Jurassic World: Rebirth

Jurassic World Rebirth
**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend
written by David Koepp
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Our first film about hyper-normalization, Jurassic World Rebirth presents a world that has grown tired of dinosaurs, and it’s buoyed not only by that topicality but also by Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and a steadfast refusal to give a good shit. About anything. Which is not to say the craft is poor (this was an expensive production, and looks it), but that the picture is more a collection of vignettes–vignettes that replicate how children play with dinosaur toys–than it is a legible narrative. It’s a rack of Scrabble tiles arranged at random, or a completely fucked-up Rubik’s Cube you’re on the verge of stripping of its stickers. That it’s not awful is a testament to stars who know the assignment, a new director who isn’t Colin Trevorrow, and a script, by professional populist screenwriter David Koepp (returning to the franchise for the first time since The Lost World), that takes it easy on the last film’s memorably ugly misogyny and autocritical metaphors for the bankrupt intentions driving franchise filmmaking. I’m not saying Jurassic World Dominion is wrong about the cynical commodification of everything, just that it made dinosaurs eating people not fun.

Jurassic World Rebirth is basically just a ragtag band of mercenaries at the tail end of their careers fighting with dinosaurs while forced to suffer an evil capitalist who is worse than any prehistoric foe. Meanwhile, on the other side of the island, a hapless father and his kids (an adorable ragamuffin you would like to feed to the dinosaurs, and a budding gamine adolescent mooning at an unworthy boyfriend who will prove himself by the end) are on a collision course with the mercenaries. The picture opens with the reveal that scientists are splicing together a thing that looks and acts like the Rancor Monster from Return of the Jedi, which is an appeal to nostalgia that makes no sense within the movie but a lot of sense outside it. The more abominable the creature is, the corporation behind the dino-park reasons, the more tourists they’ll attract. I wish the monster’s similarity to the Rancor had been a part of the plot–that someone had said, “Well, they said to make something that looked like that thing from Return of the Jedi, so,” and then suddenly the film is making a meta-comment about hooks baited with childhood nostalgia.

That level of self-awareness would also make the existence of a Paul Reiser-esque company stooge, Krebs (Rupert Friend), recruiting Tomb Raider-for-hire Zora (ScarJo) to retrieve unimaginably dangerous biological samples on what amounts to a suicide mission, thrum with intelligence instead of taking ours for granted. The biggest disappointment of this seventh film in a 32-year-old franchise is its unwillingness to throw coyness to the wind and eviscerate the motivations that drive these eternally replicable products. Dig into why no one goes to the Dino Death Park anymore. Why doesn’t death…matter? I thought for a thrilling second that Jurassic Park Rebirth would be about how we’ve been desensitized to all manner of human atrocity and suffering to the point of also becoming numb to joy and wonder. It took a meteor to kill the dinosaurs the first time around. Here, all it takes is humanity’s astonishing ability to normalize anything. Pandemic, genocide, the return of Nazis, the construction of concentration camps, the gun-slaughter of children–if it’s not actively happening to us, it fails to hold our attention for even the blink of an eye, a flicker of our moral compass, a thump of a hummingbird heartbeat. 

Alas, Jurassic Park Rebirth is, again, a film about an evil industrialist who wants to collect, open-world game-like, three samples from three giant dinosaurs, which would give his company the power to cure heart disease. Zora assembles a team–Duncan (Ali), plus two others who are going to die immediately–and, in a side story, dad Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Bella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) are attacked by a sea monster. They end up shipwrecked on a dinosaur-infested island, allowing for separate soldier and family melodramas to play out before the two threads converge in a breathless climax where our heroes have to fight their way through a monster gauntlet to get to the final boss, i.e., the Rancor. Most of the family-story arc involves people pleading with Bella not to do what she’s committed to doing. Remember in Mick Jackson’s Volcano when the vulcanologist needs to scream at his daughter to move away from the slowly approaching lava? That’s everyone at Bella, repeated ad nauseam. Bella isn’t a person–she’s a device meant to create tension, essentially serving as Jones the Cat from Alien. The crowd would have erupted in a rapture of joy had a dinosaur devoured her as ugly as possible, but just as the film lacks balls in its subtext, it lacks balls in its text, too.

What’s oddly satisfying, though, is when Krebs finally gets Gamorrean Guard-ed by the Rancor in an almost-loving, clay-model-feeling CHOMP that is too specific not to be a direct and knowing homage. (The only thing missing is the pig squeals.) I even liked the glad-handing equivocation of Zora declaring that she’ll share the knowledge of curing heart disease with the world rather than try to profit from it, although we know how that turned out for insulin. Still, it’s not for the bad intentions of the world that the world is ending–it’s for the bad intentions of a very few obscenely wealthy individuals that the world is ending. And in its way, Jurassic Park Rebirth is about that. The bad guys of the film are corporations and the billionaire class, as represented by Krebs, the weird shit they’ve created under the aegis of satisfying stockholders, and our peculiar hardwiring as a species that makes us pathologically distractible and fatally solipsistic. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, right? Maybe it’s how we blink when the bat swings at our face; maybe it’s how we can’t help but pull away from a hot stove or jut our hand out as we fall–a reflex. The worst of us take advantage of that, you know, take advantage of how most of us have evolved a limit for confronting atrocity and real evil while a few of us simply…haven’t, and that’s what makes you different from them. That’s why they’re predators and we’re such easy prey: because we flinch. Eventually, we burn out the circuit that has always protected us, so now we’re sitting ducks. Eventually, we fight back, but not always in time and not always enough, and the shadows are getting real long. Real long.