Jurassic World Rebirth Review
Here’s my Jurassic World Rebirth review directed by Gareth Edwards and written by David Koepp and stars Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali and more!
Synopsis:
Five years post-Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), an expedition braves isolated equatorial regions to extract DNA from three massive prehistoric creatures for a groundbreaking medical breakthrough.
Trailer:
Just like the whole point of the rebirth and reboot for the Jurassic Park/ Jurassic World franchise of bringing back what’s dead and extinct to cause chaos, Jurassic World Rebirth does so with polarizing views about whether the film was good or bad. For me, I honestly thought it was good. A little rough around the edges but it hits the bottom line of being entertained. My tiny lizard brain wanted to see people surviving the horror of being stranded in an island with dinosaurs and that’s what I got and a little bit more.
So basically what happens is that a Pharma company has tasked a group of mercenaries led by Scarlett Johansson’s Zora Bennett to take DNA samples from the biggest dinos in a new island that was converted into a breeding ground for dinosaurs. The timing for the film does line up with what happened in Jurassic World Dominion and it even follows what the status quo that’s previously established being that the modern world’s ecosystem and climate has drastically been changed by BioSyn and their weird locusts that dinos can only live in specific places that’s untouched namely this third island called Ile Saint-Hubert.
For any dinosaur fans, the latest JW movie provides us with some new dinos as well as some vastly different familiar dinosaurs like the Mosasaur and the Spinosaurs.
The mutated dinosaurs gets taken down (or up) a notch with the introduction of the immense D-Rex or Distortus Rex and the Mutadons who are pretty much velociraptor and pteradon hybrids.
But I dunno, I did enjoy seeing the D-Rex onscreen for those short scenes.
And you may be wondering why it felt like they were were really trying to hide the D-Rex for most of the film, well you can thank directir Gareth Edwards for that. He’s the same director that was responsible for 2014’s Godzilla where they intentionally tried to hide the Big G throughout the film.
I certainly loved that last few minutes of the film with the survivors racing away on a boat and bemoaning the loss of their field leader Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and that scene where the darkness and the clouds shroud the D-Rex and it’s attack. Thought it was awesome and had big kaiju movie feels. But that might not be for everybody. Here’s to hoping they give us more of this nasty creature down the road because it would be a shame if they only use this mutant dinosaur once for this film.
If you want some basic thrills though that’s done exceptionally well then you must look forward to the whole T-Rex scene with the Delgado family. That one I wasn’t expecting to be fun but the moment that T-Rex went for the family, I knew we were in for a wicked good thrill ride.
The problem with the fans who didn’t like the film that much and I resonate with some of their sentiment, is that the film was too formulaic and too playing safe. We were promised a “rebirth” not a “remake” with modern twists and thrills. It came to a point that it felt like we were just watching an update version of 1993’s Jurassic Park even with a scene that was made to mirror the Visitor Center segment wit flying raptors instead of the generic Velociraptors.
Still the visuals are stunning and I really want to catch this on IMAX to really get the best of the visuals. The music and the score throughout the film was also good and I cannot stop pointing things back to the river chase sequence. It’s also crazy to think that I suddenly want a baby Aquilops dinosaur after meeting the baby Dolores who was such an adorbs character and a breath of fresh air for the film.
The human characters were OK at most there’s nothing really great about the characterization and character development although I did want to point out that the characters do get some bits of morality plays especially Zora who at the end realizes that the DNA’s they procured could be used if they handed it away to the public rather than return it to their employers who stand to earn billions on this wonder drug they were planning to create. The teens were OK too, nothing really big’s happening with them through the arc, which circles back to the idea of the film playing it safe with their characters. I did realize however that I would’ve turned on the film if something happened to one of them so I guess, they did the right thing.
Verdict
Jurassic World Rebirth starts off with some birthing pains but it promises something good provided they cook well with their next shot. This new set provides the stepping stone with new characters that may or may not come back. The creature effects and the visuals were excellent and would make any dinosaur fan would appreciate it to some extent. The cast were pretty OK with Jonathan Bailey’s character actually being a decent human being minus the action hero beats that previous film’s protagonist kind of has built into him. Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali were also nice additions. The cinematography was good and helped in building tension. The biggest pain point for “Rebirth” was the fact that it kind of copied the past movies instead of devising some insane set pieces involving humans and hungry dinosaurs. Still, the ones that we were given in the film was good to some extent.
8/1
Special thanks to Universal Pictures PH and SM Cinemas
