Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me six times, shame on both of us.
In its 32-year existence, and now seven-film catalogue, the “Jurassic Park” franchise has produced only a single decent entry: Steven Spielberg’s iconic 1993 original. A .142 batting average would get a major league baseball player sent down to the minor leagues the next day. In Hollywood, it nets you billions of dollars.
“Rebirth” is the worst kind of baseball player: the kind who strikes out looking. Despite nearly all of its swings missing, by an ever-increasing number, the “Jurassic World” trilogy at least had the gumption to have an idea about what’s next in the prehistoric cycle of life. “Rebirth” isn’t remotely concerned with evolution, just survival. It’s a scientific fact that 99.9% of species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct. Time has proven that survival isn’t enough. Now I’m counting down the days until this franchise gets kicked out of that exclusive 0.1% club.
It’s no secret that nostalgia in its most weaponized form has been the oxygen that keeps this dying flame from completely going out. Nostalgia for the first time you saw a dinosaur on screen, so real that you could have walked up and touched it. Nostalgia for John Williams’ score, which immediately evokes a sweeping grandeur. Nostalgia for the one-liners coming from likeable characters. “Rebirth” attempts to mimic all that without an ounce of shame. Even when it does hit the target, which, to be clear, is not often, the positive effects have been diluted.
Another shady company wants something from another dinosaur-infested island, which means another ragtag group of characters must defy another set of million-to-one odds in order to live to see another day. Supplying the financial motivation is Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a representative of ParkerGenix, whose top scientists have found out that the blood of three dinosaurs is the final ingredient to developing a miracle cure for heart disease. Ex-special forces Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is the hired muscle, Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) is providing the on-the-ground paleontology expertise, and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) is the only boat captain brave enough to venture into certain death. There are a few other members of this expedition, but the absence of their names from the poster immediately signifies that they’re sole responsibility is to be dinosaur food.
With stars like this, there’s an innate likability to these characters. Unfortunately, you leave the theater with nothing more than what you brought in. I’d estimate that 80% of Bailey’s character is his cute glasses and sweater.
Returning from the original film and its immediate sequel, “The Lost World: Jurassic Park,” screenwriter David Koepp pushes past all notions of characterization, truncating important aspects like motivation and depth. Running in conjunction and sometimes parallel to all of this is the story of a family stranded on the island after a whale-like dinosaur called a Mosasaur capsizes their boat. Their fight for survival grinds down any sense of momentum and tension, with long stretches of children in weightless peril.
Director Gareth Edwards at least has the sense to create a pretty picture through some sun-baked imagery. As evidenced by his 2014 “Godzilla” film and “The Creator,” Edwards has a knack for establishing large-scale spectacle. What needs to be improved is executing on that promise. There isn’t a signature moment of awe or terror here, just several okay-ish copy-and-pasted sequences from previous entries.
It’s worth pointing out that I’ve never had a fascination for either this franchise or dinosaurs in general. Heck, I didn’t see “Jurassic Park” until 2020, and that was because a local cinema programmed it to stay afloat during the COVID-19 drought, and I was going through withdrawals from not being in the theater for months. But even if these retreads hit all the right buttons for you, don’t you want more? Don’t you want to see at least an attempt at charting a new path? A better word than “rebirth” would have been “regurgitation.”
Hunter Friesen is a film critic who owns and operates The Cinema Dispatch, a website where he writes reviews, essays, and more. He currently serves as the president of the Minnesota Film Critics Association and travels the globe covering film festivals both big and small. To view his entire body of work, you can visit his website and Instagram.
