REVIEW:
Jurassic World: Rebirth is most likely the start of a third Jurassic trilogy. It all started with Jurassic Park, of course, which was pretty amazing. But that movie spawned two sequels which were less than interesting, and after the end of the Jurassic Park trilogy, we got the Jurassic World trilogy, starring Chris Pratt. So there have been six of these movies at this point. And now here we are with Jurassic World: Rebirth.. No new name following the Jurassic title, which is a little surprising. Is this a continuation of the Jurassic World trilogy? No, not at all. Not one returning character. It’s simply a matter of running out of ideas, starting with the title.
Let’s be honest… these movies ran out of ideas a long time ago. Jurassic Park was a spectacular, one-of-a-kind film, but everything that came afterwards has been kind of lousy. The first Chris Pratt film, Jurassic World was okay. It was fine enough. But none of the sequels to Jurassic Park or to Jurassic World have been any good at all. And then there’s this movie. It’s much closer to the sequels, as far as how good it is, then to the original. But that is to be expected, of course. The original is one of the greatest movies of all time. It’s almost unfair to compare anything to that. So let’s just compare this latest movie to the other flicks hitting cinemas these days and see where we go from there.
Jurassic World Rebirth is on par with the Fast and the Furious movies. Which is to say it is another sequel in a long, on-going machine, that has some things to offer, but is hardly something to write home about. It’s a monster movie, just like all the other Jurassic films. There’s a mission, to get the DNA from threes specific Dinos on a deserted island. it’s simple enough. And the reason for the mission is pretty simple and straight forward to. A pharmaceutical company can use this DNA to create a drug that can cure heart disease. This movie definitely deserves credit for keeping things relatively simply, instead of over-complicating them, the way a Mission Impossible movie might.
After the mission is established, we get our characters going out to the island. We also get a family who is on a sailing trip, and just happens to sail into these waters. I like that the crew of mercenaries on the mission (which includes the protagonist, played by Scarlet Johansen, and her costar, Mahershala Ali,) come across the family early on. If we had to follow two different stories throughout the entire film, expecting them to finally meet at the end, it would have been annoying. But they all join forces when out at sea, and characters meet each other, and start to form opinions of each other.
We do get the obvious villains and obvious characters who “deserve” to die. This starts right at the beginning of the movie with a scientist who drops a wrapper, littering, and thus apparently caused his own fate. Forget the logistics of how a wrapper can get sucked up into an air vent and cause a whole security system to shut down, the opening sequence is right out of The Rock, complete with the “I’m sorry,” line as a member of the team gets locked into a room with imminent death. But even still, it’s pretty cool.
The team looks to capture the DNA from these three dinosaurs as planned, but they also have to avoid the giant mutant dinosaur, which we’ve been getting clues about ever since that sequence at the start of the film. It all works like clockwork here, with the big bad dinosaur being saved for the end. The same can be said of our main villain, who tries to kill one of the other characters because it will be financially rewarding for him and his company, very much like what the Paul Reisser character did in Aliens.
And that’s the thing, there is nothing here that we haven’t’ seen before. It’s an enjoyable movie, because the characters are fun and the dinosaur attacks are fun, but the story is pretty routine. That being said, it is more memorable than most of the sequels have been. There’s a pharmaceutical story that is just simple enough to be worthy of remembering. The characters may be completely underdeveloped with ridiculous exposition, (there is literally one scene in the movie where we learn everything about both Scar Jos character and Mahershala Ali’s character, in a matter of minutes, on a ship…. all through dialogue.) but at least there’s effort. At least the told us about the characters. These days, we often get movies where they don’t even do that. At the end of the day, this is not a very good movie, but it is still better than most of the Jurassic sequels. Like the Fast and Furious movies, and getting one that is slightly better than the others, this movie is far from great, but it is still pretty enjoyable.