There are some movies you go into thinking “this is going to be amazing; I can’t wait.” There are other movies you go into thinking “this is going to be an absolute trash fire but I’m going to watch it anyway.” I’ll be honest: I really expected Jurassic World: Rebirth to be the latter. To my surprise more than anyone’s, I was wrong.
Unlike pretty much any character in a Jurassic Park movie, I’ll give you a warning before you jump in. There be spoilers below.
Returning Home
One of the biggest complaints I’ve had about the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise is the series’ conviction that every movie has to be bigger and better (which means the dinosaurs have to be more threatening). It’s not a criticism that Jurassic World: Rebirth entirely escapes.
Yes, it does try to make its Big Bad Dinosaur bigger and badder than the T-Rex. Which is still completely unnecessary. We don’t need bigger and badder dinosaurs. We need to care about the characters getting eaten – or not – by said dinosaurs. And that’s where Jurassic World: Rebirth goes back to its roots.
No movie will likely ever recapture the magic of the first Jurassic Park. I still remember sitting at a drive-in theater with my family, chugging I-can’t-believe-they-call-this-grape soda. Holding my breath the first time the sauropods were seen on screen, more massive and beautiful than anything I could have imagined. Tensing up at something as simple as ripples forming in standing water. It wasn’t just that the dinosaurs were big and bad and scary. They were wondrous.
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Magic and Mundane
That sense of wonder is something that I feel like the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World movies have forgotten, over the years. They have made dinosaurs so commonplace in the world, people have grown rather bored of them. Overtly so, in Jurassic World: Rebirth. But dinosaurs walking amongst us should be a touch of magic among the mundane. Not just for us, but for the characters themselves.
In that respect, Jurassic World: Rebirth gave me a spark of that feeling I had as a young child watching the first film in the franchise. When Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) cheered and even teared up at seeing dinosaurs for the first time, I was reminded of how I felt the first time I saw dinosaurs come to life on my screen. Particularly since Loomis wasn’t alone. Even world-weary characters like Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) couldn’t quite escape the magic.
Even 30 years after the original film, dinosaurs still capture our imagination. Dinosaurs should capture our imagination. Jurassic World: Rebirth pulls back on the epic scope of the adventure and re-centers it in a relatively small, intimate setting peopled with sympathetic characters. In doing so, it remembers that the world of dinosaurs doesn’t need to be bigger and better. It just needs to make us care.
Walk in the Park
With all that “feeling” stuff aside, there is one essential point that I have to acknowledge about Jurassic World: Rebirth. It’s essentially Jurassic Park, in a slightly different setting, with slightly different dinosaurs. The story beats are pretty much the same. You have your “experts” and some “innocent family/kids” imperiled together on an island with dinosaurs. They get separated and have to find their way back to each other. There’s the sleazy, cowardly slimeball you can’t wait to see become a dino-snack. A kid hides in a small confined space as a velociraptor (or something like it) comes after them. And a character you really want to survive the movie distracts the big bad dinosaur with nothing but flares and a hint of chutzpah.
Yes, in this analogy, Ali is the Jeff Goldblum of this franchise. All he needed was to unbutton his shirt a couple more buttons, and the parallel would have been even more clear. Would anyone object to him doing that? No, I don’t think so.
Anyway, back to the point. It’s like someone dusted off the framework of the first movie, slapped a new justification for being on the island on top of it. and sold it as something new. And while that kind of thing might normally annoy me a little, I’m surprisingly okay with it in this case. Jurassic World: Rebirth needed to recapture the feeling of the first film and remind us all – and maybe even itself – why people have loved this franchise for so long. If it takes going back to the start (literally) for that to happen, I’m okay with it. I just want to know where they go from here.
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Final Thoughts
Look, I won’t mince words here. Jurassic World: Rebirth doesn’t reinvent the wheel or break new territory in the world of dinosaur action films. In a cinematic landscape filled with reboots and sequels, that may be disappointing to some. It is very much a return to the series’ roots.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As much fun as the first Jurassic World was, bringing dinosaurs to the mainland just ended up being as ho-hum to the audience as it seems to be to the characters themselves. “Bigger and better” isn’t always bigger and better. Sometimes making the world smaller is the right call.
And as much as this latest movie in the franchise rehashes old ground, it does do so many things right. The casting is fantastic. Johansson and Ali are strangely endearing and even downright charming. They’re the warmest mercenaries I’ve ever seen on film, I think. And Bailey plays the “damsel in distress” to perfection. All the more because his attitude about being the damsel in distress is more “if I am eaten here, I will go down doing something amazing” than “I’m too old for this shit; how did I let myself get talked into this?”
The chemistry between all the actors is absolutely on point, as well. All the characters you want to see again live. (And I do hope we see them again!) The romantic chemistry between Johansson and Bailey’s characters works but is also understated. This isn’t a romance you expected to see flourish by the end of the movie, but one you hope to see grow over a series of films. And for those missing a little romance in their action film, there is even an oddly touching love scene between two dinosaurs. It’s a love story I never knew I needed.
If I walked away from Jurassic World: Rebirth with one complaint, it’s this: Next movie needs more T-Rex. We don’t need mutant abominations. We need more T-Rex. Stop trying to make scarier Jurassic Park/Alien hybrids. Just give us more T-Rex.
