REEL | Scarlett Johansson Discovers 'Jurassic World Rebirth'

"What would I do about mutant dinosaurs from an accounting perspective?"

Universal Pictures / Amblin Entertainment

British visual effects artist turned filmmaker Gareth Edwards returns to his monster movie roots in directing the latest incarnation of the originally Michael Crichton-authored dinosaur action franchise. Jurassic World Rebirth (sans colon) is a bit curious as a standalone sequel, only loosely tied to the original (1994) and revamped (2015) incarnations, as the seventh entry tries to rediscover our reverence for its trademark brand of visual prehistoric wonder once again.

This new Jurassic World's cast is led by movie star Scarlett Johansson and standout Jonathan Bailey as a covert operations mercenary and the resident paleontologist (in the tradition of sexy chaos theorist Ian Malcolm), our team leaders. Surrounding them, Mahershala Ali and Rupert Friend fill in the small team as shady stock character archetypes unwisely tasked with revisiting another abandoned, now mutated dinosaur island to capture DNA for scientific research to cure heart disease.

Original Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp returns to write the film's back-to-basics script, using his penchant for streamlining action in blockbuster movies. Rebirth essentially acts as a separate sidequel expedition fairly divorced from any previous characters. It's light on story and heavy on action, yet lacks the sense of wonder or stakes best seen in the first two Steven Spielberg-directed films. How a shipwrecked civilian Mexican-American family (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, and Audrina Miranda) parallels and becomes integrated into the film's main mission storyline is by far the most compelling and thrilling element, despite them being completely superfluous to the ongoing plot.

Jurassic World Rebirth does just barely enough to rehash and reheat the middling franchise's derivative sense of dinosaur horror, but it feels rushed in its story momentum and production. There is hardly enough material to justify itself in the greater Jurassic universe beyond finding clunky story beats to envision different dinosaurs audiences have not seen on screen before. It desperately needed more original elements instead of simply redoing (albeit competently) mucn of what audiences have already seen before.


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