“Jurassic Park Rebirth” Doesn’t Breathe Life into Franchise
Summertime means the return of big intellectual property lumbering toward your local multiplex theater. While many may lament the lack of originality that comes with sequels and franchises, others welcome it. They relish the familiarity that comes with seeing a film that connects them to simpler times. Jurassic Park, despite the fact that it was released in the ’90s, is one of those franchises that makes people who didn’t grow up in the ’80s nostalgic for a seemingly simpler time. Jurassic World Rebirth is the seventh installment in the franchise and the standalone sequel to 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion. After all these years and all these sequels, Rebirth struggles to find a roar of its own to distinguish itself from the dinosaurs that came before it.
Rebirth picks up after the events of Dominion, but if you don’t remember the events of Dominion you’ll still follow along just fine. At this point, it’s a tale as old as time. Scientists can’t stop messing around with the genetic material of dinosaurs, end up creating a gnarly, uncontrollable monster, and our heroes are forced to find a way to escape. Rebirth’s heroes are a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson), a paleontologist (Jonathan Bailey), and a boat captain (Mahershala Ali) who have been tasked to travel to the last remaining part of the world where dinosaurs run free. There, they must retrieve blood samples from three living dinosaurs for a pharmaceutical company that believes dinosaur DNA is the key to eradicating heart problems in humans. Of course things go awry, and the hired help has to decide if this DNA is better served in the hands of the pharmaceutical company or in the hands of the public to open-source the life-saving medicine.
courtesy of Universal Studios
With summer blockbusters, there’s the expectation that the audience is walking into something breezy and thrilling. An action-adventure story where the good guys win and there are cool dinosaurs along the way. When Rebirth begins, there’s a palpable excitement that the thing we love, the franchise that raised us, is returning. When the team is being put together, there’s a true sense of the Spielbergian adventure movies of yesteryear. It’s a sensation that quickly wears off as the film devolves into a loosely-cobbled-together list of tasks the group must complete in order to get off this dinosaur-infested island. All action-adventure movies can be reduced to the idea of our heroes needing to check things off a list, but the truly great ones don’t make it obvious. That immerse us in faraway places in the shadow of magnificent creatures.
Rebirth is torn between two stories, either of which could have been a film of its own. There’s the pharmaceutical story and then there’s the story of a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his two daughters (Luna Blaise & Audrina Miranda), and the boyfriend (David Iacono ) of his eldest daughter who find themselves crashing the mission of our heroes. The family is on a sailing trip when their ship is capsized by a Mosasaurus. Their mayday call is picked up by the hero team, who saves them but ignores the family’s desire to immediately get help. The family is now thrust into a dinosaur survival story of their own, which is compelling in its own right. A regular group of people fighting for survival against forces far larger than themselves that they are woefully unprepared to battle. The story of the family is intermixed with that of the scientific endeavors, and Rebirth can’t help but feel like it’s torn between two worlds. It’s as though one person had started a script about a family’s survival and another had started a script about the evils of pharmaceuticals, and then they decided to smoosh them together into one behemoth story that doesn’t give either emotional journey the time it needs to develop.
courtesy of Universal Studios
Part of why these adventure movies from the ’80s and ’90s have endured is because there’s a distinctly human heart beating at the center of them that overshadows any monsters or jet-setting travels. It's this loud, earnest heart that’s missing from the latest installments of the Jurassic franchise. Anything we learn about these characters as an attempt to endear us to them are awkwardly shoehorned in. It’s merely throwaway lines to let us know that there is sadness in our heroes’ lives and that’s why they’re here on this journey. However, these inorganic, vague lines about a character’s deceased child or their mother’s heart condition isn’t a substitute for meaningful dialogue between the various crew members. The dinosaurs featured in Rebirth are the result of genetic splicing and cross-species mutations. It’s hard to ignore the fact that the film itself feels like a mirror of this. Borrowing bits and pieces of the films that came before it, the plot beats that have proven to be successful, to create something that is inherently off, despite making sense on paper.
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