Just like the scientists who can't stop breeding dinosaurs, executives at Universal can't stop making Jurassic Park sequels, despite knowing they're a bad idea. Oh sure, they tend to make around a billion dollars worldwide. But the best any of them have achieved is "fine." And so just three years after the thoroughly mediocre Jurassic World trilogy, the franchise is back for another bite (pun intended).
Steven Spielberg apparently recruited original scriptwriter David Koepp to come up with a new idea to keep the series going. But you can only reanimate dead tissue so many times before it starts to look sad. Rebirth has all the familiar beats: a cute kid in danger, corporate espionage, dinos both terrifying and adorable, and some of the hottest actors on the planet. Despite delivering sharp scripts with real stakes earlier this year with Presence and Black Bag, Koepp can't make us care about any of these archetypes.
Scarlett Johansson stars as Zora, a mercenary with zero personality other than being good at everything and always looking gorgeous no matter how gross the conditions. Jonathan Bailey fares better as Dr. Henry Loomis, the paleontology expert. His passion for nature is about the only believable thing here. And poor Mahershala Ali, a two-time Oscar winner, is reduced to being the cocky ship's captain who mostly tells people to move or run. His traumatic background marks some of the laziest writing you'll hear in a major film this year.
Rupert Friend exudes enough menace as the evil pharmaceutical exec funding this dangerous expedition. But he's just a carbon copy, and missing the pathetic squirminess, of Martin Ferrero as the lawyer in the original. Oh, and if that wasn't enough there's a whole family – dad, adult daughter, loser boyfriend, and precocious kid – who get shipwrecked by an aquatic dinosaur and rescued by the crew. They're almost immediately separated, which drags down an already overstuffed movie.
Yet on a scene-by-scene basis, there is some remarkable stuff. But then the film recycles some of John Williams's iconic score and you realize this is just a pale imitation of a true classic. And the original isn't the only thing this film dutifully rips off. It lifts scenes from both Jaws and Alien without a hint of self-awareness.
Like The Terminator franchise, this series refuses to die, despite not being good since the '90s. This is another perfunctory sequel that's never truly awful, but never rises above mediocrity. They should have called it Jurassic World Retread.
