Jurassic World: Rebirth

Bluesky

Starting with a flashback, Jurassic World Rebirth establishes that there was yet another island with yet more dinosaurs. The suggestion that even in a world where health and safety prosecutions include standard fare like fires and floods, but also ravenous raptors, that corporations will stint on security measures is possibly the most realistic thing about the franchise. That suspension of best practises also has to suspend a fair measure of disbelief.

I wish it were incredible that a system with twin-key interlocks and negative ambient pressure could be compromised by a product-placed snack-wrapper, but I do have to salute the efficiency with which director Gareth Edwards and writer David Koepp set the ball rolling in a franchise outing that would feel reductive and mercenary even without much of its main cast being guns for hire.

Scarlett Johansson's Zora is one of a cast of characters whose motivations are mostly financial with a smattering of grief for depth. Jonathan Bailey's Dr Loomis does have a bit of public spirit to go with it, Mahershala Ali has regret to alloy the cynicism of a scripted shakedown, and Rupert Friend's Martin Krebs has clearly studied at the Weyland-Yutani Carter Burke School of Management Excellence. To leaven the gritty mixture of soldiers and suits come the Delgados, though even at two and a quarter hours the rush to set pieces sees them described as 'that family' to avoid you having to recall their names.

There are three outposts on a quest to fetch from once-fossil fauna. The McGuffin here is myocardial, something in the blood of the biggest dinosaurs on land, sea, and air, though not necessarily in that order. It might not surprise anyone to discover that the evil that lurks in the hearts of men can overshadow the good that might be found in animal equivalents. There's billions to be found in these beasts' biology, and getting it requires action-friendly proximity and action-figure friendly projectiles.

Our prologue establishes that the island has been abandoned for 17 years. That makes the survival of so much convenient equipment all the more impressive. Animals making it that long is kind of expected. A food conglomerate's products remaining attractively shelved in what appears to be a convenience store attached to a petrol station at a biotechnology research base slightly less so. I know that ultra-processed foods have lots of preservatives, but queso dip shouldn't age less than amber. The notion that a firm could have consumer electronics with batteries that survive for almost two decades without maintenance near the equator would seem a secret more valuable than pterosaur plasma. We won't even get onto the other things that belong in a museum, as there's plenty of historical cultural artefacts exhibited here.

That includes bits lifted from other films. The suspiciously survivable shop gives us one of many sequences that's reminiscent of something you've seen earlier in the franchise, or perhaps in another one, and it's in that reconstruction that Jurassic World Rebirth most closely tends to metatextuality.

People are bored of dinosaurs, we're told. This had been predicted, so they cooked up something new. That these new things are created by taking bits and pieces from here and there and turning them into slightly new shapes that move in familiar ways is less genetic engineering than Hollywood accounting. Koepp and Edwards are no strangers to these box office behemoths, they've been behind cameras that have caught any number of characters fit to keep up with the (Indiana) Joneses. That so much of the product placement is different kinds of candy is what's going on here: it's more of the same, maybe with one new ingredient, but familiar, safely packaged, brightly coloured, and quick.

Rebirth manages most of those, but not brevity. Character moments meander past mawkishness, there's more to Spielberg's magic than folk talking on a boat. Alexandre Desplat's score does the trick, but one of those is lifting from John Williams whose themes have scored so many cinematic staples. It is perhaps foolish to hope for better from a film series that's been staggering on for decades but we've had flashes of brilliance like Rogue One and Skyfall and The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Rebirth might be more of a reboot but that doesn't mean it had to be a retread, and in its repetitions it fails to reward returners. Instead of Jurassic World Rebirth I'd suggest a Jurassic Park rewatch.

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