‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’ Is The First Good ‘Jurassic’ Movie In Years—And A Great Place For This Franchise To End
The following article contains minor spoilers for Jurassic World Rebirth.
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Jurassic Park and World movies. As a kid, a VHS copy of Jurassic Park was my go-to watch before bedtime, a ritual that would’ve put my view count into the hundreds. (This preceded the advent of smartphones and apps by a couple of decades, so my Letterboxd numbers went sadly unjuiced.) Nonetheless, my experience with the series post-Park largely aligns with fan consensus, which is that it has come with severely diminishing returns.
The Lost World is an underrated gem with some great sequences—the cliffside T. Rex attack; the San Diego scenes; that match cut from a horrified mother screaming at her mutilated child to a yawning Jeff Goldblum—and Jurassic Park III also has its exciting moments. (“Alan!” is not one of them.) Jurassic World went a long way toward recapturing the Spielbergian magic of its 1993 forebear, and it was cool to see Hammond’s dream of a working dinosaur theme park come to life, but I’ve hardly revisited it since it came out. Fallen Kingdom is fine and has a cool Alien-inspired final act. I was so-so on Dominion on release but have come to realize it blows.
It has long felt like we were just waiting for the franchise to curl up and accept its inevitable extinction, even if the movies still make eye-watering sums of money; somehow, audiences have refused to let Jurassic go the way of the dodo (or the ankylosaur) and it remains a cornerstone of Universal’s IP empire. And yet, for all of the disappointment of the World era, I found myself cautiously optimistic about Jurassic World Rebirth. This was largely down to the involvement of Gareth Edwards, an economical genre director who has proven his blockbuster bona fides with the likes of Godzilla and Star Wars prequel Rogue One. (I was also one of the seemingly-few who appreciated his second original film, The Creator, a big, beautiful take on the ethical questions around sentient AI, wrapped up in an action-film package that equally borrowed from Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner and Akira.) Park and The Lost World writer David Koepp also returned for Rebirth, and it had an all-new cast of exciting Hollywood names: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey, who was my standout from last year’s Wicked ensemble.
The result, at the very least, is the most outwardly fun Jurassic has been since Spielberg first introduced us to the magic of Isla Nublar. It’s a back-to-basics sequel that understands the fundamental appeal of these movies, and why we were so spellbound in the first place: captivating special effects, genuine movie stars putting in heartfelt performances, and popcorn-friendly moments of suspense, all in service of a man versus nature allegory that reminds us that some things are best left in the past. Especially dinosaurs.
After a prologue that introduces Rebirth‘s new dino mega-threat—the Distortus Rex, a towering, and yet knowingly silly, mutant that looks like a T. Rex with the bulbous head of a beluga whale—Edwards’ movie quickly gets to setting out the new terms of its dinosaur-inhabited world. The first order of business? A hilariously brutal retcon: while Dominion ended with dinosaurs co-existing with humans across the globe, Rebirth re-establishes that most of the prehistoric beasts have since been killed off by our unfavorable modern climate. Many of the dinos left are now restricted to a strip of small islands close to the equator. There is little public sympathy for their plight, people having largely become bored of dinosaurs in this “Neo Jurassic” era; they have gone from being majestic wonders that could command hordes of tourists to nuisances that block up highways and terrorize sea shipping routes.
