Film review: Jurassic World Rebirth

Those with the keys to the Jurassic Park franchise thought they were clever. Rebooting things a decade ago with Jurassic World, they played to the chilling idea that nobody had learned a damned thing from the original park’s disastrous lesson in trying to bring back dinosaurs as a product. It even winked knowingly at itself with its bit about the audience demanding more claws and bigger teeth. With a new load of greedy investors (who may as well have worn shirts announcing that they know the price of everything but the value of nothing) having a second go at John Hammond’s doomed park with new, bigger creatures, it was a prescient lesson in hubris and forgetting cautions from history.

It was great (even if the T-rex and the Velociraptor stopped just short of fist-bumping one another at the end). But the very things it was talking about – being careful with what you exploit without truly understanding or appreciating what you’re working with – have been ignored. Here, a once glorious and wonder-giving proposition has once again been reanimated and is confused, unsure why it exists. Despite being the work of David Koepp, who co-wrote the 1993 original, it is an extinction-level disaster that’s even worse than 2022’s Dominion.

This time, the dinosaurs are confined to an island and the seas of a highly-forbidden zone out in the Atlantic, on which terrible mutation experiments were carried out until they fucked up in Final Destination-style and a D-Rex creation got out and ate everyone. (Note: this bit is actually good).

Big pharma (untrustworthy character flag alert) have discovered that it’s possible to effectively cure heart disease using stuff found in dinosaur blood. Slimy corporate vampire Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) seeks the help of Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a special ops expert, to lead an illegal mission to the island. Along with struggling palaeontologist nice guy Dr Henry Loomis, who isn’t sure about this whole thing, and a tough but big-hearted crew, they set off to get gore from living dinos, which they can turn into medicine, and turn into a fortune.

This skips by so fast you’ve barely caught anyone’s name. Never mind: dinosaur now! At the same time as they're speeding their way to the island, an adventurous father is sailing across the ocean with his two daughters and his elder child’s boyfriend. Encountering a massive sea beast, they end up stranded, then rescued by Zora and co.

The whole lot of them outrun the leviathans, end up on the island with a totalled boat, and a vague idea that they should get to a helipad for a covert rescue the following night. All while trying to get the samples. Oh, by this point, someone has died, but you didn’t catch his name, and Krebs has shown he’s a baddie by nearly killing one of the girls.

If this actually sounds quite good, a rompy thriller with some action and monsters: it isn’t. The dinosaurs, often rendered in eye-melting CGI, are at this point so big and so toothy you wonder if someone is taking the piss. Everything rushes past so fast and inconsequentially that there’s no tension or dread, quite something in a film where you see people getting eaten alive. Remember how hard Lex and Tim shat themselves when all that was standing between them and the T-Rex was a plastic sunroof it was trying to crush them with? Yeah, nah. None of that.

And you don’t care about the party. There’s no time spent getting to know anyone, other than the most basic “he’s the baddie, he’s the goodie, she’s the hard-ass with a good heart, he’s the stoner bum boyfriend who wins the respect of his potential father-in-law by risking his life to protect his daughter” stuff. Annoyingly, the youngest kid also takes a cutesie CGI dinosaur and keeps it in her backpack for absolutely no reason other than they needed something adorable. That’s what you’ll be buying the child in your life this Christmas.

In the same way that the very movies themselves posit the notion that people will eventually tire of the ability to resurrect the dinosaurs, the wonder of Steven Spielberg’s original animals (worked on by Tool guitarist Adam Jones, pub-quiz fans) have been cheapened into computerised slop. But they're bigger, so that's cooler…

The soul and the warning of Michael Crichton’s novels are almost entirely absent. And in a world where it’s more important than ever to beware dodgy technocrats doing whatever they want, where Elon Musk is putting tech inside people’s brains, such things would be timely. Here, though, it’s all about the money. The most valuable and overlooked lesson of the whole thing.

Verdict: 1/5

Jurassic World Rebirth is released on July 2 via Universal