In what is now the seventh installment of the Jurassic saga — rebadged as Jurassic World to denote the presence and prevalence of dinosaurs beyond island enclosures (pray Universal never dreams up a Jurassic Multiverse) — screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the original 1993 adaptation, cements the classic’s central message that some relics are best left in the past.
As the subtitle Rebirth suggests, the film assembles a fresh crew of daring but dim-witted explorers to serve primarily as dino fodder. It opens with a preposterous prologue in which a candy wrapper gets sucked into an air vent and, somehow, triggers a total power reset at a research center — releasing a genetically engineered mega-dinosaur that looks like a cross between Ridley Scott’s Alien and a T-Rex.
You’d think a facility designed to contain weaponized apex predators might have invested in a backup generator. Then again, it seems fitting that such sheer idiocy is the impetus for the entire movie.
The rest of the plot unfolds on a remote equatorial island — once a research outpost where increasingly terrifying dinosaur variants were bred in a desperate attempt to “reinvigorate” audience fear, as if skyscraper-sized carnivores had somehow gone out of style.
But Rebirth is at its best when it remembers what made the franchise thrilling in the first place: simply allowing real, historical dinosaurs to exist and watching humans react in awe and terror, as if they had time-traveled into the Cretaceous period.
A standout moment arrives midway through, as sailor Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his family paddle for their lives down a river on an inflatable raft while a hulking T-Rex emerges from the jungle behind them, its head slowly rising into view, exhaling a thunderous roar tantamount to a jet engine.
For a fleeting moment, we’re transported back to Steven Spielberg’s world, where the sheer scale and presence of the creature do all the heavy lifting. No mutants, monsters, or contrivances — just the primal terror of man versus nature. The film also heavily leans on John Williams’s iconic, endearing score to manufacture awe and nostalgia the script hasn’t earned.
Delgado, for his part, is one of the film’s few remotely tolerable characters. A strong contender for father-of-the-year, he brings his daughters sailing through quarantined, dinosaur-infested waters — then stumbles into the mercenary-led mission that forms the spine of the plot. Inane vacation planning aside, his improvisational savvy and paternal instincts lend the film a faint pulse of heart as he tries to guide his daughters through escalating chaos.
The rest of the cast fares far worse.
Jonathan Bailey plays Dr. Henry Loomis, a smarmy, self-righteous scientist who almost certainly keeps Howard Zinn glued to his nightstand and delivers sanctimonious lines like, “Have you ever thought about how science belongs to everyone? No? Well, you should start,” with such an unbearable smirk I spent much of the runtime rooting for a dinosaur to neatly scoop him up like a canapé.
Scarlett Johansson portrays Zora Bennett, a snappy mercenary with no discernible personality traits beyond a barrage of quips seemingly lifted straight from her Marvel back-catalogue. And Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) is a shady pharmaceutical firm executive who has learned he can develop a lifesaving heart medication using the DNA in the three largest dinosaurs — because they have the biggest hearts. The rationale is entirely extraneous, but he is supposedly evil because, after spending tens of millions of dollars on a team of mercenaries to procure the blood samples — and a subsequent fortune on the R&D required to produce the lifesaving drugs — he plans to patent it to recoup some of his costs.
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“What if instead of giving the blood samples to the pharmaceutical guys, we just made it open source?” suggests Loomis at one point, like an animated Reddit avatar.
The monstrous Frankenstein dino teased in the prologue vanishes for most of the runtime, only to return in the underwhelming final act for a lumbering cameo — because the real villain here is capitalism. There is, perhaps unintentionally, a fitting irony at the heart of Jurassic World: Rebirth: It asks whether it’s right to resurrect relics of the past for present-day exploitation in pursuit of profit. It answers its own question.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds an MBA from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.