The thing with the latest addition to the Jurassic World franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth, is that it just feels like a tribute to the tropes of the original. The movie that marks the return of writer David Koepp, who wrote the OG Jurassic Park movies, feels more like a horror film that relies on the usual jump scares, and every beat feels like a repetition of what we have seen in the Spielberg-directed movies. With even the original thoughts in this movie looking like something they lifted from another familiar mainstream film, Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth is ideal reboot material for those who have only heard about the Jurassic Park movies.
So, it seems like things have gone terribly out of control, and the dinosaurs are roaming around freely. But due to the climate change scenario, they can’t really survive in places other than in and around the equator. Martin Krebs of ParkerGenix, a pharmaceutical company representative, approaches an ex-military covert operative, Zora Bennett, and a paleontologist, Henry Loomis, to go to this space in the middle of nowhere where once a company conducted experiments on dinosaurs. ParkerGenix wants to build a medicine, and for that, they need to get some stuff from certain specific dinosaurs. The journey to get what they want is what we see in the whole film.
The moment you see certain characters in this movie, you can quickly understand who is going to get eaten by the creatures in this film. Creating characters or equations similar to the original film can be considered as homage when done minimally. However, when your method of developing an unremarkable core idea into a Jurassic World script is recreating all the iconic moments they created almost three decades ago, that clearly feels like Koepp and Edwards were perhaps forced by Universal to make a film because sequels are the easy bets these days for initial collection.
In the original film, Alan Grant and the kids were stuck in the wild forest when the situation got out of hand, and we see Grant’s approach towards the kids go through a major change by the end of the film. To recreate that, Rebirth is using a somewhat dysfunctional family. The most iconic excitement scene of seeing them for the first time is also recreated, and this time, the overenthusiastic screaming science guy is Henry Loomis. Remember how the Ian Malcom character distracts the dinosaurs to save the kids? We have a different iteration of that happening in this movie as well. When Loomis is giving these open-source medicine creation lectures to Zora, it feels way too basic, and it is almost like they are using it as an excuse to say, “Look, we are actually talking about an important thing.”
Gareth Edwards starts off the movie with these long conversational bits between characters, and just when you are about to close your eyes, because the idea of characters talking about their work-life trauma is so generic, we get to hear this loud background score that shows a wide shot to wake us up. This happens almost three times in the first forty-odd minutes. The numerous jump scares and how they tease you with a possible attack in almost every frame are pretty scary. But even mediocre films can do that, and the kind of fear this movie could create is nowhere near what Spielberg could create with water ripples on a car’s dashboard. The CGI quality is fairly good. However, there are moments when you see characters on top of mountains, the lighting and the texture of the partial set they created pretty much expose the fact that it is a studio floor.
Scarlett Johansson, with her Black Widow aura, is able to pull off Zora: The Mercenary with that required amount of heroics and coolness. Jonathan Bailey is the rookie here with minimal real-world exposure, and he performed that part without overdoing it. Maharshala Ali’s Duncan is pretty much the tough guy transporter here. Rupert Friend is your typical greedy corporate guy with nothing much to do here, other than the obvious physical efforts. The actors who performed as the members of the shipwrecked family were also fine.
If seeing dinosaurs again on a big screen, with their screams and all the typical jump scare tactics associated with the franchise, is enough for you to watch a Jurassic World film, I would say Jurassic World Rebirth can be that easy popcorn watch. If you ask me whether the movie is able to create that eerie discomfort, I would say yes. But because of the derivative nature of the writing, it is easily the most underwhelming discomfort.
