Review: Jurassic World Rebirth

Score: C

Director: Gareth Edwards

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend

Running Time: 134 Minutes

Rated: PG-13

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.

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About Kip Mooney

Like many film critics born during and after the 1980s, my hero is Roger Ebert. The man was already the best critic in the nation when he won the Pulitzer in 1975, but his indomitable spirit during and after his recent battle with cancer keeps me coming back to read not only his reviews but his insightful commentary on the everyday. But enough about a guy you know a lot about. I knew I was going to be a film critic—some would say a snob—in middle school, when I had to voraciously defend my position that The Royal Tenenbaums was only a million times better than Adam Sandler’s remake of Mr. Deeds. From then on, I would seek out Wes Anderson’s films and avoid Sandler’s like the plague. Still, I like to think of myself as a populist, and I’ll be just as likely to see the next superhero movie as the next Sundance sensation. The thing I most deplore in a movie is laziness. I’d much rather see movies with big ambitions try and fail than movies with no ambitions succeed at simply existing. I’m also a big advocate of fun-bad movies like The Room and most of Nicolas Cage’s work. In the past, I’ve written for The Dallas Morning News and the North Texas Daily, which I edited for a semester. I also contributed to Dallas-based Pegasus News, which in the circle of life, is now part of The Dallas Morning News, where I got my big break in 2007. Eventually, I’d love to write and talk about film full-time, but until that’s a viable career option, I work as an auditor for Wells Fargo. I hope to one day meet my hero, go to the Toronto International Film Festival, and compete on Jeopardy. Until then, I’m excited to share my love of film with you.