Jurassic World Rebirth is, spiritually, a Jurassic Park film – not a World one. The distinction matters. Ever since the 2015 reboot attempted to expand the boundaries of Michael Crichton’s tooth-and-clawed warning against man’s follies, the franchise has spiralled increasingly out of control. At first, it was Chris Pratt as a navy veteran turned raptor wrangler, then suddenly we had human clones and an expansive plotline about very big locusts.
Jurassic Park is, at its heart, merely a different brand of slasher film, where the killer has been previously extinct for 65 million years. And slasher sequels have a tendency to just restock the fridge of victims and carry on as usual. Rebirth pretty much does just that. It’s exactly where we should be – back to basics, with a boat full of broad but fun archetypes sailing up to a dinosaur-infested island, and then systematically being chomped on.
Leading the pack is Scarlett Johansson’s Zora Bennett, Black Widow in khaki, a morally grey special-ops type with a speciality in procuring items of the dubiously legal variety. Ah! But she lost a dear friend on the last job, so her veneer might be starting to crack. She’s been hired by pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to join palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) on an excursion to Suriname, and an old facility there that used to function as R&D for InGen, ie the people who made Jurassic Park.
Their task is to collect a few samples of dino DNA that hold the key to curing coronary disease. Zora ropes in her old colleague Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who has a boat. On the way, they receive a distress signal from the Delgado family seacraft, captained by Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and transporting his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono).
There are three key ingredients here. The first is David Koepp, who wrote both Jurassic Park and its sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but hasn’t returned to the franchise since – until now. As with the two films he scripted for Steven Soderbergh this year (Presence and Black Bag), he keeps his narrative clean and efficient, even managing to work back in unused material from Crichton’s novel.
The second is Godzilla director Gareth Edwards, one of Hollywood’s finest monster wranglers, who rightly treats his creatures as both a source of terror and wonder. He happily deploys a few of his (always effective) signature shots here: the would-be victim slamming their fists against the door (in Rogue One, it was because Darth Vader was making rebel sashimi), and the titan-sized beast or machine emerging from smoke.
With limited budget, he also proved on 2023’s The Creator and his 2010 debut Monsters how well he’s able to blend CGI work, practical effects, and evocative scenery. He does the same here (for the most part), with the aid of cinematographer John Mathieson. Even the film’s botched mutant dinosaurs, all hideous and quite tragic creations, are sparingly and smartly used.
The third magic ingredient is Bailey, who’s charming as usual (see: Wicked, Bridgerton, his entire back catalogue), but also crucially nails the “man who dedicated his life to dinosaurs sees a dinosaur for the first time” sequence. Former dinosaur kids may shed a tear or two. In fact, let’s add a fourth ingredient – the terrier-sized aquilops named Dolores, who brings a little of that highly marketable Grogu-factor to the picture. What can I say? She’s cute as hell.
There is something nostalgic about Rebirth. And yet that cosy feeling is achieved primarily through composer Alexandre Desplat’s targeted deployment of John Williams’s original theme, and through the way Koepp and Edwards lightly pay homage to certain, familiar sequences (there’s a scene of a kid dodging between aisles here, too, just like with the raptors in the kitchen).
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But old characters and lines of dialogue certainly aren’t getting dragged out for the audience to clap at. It shouldn’t feel refreshing that a sequel’s maintained its dignity, but here we are. There’s even a through line in the film about how the public has grown tired of all the Jurassic wildlife. The sheen has gone. It’s a bit of meta-narrative that pays off beautifully. Rebirth is making the dinosaur cool again.
Dir: Gareth Edwards. Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono. Cert 12A, 133 minutes.
‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ is in cinemas from 2 July
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