Fourteen years after the first Jurassic Park trilogy wound up in 2001, a reboot of the monster thriller franchise landed in our midst. Two sequels followed with markedly diminishing impact. Now, exactly a decade after Jurassic World (2015), we have the seventh film of the 32-year-old heavy-duty enterprise, a follow-up that builds on, but has little in common with, 2022's Jurassic World Dominion.
Within the scope of its well-worn fantasy centred on the dangers of corporate avarice and overreach, Jurassic World Rebirth aspires to reflect humanity at a point in its history where it has strayed into apocalyptic territory.
While that sounds excitingly ambitious, the movie gives fans of the high-grossing franchise no reason to rejoice. That has far less to do with the darkness at the heart of the dire tale than with what the script does on the level of plot and characterisation, neither of which rises above the pedestrian.
Yes, Jurassic World Rebirth isn't quite the shot in arm that it could have been for a fading, if not altogether moribund, idea. It is a pale shadow of all that has gone before, a cinematic mutant that moviegoers could have done without. The rampaging prehistoric predators of a variety of species do have their sporadic moments in the movie but these are never enough.
Dinosaurs were once bona fide box-office dynamite. Their appeal has now worn thin. Director Gareth Edwards, no stranger to blockbusters, is clearly conscious of that fact. A card at the beginning of the movie acknowledges that "public interest (in these creatures) has waned". Spot on.
Edwards gives Jurassic Park Rebirth the all-hands-on-deck treatment that it demands but he is unable to disguise the mothballed conventions that he is saddled with. The aim is to lend a new lease of life to old-school sci-fi horror. A dauntingly tall order.
The screenplay by David Koepp, the writer of the two Steven Spielberg-directed Jurassic Park films (1993 and 1997), carries way too much baggage of the past to be able to fully embrace the present, let alone plough a path to the future.
With a striking sleight of hand here and a mildly diverting twist there, the film attempts to woo moviegoers who were either not born or were too young when T-Rex first stomped across the big screen and captured the world's imagination.
Two or three of action sequences here are certainly more thrilling than anything that Fallen Kingdom and Dominion delivered, but the qualitative difference between the enjoyable bits of the movie and its less entertaining passages is glaring and yawning.
Nothing is more amiss than the movie's painfully sluggish and frustratingly wayward first half. When two key characters spend an inordinate amount of time filling each other in with the unhappy details of their immediate past, the backstories are neither substantial nor arresting.
The conversation amounts to just words written for the purpose of providing information to the audience rather than for any specific, organic, plot-driven reason. To be fair, the writing isn't all bad but the lack of consistency severely weighs the movie down.
No matter what Edwards, director of Godzilla and Rogue One, brings to the wobbly table - he does not scrimp in any manner in the matter of delivering scale and sweep in a movie shot on 35mm film by cinematographer John Mathieson and propped up by a lively background score by composer Alexandre Desplat - the sense that the franchise is gasping for breath, if not teetering on the verge of extinction, never goes away.
Jurassic World Rebirth has the feel of an enterprise rustled up in haste to catch a summer release window and ride on the combined power of a quartet of actors with a history of smash hits across delivery platforms - two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, Oscar nominee Scarlett Johansson, Primetime Emmy nominee Jonathan Bailey and the versatile Rupert Friend.
More than the humans in the story - they include a family out on a boat trip that leads them into forbidden territory - it is a bunch of dinosaurs, including ones that take (for the first time ever in Jurassic Park/World annals) to water like a fish that matters the most. Remember, public interest in them has waned and only in the fictional domain.
In Jurassic Park Dominion, humans and dinosaurs had begun to co-exist. Here, Earth has turned inhospitable and dinosaurs that have mutated as a result of genetic cross-species experiments gone wrong have retreated to uninhabited, mysterious island near the Equator.
A sleazy pharmaceutical company honcho Martin Krebs (Friend) - a typically greedy and scheming Jurassic Park/World villain - enlists the services of mercenary Zora Bennett (Johansson), who, in her own words, specialises in retrievals and extractions, for an illegal mission. Her deliverables are DNA samples to be collected from the three largest surviving dinosaur species on a tropical island declared a no-go zone by many governments.
Martin then talks a reluctant Dr. Henry Loomis (Bailey), the head of a palaeontological museum that has seen a drastic decline in footfalls, into joining the operation. Boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Ali), an old associate of Zora's, agrees to lead the covert operation but not before a bit of coaxing.
What the pharma firm aims to do is use the DNA samples for the formulation of a life-saving drug for humans. The operation is fraught with risk as the three creatures being sought are no sitting ducks. A few stray moments of excitement unsurprisingly stem from the human-dinosaur confrontations.
For no good reason, the script throws in a marooned man, his two daughters and the older girl's boyfriend into the mix. Their misadventures - it is hard to fathom how these four people managed to end up in a place that has been out of bounds for decades - contribute little to the core of the movie. They simply do not belong here.
It is almost as if the screenwriter fell short of narrative fodder to beef up the plot and opted for a detour. It is all so superfluous that it could well have been the spine of a separate movie - may be a modern-day version of Jaws. Baffling, to say the least.
But that is only one of the many things that do not work. Despite the pleasing performances, not the least of which is the one by Jonathan Bailey as the nerdy, nervy scientist with a conscience, the characters fall flat on their faces in the absence of genuine depth in their words and deeds.
The stars do indeed shine bright but the load that they are called upon to carry, constructed with done-to-death tropes, is unbearably flimsy. Verdict: Jurassic World Rebirth is more monster than magic.
-
Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey
