Dino Might: JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH

Screenwriter David Koepp has written several perfectly structured movies in his career. He’s responsible for Raimi’s first Spider-Man’s thrilling uplift trajectory, and Fincher’s Panic Room’s tightening claustrophobia. He directed his own expert thriller Premium Rush, a bike messenger chase that knows just when to shift into the next gear like clockwork. He’s recently on a great run of collaborations with Soderbergh across genres: pandemic tech mystery Kimi, haunted family drama Presence, and twisty spy investigation Black Bag. But still his greatest screenplay is the original Jurassic Park, a movie with nary a line out of place or sequence mistimed. Every character beat, line of exposition, and complication revealed is precisely calibrated and exquisitely balanced. It’s a movie with such a sturdy structure that it only grows in the skill of Spielberg’s direction which embellishes the intensity of the emotions and the suspense until it reaches its transcendent blockbuster heights. Koepp’s clearly a pro who knows what he’s doing. So far be it from me to note Koepp’s return to the franchise for its seventh entry, Jurassic World Rebirth, has one obvious structural problem, but here goes. 

This movie picks up a few years past the conclusion of Colin Tervorrow’s Jurassic World Dominion. In the Rebirth we find that our ecosystem can’t support dinosaur life anywhere but the equator, which means the whole world building is rest to confine the cloned prehistoric life on the original islands. In a lengthy first act we follow a pharmaceutical rep (Rupert Friend) recruiting a team to secretly go to a Jurassic Island and steal some dino DNA in order to develop a miracle cure. He explains the deal to a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson), who goes with him to meet a scientist (Jonathan Bailey), who joins them to hire a boat and its captain (Mahershala Ali). Each step repeats a lot of the same plot information as we meet a new character. (We’ll repeat the character information throughout, too, a nagging drag on the picture.) Then we cut to a vacationing family (father Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, daughters Luna Blaise and Audrina Miranda, and the older girl’s boyfriend David Iacono) as their sailboat capsizes in the middle of the ocean. They’re rescued by the team en route to Jurassic danger and pretty quickly realize they’ve been brought into a dangerous journey. The movie’s off to a pretty slow, uncertain start until the family joins. Then there’s a clean line of suspense and momentum as the rescue boat is attacked by dinosaurs and crashes on the island, forcing the whole ensemble to scramble around and survive until rescue can arrive. I entertained the idea of an instantly better version starting with the family and introducing more mystery about our all-star mercenaries while getting to the goods faster, but at least the movie as is gets there eventually. 

Koepp provides a sturdy enough framework for the basic Jurassic creature feature sequences. Director Gareth Edwards, of the great 2014 American Godzilla, shapes them with style and heft. He restores a sense of scale and awe to a franchise that has recently lacked in those departments. He has a great eye for teasing out details, putting the camera in the right place to start stringing them along, accumulating complications with a long fuse that twists and turns on its way to exploding. It’s beat for beat the best directed Jurassic movie in a long time. Just the pleasure of watching humans and dinos arranged with intentionality in the frame for surprise and suspense is enough to keep the proceedings agreeably entertaining. Hanging off a boat while enormous jaws chomp, or dangling on a mountainside while pterodactyls swoop and snap are good use of the variables one would expect from a movie like this. (Edwards gets a little of the vibes of Howard Hawks' big game chases in Hatari! going here.) A scene with a t-rex and an inflatable life raft is a fine manipulation of teasing reveals, and a sequence involving winged raptors in a convenience store and down into some conveniently large drains is a decent use of space. It’s a fine popcorn programmer, delivering precisely what one wants from a movie like this. The creatures look great, the jungle landscapes are attractively shot, the soundtrack is booming, and the characters are just believable enough types to wish them well (or ill, in the case of the slimier ones). You go to a Jurassic movie for simple pleasures at this point, or you don’t go at all. If this one doesn’t even begin to reach the heights of the original, well, none of the others have. At least it also doesn’t hit the lows of the more recent sequels, either. I went in asking if we really needed to keep this series going, and left thinking we might as well.