I’m truly in figurative tears after watching this. As a beloved fan of the Jurassic Park series, this movie was a serious letdown. “Jurassic World: Rebirth” is here to show you why sacrificing the lives of many people is worthwhile—because you can cure heart disease! But hey, it probably can’t be that bad, right? Right…?
Our movie is set in an alternate version of our contemporary Earth, thirty-two years after the events of the previous movie and the release of dinosaurs across the globe. The story follows two separate groups: the mission team, and the Delgado family, sailing from Barbados to Cape Town on a summer break vacation. The mission team is composed of several high profile individuals. First, Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a ruthless special operations agent with a history of extraction and retrieval missions. The scientist of our team is Dr. Henry Loomis (Johnathan Bailey), a paleontologist whose dream is to witness dinosaurs with his own eyes. Captain Kinceid (Mahershala Ali) an ex-agent good at moving things and people in and out of places, and is also a close friend of Bennett, having spent 10 years with her in MARSOC. The last important member of our crew is the man who put together the entire operation: Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), an executive of research company ParkerGenix and an incredibly rich guy in a suit. The other members of our crew are a few other characters, Bobby Atwater (Ed Skrein), Nina (Philipine Velge), and LeClerc (Bechir Sylvain). The overall goal of the mission team is to venture to a remote island off the coast of Barbados, Île Saint-Hubert. ParkerGenix is attempting to procure three samples of dinosaur DNA, in order for ParkerGenix to develop a drug to cure coronary disease. Our other group, the family, includes the father, Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a teenage daughter, Teresa (Luna Blaise), a young daughter, Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and the teenager’s boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono).
I wish I could provide a large list of amazing things that this movie does; however, it severely falls short in most regards—and underwhelmingly so. On the flip side, there are enough positives to warrant giving an opinion on them. Firstly, the soundtrack is fantastic. Jurassic Park movies always cook when it comes to music, and this movie is no different. The serene soundtrack moments captivate strong emotions, especially relating to the majestic dinosaur noises that often play at the same time.. This hypes up the dinosaurs quite a bit. Also, the remix of the original soundtrack is amazing and clearly done by a well-trained orchestra. Another thing this movie does surprisingly well—especially compared to its other aspects—is the CGI. The dinosaurs, especially the main gimmick, mutated dinosaurs, look beyond beautiful. They are high quality, with grand scales and providing spectacular scenes. This is extraordinary when combined with the landscapes, which are fantastic, very dense, and create an enjoyable adventure. The scale is also quite grand, with large cascades, trees, and other scenery. Despite the fact I am about to trash the rest of the movie, I also think the acting done by Scarlett Johansson, Johnathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali is exquisite. They capture emotion very well—not too much of a surprise considering their skills in acting—and make the movie watchable. Scarlett in particular exemplifies the emotions felt by her character: a broken, desperate woman who’s lost everything, so she has nothing left to lose in doing the mission.
Unfortunately, that’s about all I have to say that’s positive about this movie. The rest is, to put it bluntly, absolute hot garbage. Firstly, the writing is terrible. Everything in the movie is explained by dialogue, often repetitively and unnecessarily so. The only time that characters have any indirect characterization is when they emotionally interact with one another, which doesn’t happen very often either. If you come into this movie knowing absolutely nothing, you can be sure that you will leave the movie wishing the characters spoke less, because they told you each and every thought running through their head—most of which were poorly written. Characters constantly seem to completely miss everything going on around them and pay no attention to the large dinosaur noises—it seems like they just have them be clueless for artificial suspense. Apologies for the language, but you have to be seriously f***ing stupid to not hear the 2000 lb dinosaur digging through the ceiling directly on top of you. And it truly seems like some characters were introduced just to die for shock factor, most of which in utterly stupid ways without speaking nearly at all. Imagine you were cast in what was supposed to be the best movie of the year, just to speak three lines and then be eaten by a dinosaur because the writers decided the movie needed a little “oomph.” In addition to this, the plot armor in this movie is insane. Teresa decides she is going to retrieve a raft to float downstream with her family after the boat crashes onto the island, which happens to be right next to a T-Rex. She then makes the brilliant decision to open directly in front of the giant dinosaur, which notably wakes it from its slumber. Loomis ends up falling off of a cliff and gets saved by supernaturally strong leaves and a conveniently placed pond. Every character except Zora should be dead. The family would’ve gotten eaten by the T-Rex or numerous dinosaurs in the jungle, Kincaid would’ve been eaten as well, and Loomis would’ve died on the massive cliff he fell off of. Again with another weakness, the main dinosaur of this movie is the D-Rex, a mutated version of the T-Rex. As awesome as it looks, they gave it a poor scale, which seems to change to fit the scene. At one point it looked to be as large as a small mountain. Then, immediately afterwards, it is roughly the size of a building. Genuinely, what the hell? How hard was it to just render the exact same dinosaur? The funding for this movie was obviously directed solely to the lead cast and CGI, and they still managed to mess it up.
The overall message for this movie was simple: sacrifices need to be made for the greater good. They need to hurt, and disrupt, dinosaurs and put themselves at risk to cure heart disease, which is quite the noble goal. Despite the fact that the ending of the movie violates all of the characterization built around Zora, they still went ahead with it, which is upsetting. However, I’ll leave you to suffer through the movie to see what it was—although it shouldn’t be hard to guess. The message was developed well, especially considering how many people died for it to be produced. The intended audience is the same as always with these movies: whoever is comfortable with seeing flying limbs or a dinosaur carcass. I wouldn’t recommend it for younger children, but in this day and age they’ve probably seen worse. To summarize, if you watch this movie, please don’t pay for it. It exists as an unfortunate, and quite disappointing stain on a fantastic movie franchise.
Rating:
2/10