Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Gareth Edwards
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Ed Skrein
When a new coach takes over a struggling sports team they often start
pinning the blame on their predecessor, complaining about the lack of
fitness in their players. It's a way of buying themselves time. "Look at
the mess I inherited!" With Jurassic World Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards and returning screenwriter
David Koepp, who penned the first two Spielberg directed entries,
pull a similar stunt. Opening text tells us that the world of this series
has begun to take dinosaurs for granted, and in an early sequence we see
New York commuters moan as the sort of dinosaur that inspired wonder in
Sam Neill and Laura Dern all those years ago is now the cause of a traffic
jam. Edwards and Koepp are clearly acknowledging that they've inherited a
mess, but the box office figures suggest the public hasn't lost interest
in this series. The most recent entry,
Dominion, made a billion dollars despite being the series' low point. At time of
writing, Jurassic World Rebirth has made a staggering $250
million in just its opening day.
After three Jurassic World movies with increasingly
convoluted plots that all but forgot this series was built around
dinosaurs (Dominion had more in common with a
Fast and Furious movie), the hype for
Rebirth has promised a stripped down, back to basics
approach. Its plot is straight out of a b-movie. That b-movie is the 2004
straight to video sequel Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid. As with that movie, here a ragtag group ventures to a jungle at the
behest of a pharmaceutical company in search of a magical serum believed
to work medical miracles.
In this case the serum takes the form of dino juice. Hired by big pharma
creep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend in the Paul Reiser
Aliens role), crack mercenary Zora (Scarlett Johansson) assembles a team including Duncan (Mahershala Ali) and a few
doomed redshirts. Also joining the expedition is dino-nerd biologist Dr.
Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey). Just before the mercs reach the island that is home to the specific
dinosaurs they're in search of, they stumble across a family whose small
yacht was upended by giant sea creatures.
Sometimes it's difficult to pin down where a movie goes wrong, but it's all
too easy in the case of Rebirth. For a start, it wastes a good half hour setting up a bunch of characters
that we ultimately couldn't care less about. The original 1987
Predator spends less than five minutes introducing its cast of
jarheads in a simple credits sequence that sees them banter as their chopper
arrives in the jungle, but every one of those grunts feels more fully
sketched than any of the characters here. It doesn't help that Johansson and
her crew aren't remotely believable as a grizzled bunch of mercenaries. I'm
sure Johansson could have been believably badass, but her character is
written like she's the bubbly branch manager of a small real estate firm
rather than someone who has seen action in Yemen.
Koepp's script goes out of its way to humanise the mercenaries, which might
make sense if the audiences didn't also have a civilian family to identify
with. There's a better version of this setup where the mercenaries are a
realistically scary bunch who pose as much threat to the family as the
dinosaurs. Trying to make us root for the mercs creates a character
imbalance, as the only human villain here is Krebs. To use a
Jaws analogy, Rebirth has one Hooper (Loomis), a
dozen Brodys (the mercs and the family) and no Quints. The latter role
should be occupied by Zora and her grunts, the professional hunters who know
what they're doing but might also get everyone else killed.
You have to feel sorry for Edwards. He's one of the few directors in modern
Hollywood who knows how to craft blockbuster visuals, but he's always
lumbered with second-rate, over-written scripts. For much of
Rebirth, Edwards is stuck filming talking heads, but in the last 40 minutes he
finally gets the chance to let rip. The closing stretch of
Rebirth features the best filmmaking this series has seen in
its post-Spielberg years. The highlight is a tense and beautifully staged
set-piece in which the stranded family, at this point separated from the
mercs, are menaced by the series' old mainstay, a T-Rex. Unlike the mercs,
we actually care about this family because they're more relatable (there's
some nicely comic interplay between Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and David Iacono as a father and his
daughter's obnoxious boyfriend), and it's a shame the movie doesn't understand this. They really should
have been the main protagonists rather than side characters.
Edwards' work in the climax doesn't quite redeem what is mostly a patience
testing mix of redundant character building and rehashed highlights from
both this series and Jaws. Still, it's easily the best of the Jurassic World phase of
this fossilising franchise, and the most well-crafted entry in the series as
whole since The Lost World. If only there was a screenwriter in Hollywood who could write Edwards a
decent script.
Jurassic World Rebirth is in
UK/ROI cinemas from July 2nd.
