The opening 45 minutes of Jurassic World: Rebirth mostly involve people talking about how they are doing things that they know they shouldn’t be doing because of money. If not an outright apology from accomplished screenwriter David Koepp on behalf of himself and the award-winning actors, Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, it is certainly an explicit explanation for the existence of this inert abomination.
Yes, yes, all movies are made to make a profit. But we are supposed to get something out of the deal. We give studios our cash, and they entertain us for a few hours. That’s the agreement. Rebirth is cinematic pickpocketing, a film heist in which audiences are pinched for the crime of keeping the faith in the now-truly-extinct Jurassic brand.
Koepp liberally steals from previous films, mostly Jurassic Park III, which at least had the decency to keep things to 90 minutes. Rebirth welds two “plots” together, neither of which could be called a “story” by even the broadest application of that term. Zora Bennett (Johansson) is a mercenary paid a huge sum of money by corporate shill Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to escort Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to get blood samples from three of the biggest dinosaurs in order to make a drug that will virtually cure heart disease. Zora recruits Duncan Kincaid (Ali) and his team to help.
Meanwhile, divorced dad Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is on a sailing trip with his young daughter, Isabella (Audrina Miranda); older daughter, Teresa (Luna Blaise); and Teresa’s loser boyfriend, Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono). Their boat strays into dino-infested waters, and they end of getting rescued by Zora’s expedition. Then they get separated from the expedition. Then they reunite again. Because nothing in the film has any permanence or purpose. Time is a flat circle, and we are spending too many of the precious minutes we are given on this flatulent gibberish.
Setting aside the modern hubris of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make Rebirth, the true insanity is how many hours of life humans spent making and will spend watching this. It is so stupid. It is so, so stupid. For example, a baby dinosaur shows up and is quasi-adopted by Isabella. The assumption is that its parents will show up at a key moment or, at the very least, that the young girl will learn some kind of lesson from the encounter. Nope. Koepp’s dinosaur is the anti-Chekov’s gun.
The same can be said of the buildup in the relationship between Reuben and Xavier. The film repeatedly hints at the former inspiring the latter to become more than just a burnout slacker. Despite a perfect opportunity during the climax, this storyline gets zero payoff. Worse than dumb, the film is relentlessly boring. In addition to the long stretches of pointless walking and talking, the action set pieces are so redundant to previous installments that they can’t even generously be called homages. Kids smashing toys together have had better executed spectacles.
Jurassic Park had the cleverness of bringing dinosaurs back from extinction. Heck, even Jurassic World had a decent premise – what if the theme park actually worked – before devolving into rote repetition of its predecessor. Rebirth is aggressively, flagrantly stupid and pointless. It is unable or unwilling to be or do anything of consequence. The hate and disdain that so many have (largely unfairly) had for superhero movies should be trained on this franchise until it disintegrates beyond the point of fossilization.
It’s not very good, folks.
Grade = F
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Charles Pulliam-Moore at The Verge says, “for all of its attempts at being thrilling crowd pleaser, there’s a limpness to Jurassic World Rebirth that makes it feel like a film that might have been better suited for one of the streamers.”
Ruth Maramis at FlixChatter Film Blog says, “Overall, this movie isn’t exactly a ‘rebirth’, which implies something refreshingly positive. Instead, it’s more of a ’clone me again and again’ banality. I never thought the Jurassic World movies could sink lower than they already have. Turns out I was wrong.”
Hilary White at the Irish Independent says, “Watching one of the most celebrated actors of her generation booting a Quetzalcoatlus in the face is quite a sight, and that’s taking into account a cinema universe where spectacle is the foundation for everything that matters.”
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