Director – Gareth Edwards – 2025 – US – Cert. – 134m
***
A group of mercenary hunters and a traumatised family find themselves on an equatorial island populated by mutant dinosaurs – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, July 2nd
The difficult seventh movie, made on a shorter production schedule than its predecessors – according to the production notes – and probably made too quickly for its own good. First there were three Jurassic Park movies, then there were three Jurassic World movies, and now there’s a seventh Jurassic. What to call it? Jurassic Beyond? Jurassic Outside? Jurassic Environment? Jurassic Habitat? Jurassic Equator? Jurassic Island? Jurassic Laboratory? Jurassic Lab? Jurassic Experiment? Jurassic Mutation? (Those took me a mere five minutes.) No: unable to think of a word to replace Park or World, this one is saddled with the marketing-led Jurassic World Rebirth. Which no doubt will do the job, but when Michael Crichton coined Jurassic Park for his novel’s title and Spielberg ran with it, no-one outside of palaeontologists and dinosaur-geeks (I number myself among the latter) knew what ‘Jurassic’ was. It didn’t matter: it was Spielberg and dinosaurs, that sold it, and the film more than lived up to the lure and the promise.
For this writer, Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993) remains one of half a dozen or so extraordinary movies that redefined the art of cinema, while The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997) is a poor sequel containing a couple of incredible sequences.
Spielberg subsequently stepped back from the franchise, executive producing some of the movies. This new one sees him more involved with it than he has for some time. He met with writer David Koepp, who wrote those first two films, to thrash out a new one. What they came up with is intriguing, although you might argue it’s really two films, or two plots. First, they set up a post-Jurassic World scenario where dinosaurs have escaped and live in the wild, but can only survive in the equator because of the climate. That would give you the top of South America, Equatorial Africa and the Archipelago of the Pacific. They go for a fictitious equatorial island and the sea surrounding it somewhere off the coast of Equatorial South America.
Then they invent a department of InGen (the company behind the original Jurassic Park) on an isolated island Isle Saint-Hubert, specifically an R&D department specialising in cross-breeding and developing mutant dinosaurs, to see what they can come up with. (Surely they’ve already done the different island thing in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and the mutated dinosaur thing in Jurassic World, Colin Trevorrow, 2015 with the Indominus Rex?) Anyway, this gives us a terrific opening scene in which a radiation-suit-clad technician eats a Snickers bar just before entering a mutant beast containment chamber (Really? Wouldn’t there be protocols preventing this sort of thing?) which clogs a vent, meaning the containment systems fail to contain, and instead reboot, allowing the hideous beastie to wreak mayhem on those technicians unlucky enough not to get out in time.
The two writers also throw in a terrific sequence in which a hapless sauropod is trapped in San Francisco, causing a massive traffic jam. It functions additionally as the backdrop to corporate type Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) recruiting mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) for a mission to find the three biggest prehistoric creatures – the sea one Mosasaurus, the land one Titanosaurus and the airborne one Quetzalcoatlus – to extract their DNA (Wait. They already extracted the DNA in Jurassic Park, which rather undermines the concept of this movie) as only the DNA from a living specimen will work (aha!) for what Krebs’ corporate employers have in mind – developing cures for heart disease, because dinosaurs’ hearts were so large that they never experienced any type of heart trouble. (Wait. What? Really?)
Anyway, there’s a nifty idea about syringes which extract the desired dino DNA then, when full, fly up into the air and come down on a little parachute. Zora says no, but then the money is much more than she imagined, so she says yes, and they set about recruiting a team. There are two main recruits. One is Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a former student of the first film’s Alan Grant whose museum, complete with a falling banner with the words When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth, previously seen in Jurassic Park, and referencing the dinosaur film of the same name (Val Guest, 1970), has just lost its funding. The other is Zara’s trusted friend Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who runs a bar somewhere in the tropics (showing the allosaurus battle from One Million Years BC, Don Chaffey; effects: Ray Harryhausen, 1966, on a telly) and promptly supplies a suitable boat complete with three-man crew (Ed Skein, Bechir Sylvian, Philippine Velge). And off they go to find the three dinosaurs and extract the liquid.
This sounds to me like a film. Not, perhaps, the greatest film ever made, but as a heart-pounding adventure showcasing dinosaurs, it ought to work well enough.
And then, for reasons best known to themselves, the pair throw in a nuclear family on a sailing trip, specifically a father named Rueben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his two daughters, Isabella, 18 (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa, 11 (Luna Blaise), with the 18-year-old’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) along for the ride. And they sail into the path of the Mosasaurus. And our mercenaries on the ship hunting the three big dinos responds to their distress call – but aren’t going to take the imperilled family back to land before they’ve got the three syringes of dino liquid they seek.
This furnishes a terrific sequence of the Mosasaurus attacking first the family yacht, and then the mercenary boat, the latter with the aid of some swimming Spinosauruses.
However, it also lumbers the film with two groups of human characters, one which wants to get the dino liquid from the land and air dinos and a second, somewhat redundant group, of the family who simply want to get to safety and have been told there’s a village on the island.
The genius of the original Jurassic Park was to have two kids and a couple of unrelated male and female scientists form an impromptu nuclear family; that idea worked, whereas this one doesn’t. Once you’ve got past the Mosasaurus attack sequence, and the scene in which corporate type Krebs callously allows the 18-year-old family daughter to fall off the side of the mercenaries’ boat into the water in which the Mosasaurus is swimming around, you could pretty much remove the family from this film and you wouldn’t really lose anything. Alright, you would lose the cute little dino (nicknamed Dorothy) that the 11-year-old finds and carries around in her rucksack. It’s a fun idea., but has nothing to do with the rest of the film, really. Sorry, Steven – just my opinion.
The film is directed by Gareth Edwards, the British genius behind Monsters (2010) who moved on to big budget effects fare Godzilla (2014), Rogue One (2016) and The Creator (2023) and who you would imagine being the perfect director for a Jurassic. There’s no denying it looks fantastic throughout. Yet, despite his obvious skill at putting such material on the screen, something seems off. You don’t really connect with the characterisations. The action lacks tension. There’s also the pointless addition of the nuclear family, which is down to Spielberg and Koepp. Ultimately, the heavily derivative, misjudged story and script, with its many ridiculous plot holes, render this latest Jurassic instalment hugely disappointing.
Jurassic World Rebirth is out in cinemas in the UK on Wednesday, July 2nd.
Trailer: