When a new coach takes over a struggling sports team they often start pinning the blame on their predecessor, complaining about the lack of fitness in their players. It's a way of buying themselves time. "Look at the mess I inherited!" With Jurassic World Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards and returning screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the first two Spielberg directed entries, pull a similar stunt. Opening text tells us that the world of this series has begun to take dinosaurs for granted, and in an early sequence we see New York commuters moan as the sort of dinosaur that inspired wonder in Sam Neill and Laura Dern all those years ago is now the cause of a traffic jam. Edwards and Koepp are clearly acknowledging that they've inherited a mess, but the box office figures suggest the public hasn't lost interest in this series. The most recent entry, Dominion, made a billion dollars despite being the series' low point. At time of writing, Jurassic World Rebirth has made a staggering $250 million in just its opening day.
After three Jurassic World movies with increasingly convoluted plots that all but forgot this series was built around dinosaurs (Dominion had more in common with a Fast and Furious movie), the hype for Rebirth has promised a stripped down, back to basics approach. Its plot is straight out of a b-movie. That b-movie is the 2004 straight to video sequel Anacondas: Hunt for the Blood Orchid. As with that movie, here a ragtag group ventures to a jungle at the behest of a pharmaceutical company in search of a magical serum believed to work medical miracles.
In this case the serum takes the form of dino juice. Hired by big pharma creep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend in the Paul Reiser Aliens role), crack mercenary Zora (Scarlett Johansson) assembles a team including Duncan (Mahershala Ali) and a few doomed redshirts. Also joining the expedition is dino-nerd biologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey). Just before the mercs reach the island that is home to the specific dinosaurs they're in search of, they stumble across a family whose small yacht was upended by giant sea creatures.
Sometimes it's difficult to pin down where a movie goes wrong, but it's all too easy in the case of Rebirth. For a start, it wastes a good half hour setting up a bunch of characters that we ultimately couldn't care less about. The original 1987 Predator spends less than five minutes introducing its cast of jarheads in a simple credits sequence that sees them banter as their chopper arrives in the jungle, but every one of those grunts feels more fully sketched than any of the characters here. It doesn't help that Johansson and her crew aren't remotely believable as a grizzled bunch of mercenaries. I'm sure Johansson could have been believably badass, but her character is written like she's the bubbly branch manager of a small real estate firm rather than someone who has seen action in Yemen.
Koepp's script goes out of its way to humanise the mercenaries, which might make sense if the audiences didn't also have a civilian family to identify with. There's a better version of this setup where the mercenaries are a realistically scary bunch who pose as much threat to the family as the dinosaurs. Trying to make us root for the mercs creates a character imbalance, as the only human villain here is Krebs. To use a Jaws analogy, Rebirth has one Hooper (Loomis), a dozen Brodys (the mercs and the family) and no Quints. The latter role should be occupied by Zora and her grunts, the professional hunters who know what they're doing but might also get everyone else killed.
You have to feel sorry for Edwards. He's one of the few directors in modern Hollywood who knows how to craft blockbuster visuals, but he's always lumbered with second-rate, over-written scripts. For much of Rebirth, Edwards is stuck filming talking heads, but in the last 40 minutes he finally gets the chance to let rip. The closing stretch of Rebirth features the best filmmaking this series has seen in its post-Spielberg years. The highlight is a tense and beautifully staged set-piece in which the stranded family, at this point separated from the mercs, are menaced by the series' old mainstay, a T-Rex. Unlike the mercs, we actually care about this family because they're more relatable (there's some nicely comic interplay between Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and David Iacono as a father and his daughter's obnoxious boyfriend), and it's a shame the movie doesn't understand this. They really should have been the main protagonists rather than side characters.
Edwards' work in the climax doesn't quite redeem what is mostly a patience testing mix of redundant character building and rehashed highlights from both this series and Jaws. Still, it's easily the best of the Jurassic World phase of this fossilising franchise, and the most well-crafted entry in the series as whole since The Lost World. If only there was a screenwriter in Hollywood who could write Edwards a decent script.
Directed by: Gareth Edwards
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Ed Skrein
