edwards does what he can, but try as he may, Rebirth’s boringly formulaic script and weak character writing leave so much to be desired. I don’t see a world where the world embraces this franchise again with open arms anytime soon, but this will somehow make a billion dollars at the box office. This will be a serviceable and forgettable night at the movies for your average moviegoer, but as someone who loves Jurassic Park dearly, I think average moviegoers and fans alike deserve better than conventional retreads of familiar territory.

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