Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
We start off with a Snickers wrapper. At a corporate super secret science lab (on an island, yes, ANOTHER island) where they’re making dinosaur hybrids. Hybrids crossed with what? Don’t worry about it. Most of the dinosaurs on the island look pretty regular, though, despite the mention of them mostly being failures for being so ugly no public would pay to see them.
Oh, yeah, dinosaurs now once again live in the world, having taken over most of the equatorial tropics where they can still survive because Science Reasons. And they’re such a common occurrence that people are now sick of them, considering them a nuisance more than anything else. Nobody wants to visit the dinosaur museum anymore, and dinosaurs are nothing more than brand mascots.
This despite people today being absolutely obsessed with dinosaurs even though we have no live specimens. And the original movie being based on the premise people are gonna flock to see living dinosaurs, but whatever. Don’t worry about it. (Not to mention people today shouting “cow!” or “horse!” when they spot them as they drive past, foxes, deer and moose regularly make the papers when they show up where people live, but we’re done with the dinos? Mkay.)
So, back to the Snickers wrapper.
A hapless lab employee throws a Snickers wrapper on the floor. Said Snickers wrapper then gets sucked into the air vent in a door giving rise to many questions:
- Why is there an air vent intake in a security door that’s supposed to seal shut?
- What is the purpose of putting a vent structure in a door when you could more reliably place it in a wall that doesn’t move?
- Why doesn’t it just jam that one door? Why does it crash the whole system setting the dinosaurs free?
- Why is this high-security system so fragile that one errant Snickers wrapper causes the entire facility to malfunction, releasing the AVP-inspired D-Rex, which is a mutant and a hybrid, into the wider world?
- If this is, as they’ve asserted, a huge industry, why isn’t RnD getting a decent budget for doing this kind of potentially disastrous work?
- And why was the D-Rex able to escape this area that was supposed to keep it confined once the door broke and the facility went on the fritz? (I can only hope it was a Quetzalcoatl that crashed through the roof like an errant raccoon in search of an easy snack, but this is never explained, because don’t worry about it.)
It seems every problem in the Jurassic Park universe stems from the fact that no one is capable of building a door that closes properly.
Anyway, the Distortus (Latin for “twisted, misshapen, deformed”) Rex shows considerable intelligence as it paws the hapless lab tech, who caused this whole incident in the first place, begs for his life. Much like other highly intelligent predators (lion, tiger, even house cat) the D-Rex investigates this potential prey before striking. But it’s still the ugliest thing I’ve seen in a while, so there’s that.
Skip ahead 17 years into the future, the lab has long since been abandoned and the dinosaurs now roam the earth, causing a nuisance in traffic and whatnot. Big pharma calls in woman-as-mercenary Zora (Scarlett Johansson) to retrieve samples from living dinosaurs so they can create a cure for heart disease. Because apparently the bigger the dinosaur, the better to synthesise a cure from. They need one blood sample each from the biggest water dinosaur, biggest land dinosaur and biggest air dinosaur. She only agrees to it after she finds out how much the job pays, and then later doubles even that in the most boring bit of banter with the team she put together as they “play” their employer.
We’re also, for some godforsaken reason, introduced to a hapless family on an Atlantic crossing in a tiny little sail boat. In a world where dinosaurs are known to exist, this Father of the Year thought it would be a good bonding exercise to take his school age and teenage daughters (her lazy boyfriend as an avec) on an Atlantic crossing. Right into some kind of restricted zone and past the island with the disastersaurs.
Obvious plot device (save the cat) from the word go. But also… wtf?! They essentially create their own second movie within the movie and the whiplash you get between the two storylines is insane. They could cut the family out and nothing in the story really changes, except that one thing where the kid opens the gate, but they could have written around that easily.
And I will say this: Isabella (Audrina Miranda), the youngest daughter, carries the film. Time and again she’s put in terrifying danger, getting so traumatised she stops speaking at one point, and then finding her own way to healing without the help of a single elder when she discovers a friendly dinosaur she ends up taking home as a souvenir. But I always find it ironic when kids star in movies they’re too young to watch.
Watching movies as a parent isn’t always easy.
Using a child character like this (constantly putting them in danger) is always a tricky thing when you get parents in the audience. For one, it makes me aware that I’m currently not with my own child and I miss her. This in turn makes me aware of the fact that, even when I’ve taken this time for myself to do something adult, I’m still on-call and now I’m wondering if I should check my phone for messages or missed calls.
(The biggest irony ever was that following the “don’t be an asshole, turn your phone on silent and put it away” notifications on screen before the movie, the very next thing was an ad for a new Samsung phone.)
Then I’m constantly thinking of all the ways this father is an absolute deadbeat who should never, ever be allowed to be alone with his own children ever again. Had they started the film with showing how he wanted to do this trip as a way to be close to his kids even after the divorce, setting up a strong premise for us rooting for the kids to still love him with all his mahoosive flaws, it would have been a better movie. And maybe make it so he wasn’t doing a transatlantic crossing, or even if he was, that it was maybe not a great idea but at least his kids were equipped for it? Something, anything, to lay the groundwork for this fucking decision. But, hey, don’t worry about it.
But since no children ever die in these films, we know that they’re only getting into trouble so our crew of mercs, Dino Doc (Jonathan Bailey) and Corporate Shill (Rupert Friend) in tow, can save them. A poor attempt at getting us to like these characters whose motivations meander all over the place.
There’s also an incredibly dull conversation between woman-as-mercenary Zora and man-as-mercenary Duncan (Mahershala Ali), about their tragic past, that is a blatant attempt at trying to make the audience Feel Something(TM) for these characters that somehow are a copy of each other, the plot often getting confused by which plot points should go to which character (and sometimes just decides to hand out duplicates by the mere merit that there is, in fact, two of them?).
Had they cut out Duncan, Zora would have been stronger for it. As it stands, she can’t decide if she’s the quippy rogue who’s addicted to adventure, the cold, emotionless merc who’s just here for the money, or the PTSD-suffering soldier running away from a sad backstory. None of those ever get explained, by the way. But don’t worry about it.
Other things that never get explained are the multiple plot points that are raised throughout the film:
- the crashed helicopter that Corporate Shill plunders for a pistol,
- the ancient-looking carvings and surprisingly advanced carved-into-stone multi-storey staircase that saves our heroes from having to rappel down the second half of the cliff face (because they already rappelled down the first half leaving me to wonder if the packs they have on were filled with NOTHING BUT ROPE),
- the tragic backstory of woman-as-mercenary Zora,
- the thing moving in the water that touches woman-as-mercenary Zora’s leg and later threatens Corporate Shill too,
- how the titanosaurus can have such a long tail and still abide by physics,
- how these are man-made dinosaurs, because secret lab experiments, but the Dino Doc (arguably the one who knows the most) replies to a comment about the biggest dinosaurs at least being herbivores that “the thing that hunts them isn’t”… but if these are man made, how have they evolved a predator? Or did they bring back a predator for them? And if so, why, God, why?!?
- the “survival is the exception” speech given by Dino Doc or why a museum intendant thought he could hack a journey like this in the first place (other than that he’s fit because he’s Jonathan Bailey),
- how all these people trek across difficult terrain (that should take days to cross at best) in such record time,
- how the hapless dad’s leg is injured but not really because it’s mostly forgotten and a plot device rarely (if ever?) used,
- or how the souvenir dinosaur is gonna survive Back Home if dinosaurs don’t really survive there? (So the kid is going to end up with a dead dinosaur? Yeah that probably won’t trigger any PTSD. Well, at least they don’t show that part…)
The yellow life raft scene was cool (harkens back to the book and was a scene planned for the first Jurassic Park but scrapped due to worries about the CGI and animatronics not handling water) but are you saying that a T-Rex didn’t put a single puncture in that thing while it was actively trying to rip it to shreds?
There are a few nice callbacks to the first movie, like the raptor behind the shelf thing, but we didn’t get a nail tap and that was a bit sad. Instead of a kitchen we also get a petrol station shop which is brimming with more product placements.
The flare distraction was also a nice touch, though having him die off screen only so that he could be brought back without explanation a little later was stupid. Had that been woman-as-mercenary Zora who ran off with the flare only to survive anyway, would have made more sense (but still doesn’t explain how he was fine using a flare just moments after he lured the D-Rex away with it).
By the end of the film my only though was that this film didn’t understand the assignment.
The reason the original film works is because it’s not a blatant cash grab it’s self-aware enough to know that what it’s suggesting, bringing dinosaurs back, is really far out there, so it doesn’t try to convince you otherwise – instead it just says “but look how cool (and disastrous) it could be” and promises to take us on a fun ‘what if’ ride. That scene with the T-Rex roaring its ownership over the island at the end is as iconic as it gets, the final nail in the coffin of Disneyland But With Dinosaurs, and could be straight out of a music video.
The original movie also has decent stakes, interesting characters and an actual story to tell: man’s attempt at playing God being doomed and the pitfalls of human greed, just to name a few.
Jurassic World Rebirth ends with a fizzle as they finally make the decision to open source the blood samples rather than give them to big pharma (don’t worry about it, that’s not really explained either). Was there some kind of arc there for the characters to go through to arrive at this Robin Hood solution? Absolutely none. So it felt unearned.
As they speed away in an even smaller boat than they arrived on, they’re apparently no longer worried about neither the mosasaurus or the spinosaurus hunting the waters around this island, despite them being the direct reason their original boat ran aground. (Don’t worry about it. The movie’s over anyway.)
The hapless family survives (because you can’t kill the cat) and they aren’t really changed either, beyond being traumatised for life. They weren’t even brought any closer to each other as a result of their adventures (like if the off screen mum hated the lazy boyfriend even more than the dad, but the dad and the boyfriend see eye-to-eye by the end of it all, which also brings him closer to his teenage daughter, would have made some fucking sense).
There was no story being told. There were too many characters for this plot and all of them felt like a first draft after one (1) brainstorming sesh. There’s two movies in one and they don’t fit neatly together, they would have been better off just cutting the family out entirely and bulking up the ‘mercs working for corporate’ story, rather than making them show up like a plot contrivance at every turn. Make that yet another cash grab Jurassic Park movie that might have actually been fun.
The bottom line is this franchise is coasting on one good movie made over 30 years ago and tie-in games. Because I couldn’t shake the feeling while watching the film that it’s just meant to be a light introduction to a game world. And I could even get on board the Jurassic Park movies now being just straight up action movies, but the least they could do is make them make the most rudimentary kind of sense.
“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
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