After the truly awful Jurassic World: Dominion, the Jurassic franchise course corrects in a better direction with the new standalone sequel, Jurassic World: Rebirth.
Five years after the end of Dominion, the surviving dinosaurs in the world have clustered in warm tropical areas around the equator. Mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is recruited by pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to lead an expedition to that region and get DNA from the three largest species on land, sea, and air to create a revolutionary heart disease medicine. Along with Krebs and Bennett, the expedition includes paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), Zora’s former colleague. A family trying to sail across the Atlantic gets caught up in the mission when a Mosasaur attacks them. The plot offers up a decent enough reason for dinosaur action, but the characters are fairly uninteresting across the board. Zora and Kincaid are given a tragic backstory that is barely explored, and Johansson and Ali have to use every ounce of star power to give their characters any semblance of life. Bailey is pretty fun as Dr. Loomis, primarily due to his enthusiasm at seeing dinosaurs in the wild. Rupert Friend does a decent job as the weaselly pharmaceutical rep who, shockingly, is more concerned with money than the welfare of anyone on the mission. The family is fine, but they are mostly there just to put a little girl in danger in an attempt to add emotional stakes and to introduce the extremely toyetic baby dinosaur, Dolores. Everything is still better than what happened in Dominion with its inexplicable obsession with locusts and its inexcusable waste of all the legacy Jurassic characters. There is still some fat that could probably be trimmed from the plot, especially in the first half, but once everyone gets on the new Ile Saint-Hubert, it picks up.
The movie features some solid dinosaur action throughout, including the long-awaited T Rex river attack, which was a highlight of the original Jurassic Park novel and had been considered for inclusion in several Jurassic films, but was never made until now. The Mosasaur sequence is also quite impressive as the group’s boat tries to keep up and survive against the massive aquatic predator. Gareth Edwards has consistently excelled in creating scale, and he effectively makes the dinosaurs feel impressive and dangerous in Rebirth. It’s also a fun mix of some favorites throughout the franchise, like the Mosasaur and the T-Rex, along with some new dinosaurs, like Titanosaurus and Quetzalcoatlus. Unfortunately, the much-hyped “D-Rex”, the genetic monster created in a secret INGEN lab, is somewhat disappointing, only factoring into the movie’s climax and looking more ridiculous than terrifying. If it had been an ongoing threat, like the Spinosaurus in Jurassic Park III or the Indominus Rex in Jurassic World, it probably would have been more interesting, but the normal dinosaurs are scarier and more compelling than it. Hopefully, the franchise moves away from these kaiju mutations and back to the more regular dinosaurs, which is what everyone is here for.
Jurassic World: Rebirth doesn’t reinvent the franchise, but it’s a welcome course correction that delivers solid dinosaur thrills and reminds us why we fell in love with this prehistoric spectacle in the first place.
