Jurassic World: Rebirth Review

It's a fun exercise to think of the Jurassic films as a fuzzy barometer for capitalism. Surely the original Jurassic Park, in which a jaunty Dr Hammond revived dinosaurs as a theme park attraction, was apropos of the '90s boom era of guilt-free consumerism. Now at a time when the anxieties of late-stage capitalism are all-pervasive, Jurassic World Rebirth, which features profit-hungry pharma executives and grossly-mutated creatures, may be, if nothing else, a sign of our slightly depressing, brain-rot-filled times.

Written by David Koepp (who co-wrote the original) and directed by Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, The Creator), the seventh film in the Jurassic franchise is explicitly modeled on the first. The film's instigator, the man who gathers the troops, is Martin Krebs, a sly pharmaceutical executive and a distorted version of Dr Hammond. Krebs dreams of the trillions his company will earn from a heart disease drug derived from studying the blood of long-living dinosaurs.

Krebs hires Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and her team of mercenary operatives, including a beret-wearing sea captain played by a gamely Mahershala Ali, to retrieve samples from the most colossal of the species: one that swims, one that flies, and one that walks, which have made an island and its surrounding waters their home. Filling in the scientist slot, there's Dr. Henry Loomis, played by a bespectacled Jonathan Bailey doing his best nerd impression.

As Krebs, Zora and the ragtag crew illegally make their way to the tropical habitat where these dinosaurs free-range, they rescue a family - Reuben Delgado ("Lincoln Lawyer" Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Bella and Teresa, and Teresa's stoner Gen-Z cliché of a boyfriend, Xavier (creative in a fight, but lazy otherwise) - after their sailboat vacation is cut short by an attack from a sea-dino, the Mosasaurus.

Several scenes are nods to the original greats. The velociraptor stalking Lex in the kitchen is recreated in the aisles of an abandoned department store on the island. That iconic dinosaur-reveal scene, when Laura Dern and Sam Neill jump out of the car and gape, slack-jawed, at the beasts gathered at the watering hole, is heavily referenced when Zora's crew comes across a Titanosaurus mating ritual. Yet the scene feels off-putting, from the way the Titans are imagined, to the crew's overwrought reactions as John William's legendary jingle is forcefully applied onto it. It is nothing close to the goosebumps that watching the original gives even on repeated viewing.

Koepp may have recreated the character molds - the scientist-adventurer, the oblivious executive, the terrified children - but he doesn't reanimate with the richness of character traits in the original. Zora and Duncan are given traumatic pasts (a sign of our trauma-fetishising times), which the film uses as a sorry replacement for full-bodied characterization. Worse still is Dr Loomis, the do-gooder who talks in platitudes about humanity's arrogant stance toward these magical prehistoric beasts, but has no qualms about jabbing a dino egg for a DNA sample, explaining it away as a deed that "doesn't hurt the embryo". Such moral posturing gets irritating, especially coming from characters that don't have the juice of, say, Jeff Goldblum's Dr Malcolm.

The family, who appear to be an incidental tack-on to the plot, are clearly conjured to amp up the emotional stakes of the film. Why else have Bella befriend a baby dino and carry it in her backpack like it's a puppy? But their scenes also work only marginally better than Krebs' crew. The chemistry between Ali, Johansson and Bailey is so off that it feels like not just the dinosaurs, but the actors themselves were green-screened into the film. A misguided attempt to suggest romance between Dr Loomis and Zora feels particularly off-putting.

Jurassic World: Rebirth fails its own self-imposed challenge of living up to the original, whose unsurpassed success casts a long shadow over the franchise, as none since have enraptured us in the same way. As a summer entertainer, Jurassic World Rebirth is a passable, predictable film for those chasing nostalgia. Except for a couple of dinosaur attack scenes - both featuring the Delgado family - the film is a pale, lifeless thing that just goes through the motions.