Herrrrrrrrrrrre we go again
It takes chutzpah to give the name "Rebirth" to a sequel that fails to make the case for why your franchise shouldn't stay dead. It takes even more chutzpah to admit as much in your movie's actual script: as our expert characters explain, people used to queue enthusiastically to see a good dinosaur show, whereas now they can't be bothered, and the only reason these bizarre abominations haven't been put out of their misery is that they're super expensive to make and the company still hopes something useful may come from them.
At least this time there's encouraging news: Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are mercifully out of the picture, and in their place we get actors who can act. But the spectre of those two still haunts Jurassic World: Rebirth, because the dialogues haven't gotten any better. Fortunately, the latter half of the movie is mostly action set pieces, so there's not much talking to cringe at, but the beginning, when the characters are convincing each other that returning to the land of people-eating monstrosities isn't an obviously bad idea, is full of tortured technobabble and predictable jokes.
The script sticks so faithfully to established movie tropes that the cast can be neatly classified as follows:
- Family of innocent bystanders who of course won't get eaten because they're adorable;
- Trio of heroes who of course won't get eaten because their names are on the poster;
- Suddenly introduced crew who of course will get eaten because someone has to.
That being said, the actual confrontations with various types of dinosaurs are put together with proper care for the rhythm of dramatic tension, so there are many moments when one truly fears for the characters who can't die. Also, after a shipwreck splits the cast in two teams, the editing maintains a good sense of when to cut between their respective subplots. The flow of action is consistent and engaging. As survival adventures go, this one is quite enjoyable. But the movie doesn't do the core part of the assignment, which was to justify its own existence.
When 2015's Jurassic World introduced the concept of hybrid dinosaurs, it was a clever allegory for the arms race that was taking shape between increasingly unimpressed moviegoers and increasingly desperate moviemakers. But the sequels that followed haven't known what to do with that idea, and became further incarnations of what that first reboot wanted to criticize. The moments of Spielbergian awe at the majesty of primeval colossi have ceded the stage to instinctive revulsion at uglier and uglier experiments that make for curious action figures but don't have a narrative reason for being in the story.
Rebirth closes off the opportunity that the ending of Fallen Kingdom created and Dominion squandered: the repercussions of a world where dinosaurs are running loose and interacting with today's ecosystems. The new status quo declares that, actually, dinosaurs aren't compatible with the environmental conditions in most of the planet, and they've settled in a narrow band of territory near the equator, where it's hot enough for their tastes. OK, I can buy that. But the excuse to visit them this time is too contrived: a pharmaceutical company needs living tissue samples from the biggest dinosaurs because something about their massive hearts can provide a treatment for coronary disease. Can you use DNA from their fossils? No, it has to be from living animals, for reasons. Can you make your own clones and take the tissue samples from their embryos? No, it has to be in the restricted island where every government forbids to go, for reasons. Can you use blue whales, which are actually twice as big as the mosasaur? No, it has to be from the scary ones that eat people. For reasons.
So the plot makes zero sense, but at least the characters aren't annoying and the action is competently directed. If only the script hadn't yielded to the temptation of adding yet another dinosaur hybrid for no reason. What could have been a thrilling ending to the adventure ends up delivering a titan-sized eyesore that turns out to be too easy to get rid of. There's even a prologue that foreshadows this monster, with a deadly accident that could have served to comment on the dangers of our modern way of life (a lab is destroyed because someone was eating a chocolate bar), but that plotline goes nowhere. If you can get past the mediocre dialogues, lazy comedy, and shoehorned character motivations, Rebirth clears the bar of not being terrible, which by this point seems to be all we get to ask of a Jurassic sequel.
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
