ADVERTISEMENTWhile the last few years have been characterised by movie lovers rightfully moaning about superhero fatigue, there is another cinematic ailment that has also taken hold: dino-fatigue.
Symptoms include dejected sighs triggered by recalling the lucrative but utterly pants 2015 – 2022 Jurassic World trilogy; the sudden urge to curse Colin Trevorrow’s name; and wanting to punch Chris Pratt in his perfect face every time you remember scenes of him holding up the palm of his hand to somehow communicate with raptors.
It was high time for someone to step in and give the series the much-needed renaissance it deserved.
Enter: Gareth Edwards, whose arresting debut Monsters, ambitious 2014 reboot of the Godzilla franchise and excellent Star Wars prequel Rogue One proved the British filmmaker has the chops to orchestrate a tense thrill ride. More than that, he’s not a director who bends under the weight of an existing IP and its accompanying high expectations.
Except, in the case of this seventh dinosaur instalment, he stumbles by only delivering everything you’d expect. And not a hell of a lot else.
Jurassic World Rebirth picks up after the events of 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion. Humans have been forced to co-exist with dinosaurs, and after a few years, everyone’s also experiencing dino-fatigue. We see this early on when a billboard depicting T-Rexes gets painted over – a plot point, but also an apt metaphor for the Jurassic franchise as a whole.
We meet Martin Krebs (Ruper Friend), a slimy Big Pharma bugger who enlists the services of Special Ops expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), soldier of fortune Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and palaeontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey). They are tasked with retrieving biomaterial samples from the three largest remaining dinosaurs: the aquatic Mosasaurus, the avian Quetzalcoatlus, and the land-locked Titanosaurus.
Krebs believes that their DNA holds the key to the development of a medical drug capable of curing cardiac disease. How that works, we have no idea. Something about haemoglobin needing to be extracted from living dinos. Anyway, it’s going to make him and his company millions.
The snag is that these creatures have struggled with the climate and now reside near the equator line, in remote locales reminiscent of the environments where they flourished during the Mesozoic era.
So it’s off to the dangerous Ile Saint-Hubert they go – where they’ll also rescue the shipwrecked Delgado family, whose boat came under attack from a pack of pesky Mosasaures.
Despite Gareth Edwards excellent direction, some nifty staging of CG set pieces and a handful of spectacular sequences – chiefly the riverbed encounter with a dozing T-Rex – Jurassic World Rebirth comes off as more of a nostalgic legacyquel than a rejuvenating fresh start.
There’s nothing wrong with loving Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original, but when your reboot feels like a greatest hits compilation rather than its own thing, something’s gone wrong somewhere.
Worse, original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp – who wowed us this year with Presence and Black Bag – returns to tick off all the staples expected from a dino romp (breathless chases, nail-biting close calls) but also lumbers his script with eye-rollingly poor exposition, ear-scraping dialogue, a lunatic focus on candy (don’t ask), and some very generic characters that only serve as dinosaur fodder.
It’s genuinely baffling how this feels like a first draft treatment rather than a fully formed ready-to-shoot script – one which should have relegated the Delgado family plotline to the cutting-room floor. Granted, the addition of audience surrogates makes sense, but the hapless family just slows down what should have been a down-to-basics three-part quest.
In Jurassic World Rebirth’s defence, the obviously rushed production schedule probably didn’t help. But much like our qualms with F1® The Movie, everything has to start with a decent script. Had the studio spent a bit more time polishing the screenplay instead of securing an admittedly impressive all-star cast and pushing for a Summer 2024 release slot, this could have been dino-mite.
As it stands, Jurassic World Rebirth honours the magic of Spielberg’s gamechanging blockbuster but downgrades what could have been a daring revival to a passably entertaining regurgitation.
Jurassic World Rebirth is out in cinemas now.
