Director – Gareth Edwards, Screenplay – David Koepp, Producers – Patrick Crowley & Frank Marshall, Photography – John Mathieson, Music – Alexandre Desplat, Visual Effects Supervisor – David Vickery, Animation Supervisor – Stephen Aplin, Visual Effects – Important Looking Pirates (Supervisor – Daniel Jahnel) & Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisors – Charmaine Chan, Simone Coco & Andrew Roberts, Animation Supervisors – Ted Lister, Christopher Potter & Delio Tramontozzi), Special Effects Supervisor – Neil Corbould, Creature Effects Supervisor – John Nolan, Production Design – James Clyne. Production Company – Universal/Amblin Entertainment.
Cast
Scarlett Johansson (Zora Bennett), Mahershala Ali (Duncan Kincaid), Jonathan Bailey (Dr Henry Loomis), Rupert Friend (Martin Krebs), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (Reuben Delgado), Luna Blaise (Teresa Delgado), David Iacono (Xavier Dobbs), Audrina Miranda (Isabella Delgado), Bechir Sylvain (LeClerc), Ed Skrein (Bobby Atwater), Philippine Velge (Nina)
Plot
Climate change has rendered much of Earth now inhospitable to dinosaurs. They are now clustered in equatorial regions, the only areas in which they can live and these have been declared off limits. Mercenary Zora Bennett is recruited by pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs to go on a mission into the region to retrieve biological samples from three different dinosaur species that are needed to formulate a cure for heart disease. Also recruited is palaeontologist Henry Loomis and boat captain Duncan Kincaid and his team. Along the way there, they detour to pick up the Delgado family who were vacationing on a boat before it was struck by a mosasaurus. The mosasauruses damage their ship, forcing them to land on Ile Saint-Hubert, which contains an abandoned dinosaur genetics laboratory. The separated groups try to survive in the wild, obtain the samples and make it to the helipad for the rescue copter, all while facing the threat of rampant dinosaurs.
Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), adapted from Michael Crichton’s novel, was a massive success – the No. 1 box-office hit of 1993. Spielberg made a desultory sequel with The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and then handed the reins over to another director for Jurassic Park III (2001). The series fell silent for fourteen years before being revived with new faces in Jurassic World (2015), which became the No 1 box-office hit for 2015. This duly saw a new series of sequels with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), Jurassic World: Dominion (2022) and Jurassic World: Rebirth here.
Recruited as the new director on board here is Gareth Edwards, a self-taught British visual effects artist who made a highly acclaimed debut with the SF film Monsters (2010). From there, Edwards went on to the English-language revival of Godzilla (2014), followed by the Star Wars prequel Rogue One (2016) and most recently the independently financed The Creator (2023).
The Jurassic World films have churned out the basics of the series with a formulaic predictability. Thus I had no high expectations of Jurassic World: Rebirth before sitting down to watch. Not even a couple promising names on the credits – Gareth Edwards and Davod Koepp, the screenwriter of the original who has an estimable career as a screenwriter and director elsewhere (see below) – did much to give the impression we would get anything other than another film about people running around on an island avoiding being killed by rampaging dinosaurs.
Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson
And while Jurassic World: Rebirth doesn’t stray too far from the basics of the sequels, it is actually a far more enjoyable film than anything I expected it to be. The set-up shakes up the scenario. The Jurassic World films have uneven vied between scenarios involving new theme parks, different islands and different billionaires with their private parks or questions of whether the dinosaurs should be integrated with the modern world. Each new sequel seemed to discard whatever development was introduced in the previous entry. The equatorial zone is an interesting idea, although the whole no go area seems rather indistinct – is a legally enforced zone or just a dangerous place to go? What you suspect would happen in reality would be lots of dubious companies offering big game expeditions to hunt dinosaurs or illegal tourist visits.
There seems quite a bit of clunky formula that the film is setting up – the Plot Coupons fantasy where the team have to track down three different types of dinosaurs (marine, land and air) – and cliché characters like the ruthless Big Pharma executive; the millennial slacker who seems to have target painted on his back for his indifference; the cute kid who forms a relationship with a cute baby dinosaur. That said, the script ignores or to fail to play off many of these characters’ traditional arcs.
Indeed, with the plot involving mercenaries and two kids along for the journey, what Jurassic World: Rebirth resembles more than anything is a better version of The Lost World: Jurassic Park. And okay, maybe Scarlett Johansson makes the nicest and most principled mercenary you are even likely to encounter – a point you feel that a star’s desire to play a flattering character ends up bending the character out of its natural shape (elsewhere she is talking about planting car bombs and she and her team readily exploit the situation for more money, which grates with the idea of someone with such a strong moral imperative).
Necking titanosauruses
Instead, what Gareth Edwards gives us is a surprisingly reasonable survival story. As you get in Monsters, and in its own way in The Creator, Edwards loves building worlds where the backgrounds seem to be teeming with independent life outside the frame. All the other Jurassic films are filled with assorted dinosaurs that feel like no more than wilderness encounters that are the lead-in to set-pieces. Here you have the feel of being thrown into an immersive world filled with vast leviathans – there’s one great scene where Luna Blaise walks past a slumbering T Rex that is there for no other reason than the sublime cool of the image. Edwards gives us a scene where the party travel through a field inhabited by herd of titanosauruses with their impossibly long flowing tails and watch them necking that more than ably conjures the sense of wonder that Spielberg delivered to an audience when he had his characters encounter the dinosaurs the first time.
The first set piece with the attempts to shoot with mosasaurus with the syringe and Scarlett Johansson left hanging upside down from the prow of the ship, all before it crashes into the rocks and ashore, feels like a big gimmicky set-piece. Nevertheless, Edwards thereafter creates great tension to the various scenes with the pterodactyls invading the service station; the abseil down to invade the quetzalcoatlus nest; or the climactic drama around the helipad and the tiny raft being pursued by the lumbering Distortus Rex.
