A team of mercenaries hunts down the largest dinosaurs in efforts to develop a cancer cure in Jurassic World Rebirth, which opens in Prague and cinemas worldwide this weekend. This dialed-back entry following three increasingly contrived Jurassic World movies bears the burden of its predecessors’ clunky world-building, but also fixes some key mistakes. In terms of a straightforward adventure movie packed with dinosaur thrills, it’s the series’ best entry since Joe Johnston’s Jurassic Park III, though it may disappoint anyone looking for something new.
Jurassic World Rebirth takes place five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, which saw—in between its insect-focused storyline—dinosaurs run amok in locations across the globe. Now, the beasts are a mere annoyance, witnessed in an early scene featuring a dying sauropod holding up traffic in midtown Manhattan. Due to climate change, dinosaurs can no longer survive outside of a thin band around the equator; never mind that they seemed to be thriving in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the previous movie.
Public disinterest in dinosaurs has forced the closure of a New York museum curated by paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), the film’s lone connection to the kind of awe and wonder seen in the original film. “I studied under Alan Grant,” he mentions in one scene, referencing Sam Neill‘s character in previous movies; a sequence where he encounters a titanosaurus faithfully recreates the majesty of the brachiosaurus scene in the original Jurassic Park—no doubt aided by briefly borrowing John Williams’ score.
Not everyone has given up on dinosaurs. Big pharma, represented by sleazy rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), is still conducting dinosaur research in efforts to cure cancer—and generate big profits. To do so, Krebs needs samples from the three biggest species on land, air, and sea—the titanosaurus, quetzalcoatlus, and mosasaurus—extracted from still-living specimens. You know, for freshness.
These species only reside in and around a small island somewhere between Barbados and Suriname, and entry is strictly prohibited by world governments. So Krebs hires a team of mercenaries led by Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) to lead a highly illegal mission, with the good Dr. Loomis in tow for guidance. Zora’s team includes ship captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and muscle Bobby Atwater (Ed Skrein), and the gang rescues shipwrecked father Rueben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his girls Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono), before they even make it to dino island.
Jurassic World Rebirth was directed by Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Godzilla), who gets one thing right that the previous movies fumbled: the dinosaurs feel like dinosaurs again. Gone are the domesticated velociraptors and other bizarre characterizations—the dinosaurs here are a constant threat, and genuinely scary: often operating within bushes and under water (there are a lot less VFX shots here than in the previous few films), there’s a sense of danger in every dinosaur interaction here that recalls Steven Spielberg‘s earlier films.
In the film’s best scenes—featuring mosasaurs that overturn boats, spinosauruses that pick off survivors, and quetzalcoatluses that peck at climbers attempting to raid its nest—characters scramble to save themselves from beasts they are woefully under-equipped to meet. The film’s finest sequence resurrects that old standby Tyrannosaurus rex for a river chase scene that pays off with terrific suspense; Edwards has a lot of fun staging the scene so that even the hulking T-Rex—who is awoken from a slumber, and swims through the water like a hippo—manages to pop up with surprise.
Unfortunately, Jurassic World Rebirth doubles down on one unfortunate trend from the previous trilogy: the dinosaurs here a largely fictional creations, “mutants” created in a laboratory rather than real-life resurrections. This is, because the movies keep telling us, that mankind grew bored of the real-deal dinos; the cynical reality is that there’s little IP value to be mined in a copyright-free monster, so the movie creates its own.
And so our old pal T-Rex is reduced to a mere cameo role, replaced by the bizarre D-Rex: a tyrannosaur cross-bred with a pachycephalosaurus, featuring the latter’s battering-ram helmet head. D-Rex never gets a chance to make use of that dome, but he certainly does look distinct while chomping down on our protagonists. Similarly, the velociraptors here are now raptor-pterosaur “mutadons”, essentially raptors with wings. They never put those wings to use, but they certainly look… unique.
And our human characters? An entirely disposable bunch of mercenaries with fleeting attention paid to backstory—even Johansson, effortlessly charismatic in what is essentially the lead, is working with so little (she, uh, likes money?) that it’s hard to invest in her character. Only Bailey’s paleontologist, whose interest in dinosaurs mirrors the audience, and Garcia-Rulfo, who builds a grudging respect for his daughter’s boyfriend, give us something we can connect with.
Jurassic World Rebirth is not a great movie but it is a perfectly good dinosaur adventure, and after the previous three movies that’s enough to warrant at least mild praise. With efficiently staged scenes of dinosaur peril, terrific location cinematography by John Mathieson (the jungles of Thailand double for those in the principal Caribbean island), and a streamlined story by David Koepp (returning to the franchise after adapting Michael Crichton‘s first two Jurassic Park novels), there’s plenty of fun here. It may not reinvent the fossil, but at least it remembers why we liked dinosaurs in the first place.”
