Jurassic World: Rebirth is a tired and uninspired remix of Universal’s durable dinosaur franchise. It’s the seventh entry in the series, and the cliches are beginning to feel as old as the dinosaurs themselves. Even the original screenwriter David Koepp was unable to breathe life into this one. (Incredibly enough, this is the third turd Koepp has written this year after the forgettable Presence and the weak Black Bag.)
This time, a greedy Big Pharma jackass (Rupert Friend) hires a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and her team to go to one of the Jurassic Park testing islands and retrieve blood samples from some dinosaurs that he can use to wipe out heart disease or some shit. This set-up feels more like cut scenes from a video game. In the first level, they have to find a dinosaur in the sea. The second level, they need a dinosaur from the land. And in the third, they have to contend with dinosaurs in the air.
Adding to the movie’s woes is the subplot about a family who becomes shipwrecked on the island. The crosscutting back and forth between Scar Jo and her team with the family in peril causes the film to lose much of its momentum. I think either of these plots could have worked on their own. (Think Swiss Family Robinson, but with dinosaurs.) Having both just bogs things down.
One of the biggest disappointments is the dinosaurs themselves. About halfway through the movie, someone mentions that the island is supposedly inhabited by mutant dinosaurs, but they mostly look like the same shit we’ve seen in the other movies. The “big bad” dino just looks like he’s got a big scrotum on his forehead. He only shows up for the last reel though and is kind of underwhelming.
Not only does the movie recycle elements and scenarios from the previous Jurassic Park movies, it rips off other Steven Spielberg films like Jaws (the whole mosasaurus sequence), E.T. (a little girl feeds a creature candy), and the Spielberg-produced Gremlins (said girl carries a baby dinosaur around in her backpack). It’s also a shame that the film conveniently writes off the lone intriguing element from the Jurassic World series (the humans being forced to share the planet with the dinosaurs) by having most of the dinosaurs dying off or fleeing to the equator. Because of that, the film feels more like a reboot than a continuation. Put another way, Rebirth is more like an afterbirth.
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