Jurassic World: Rebirth

Disclaimer: (Refer to disclaimer from The Lost World)

This movie fooled me, but it is, in fact, rated PG-13.

It would’ve been so much more promising if it was R…

Yes, I know. This movie is still in theaters. You’re probably wondering, understandably, how is Skye gonna review this if she can’t get screenshots? Also, when did she ever cover recently released movies? Well, one thing I’ve been meaning to tell y’all for a while is that I’ve had an occupation change. While I was on hiatus, one of the things I did was get a job at my local movie theater. As a result, seeing the latest movies has become much easier.

Because of that, I also wanted to change some films I have lined up for future reviews. Since I now have easier access to high-end film releases, I’d like to try and cover more of them. So, expect to see more recently released film reviews in the future. The images for these posts will, naturally, not be screenshots from the movie either. For these movies, I’ll be using promotional images from the internet to reflect the points I make in these reviews.

Unfortunately, that’ll mean my pictures won’t be as relevant to the points I’m making. Although, that doesn’t mean I can’t review it. Hopefully y’all enjoy this idea and are excited for the opportunities this opens up for the blog going forward. I know I am! When it comes to Jurassic World: Rebirth specifically…”excited” is a strong word. I still have yet to watch this movie, but I will be seeing it soon. My initial thoughts aren’t…how do I say…promising.

Before this film was released, I was under the impression it was the first R-rated Jurassic Park film. As it turns out, I was fooled. Again. Why do I keep letting these studios do that? Given that pretext, I thought there may have been a slight glimmer of hope for this movie. If we’re upping the rating, maybe that means we’re getting more serious. Nope, nevermind. Now I’m just thinking about all the ways the past movies disappointed me. Thanks.

Since I still haven’t seen it there’s technically hope, but after being fooled five times, it ain’t worth it. We all know this. Yet here I am, on my blog, reviewing Jurassic World: Rebirth. Good luck to all of us.

Well…

…this is awkward.

The first thing you should know about this movie: Snickers wrapper.

You probably have a lot of questions after that sentence, but allow me to explain.

Despite this movie’s attempts to be another soft reboot, it still uses the cut-and-paste plot points from the previous films. There’s another island. Not Isla Nublar. Not Isla Sequel. You know what, I forgot what it’s called so why not call it Isla Threequel? There are coked up dinosaurs there that were never mentioned before. And their whole operation was foiled by a rogue Snickers wrapper.

I kid you not. You can blame this entire movie on a Snickers wrapper. What happens is, one of the techs goes about their routine of checking on the dinosaurs in their enclosure. Before they go in, they eat their pre-work pick-me-up of a Snickers bar. The wrapper is thrown on the floor allowing it to get sucked into the door closing mechanism. This is apparently enough to jeopardize the entire island’s security system which releases the dinos.

Well, I definitely know who paid for this island:

Spared no expense.

Ah, John Hammond.

The Forrest Gump of negligent homicides at the hands of de-extinct dinosaurs.

Also, when I first saw this, I legit burst out laughing in the theater. I was the only one laughing, but I don’t regret it. Let me be clear, I understand the point they were trying to make with this scene. Ultimately it’s what Haircut has been saying for this entire franchise: chaos theory. However, there are ways they could’ve done this and have it been less dumb. Heck, let’s compare it to the first movie: Jurassic Park.

A lot of that movie was also based on the underlying point of chaos theory. What makes it work there is that the park is built on the optics of professionalism. No matter how professional it may look though, if there’s nothing supporting it it’s gonna come crashing down. Lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened. That, and all of the problems with that movie can be traced back to one man’s ego: John Hammond.

In Rebirth, they touch on the fact that this facility was paid for by Hammond, but it’s not the focus. The main issue is that if this one guy wasn’t an idiot, we wouldn’t have had this problem. At least he gets eaten first.

You know what they say…

Karma and all that…

From here on, the movie doesn’t do a great job at lifting my spirits. We technically continue the story put in place by Dominion, but continue it with brand new characters. Speaking of which, let’s get straight to them.

Our protagonist is Zora Bennett (played by Scar Jo). The first thing you need to know about her is: she’s tough. That’s pretty much it.

There’s technically more to her, y’all know these movies by now, but do you care? Exactly. She has this backstory of being some sort of ex-mercenary or something, but it only explains her military knowledge. As far as “who she is,” the movie needs a second to think about that. You know what, so long as you give us cool dinosaurs while you’re thinking about her I’m cool with it. Well, about that…

This is the big bad dino of the film.

The D-Rex.

What’s the D stand for?

Your guess is as good as mine.

The D-Rex is kinda cool, and I’ll give props that the effects are decent, but we hardly see it. It only appears in the opening and the climax. That’s it. Because of that, the D-Rex isn’t an imposing, ever-present monster like the T-Rex was in Jurassic Park. The T-Rex had a fantastic introduction and loomed over the rest of the film in various scenes until the end. The D-Rex had a passable intro and then we don’t see it again for an hour and a half. Exciting!

Also, tell me this thing doesn’t look like a Rancor ripoff:

That should be a copyright infringement. They basically just gave it extra legs, tiny arms, a bulbous head and a tail.

Anyway, besides our “big bad” dino being less than stellar, how’re the others? Like I said about the effects earlier, they actually look pretty good. Whenever we just see dinos on screen, they’re actually not half bad. The film focuses on 3 specific apex dinosaurs which is new and they partake in some good action. It would be more heart-pounding if I gave a crap about any of these people, but I digress. Actually no, who else do we have with us?

Next to Scar Jo (yeah, I already forgot her name), we have her…”partner?” His name is Duncan Kincaid (played by Mahershala Ali).

Again, I guess he looks cool, but that’s pretty much all there is to him. He’s basically just here to provide transportation for our dino operation and backup when needed. I called him Scar Jo’s “partner” because they have a vague history together. It’s clear the two of them have worked together and there may have been a romance between them. The reason I know this is due to Scar Jo’s reaction to his “sacrifice” at the end of the movie. Heartbreaking.

He doesn’t die, in case you’re wondering. Sorry, spoilers.

Besides him, there’s our token scientist guy: Dr. Henry Loomis (played by Jonathan Bailey).

Once again, what does he bring to the table? He’s the guy who’s clearly the smartest but no one listens to him because everyone else is a dumbass. Of course that makes him our Alan Grant/Ellie Sattler or even Haircut stand-in. Yeah, this franchise feels super “reborn” right now, doesn’t it? Also, with his name being Dr. Loomis I can’t help but think of Halloween whenever I hear it.

I met this six-year-old boy with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes

–

The Devil’s eyes.

The only partially good characters in the film are the family that gets rescued.

Despite only being here to check the box “obligatory child characters,” I actually somewhat enjoyed their dynamic. I’ve said before that Jurassic Park movies have never done children well, but this one is probably the best. The reason they got into this mess is hackneyed, but they’re the only ones that go through any growth. Mostly with the boyfriend, Xavier (played by David Iacono), slowly being accepted into the family.

Even so, sisters Teresa and Isabella (played by Luna Blaise and Audrina Miranda) feel like real sisters and the father, Reuben (played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), clearly cares about his family. It’s not a good sign when basic character development comes across as good writing, but what can I say? These movies really set the bar low. We’ve come a long way from the throwaway characters of Franchise Past.

The biggest gripe I have with them though is their tendency to jack with the pacing. Eventually the family splits from the main group resulting in the film cutting back and forth between the two parties. Since the goal of the movie is getting dinosaur blood samples, cutting away to show the family slows things down. While they’re my favorite family, I don’t care about them enough to justify them hijacking the story on multiple occasions.

Wait a minute. Do I smell a bad guy?

Martin Krebs (played by Rupert Friend) should do nicely. Funny thing is, he’s not really a bad guy until the last third of the movie. The douchiest thing he does up until then is not save Teresa as she’s hanging off of the boat. Even then, you could argue that he wasn’t in a good enough position to save her. The movie clearly indicates otherwise, but this is the only evidence we have of him being evil until the climax. Unless you count him picking up a gun.

Only in the climax does he pull out the gun and steal the samples to sell them for millions. It’s always money with these people, do they seriously not have any better motivations? So many great villains are motivated by things other than money. Well, I’m sure you can assume what happens to him.

+

=

Never saw that one coming.

Outside of the mediocre at best characters and passable dinos, the feel of this movie was very familiar to me. Not in a good way. Given the narrative structure, story beats and plot progression, this film is trying way too hard to be Jurassic Park. Sure, the rest of the movies were basically doing the same, but this one felt different. For Rebirth, it felt too much like The Force Awakens did to the Star Wars series.

This movie was supposed to finally be a fresh start for this franchise. No half-measures, no training wheels, a full and complete reimagining of this idea. What I got was a weak version of the original under a different name. I first started to notice this about halfway through the film. The movie sits back and admires the long-necked dinosaurs, as it does, and I almost felt something. As soon as I did, I realized how much better it was done in the original.

Our protagonists cry at the majestic site. The camera sweeps across the landscape in grand fashion. The music swells and then it hits me: they’re not even trying. Now I know why this movie was titled “Rebirth.” Not because they wanted to start over with this concept. No, they wanted to repackage the original for a new generation. The generation who hasn’t seen Jurassic Park yet and will consider this film the definitive version because of it.

Heck, that was all but confirmed as I left the theater. I heard one of my fellow movie-goers say as we walked out “That was even better than the original.” I’m not judging them for their opinion, but that’s exactly what the studio wanted them to think. Either you’re young and haven’t seen the original or haven’t seen it in years and mentally replace it with Rebirth. That’s actually worse than just another pointless sequel.

Going out of your way to supplant the superior version with a watered-down copy is practically villainous. It’s also the same way I feel about every Disney live-action remake, but that’s another conversation. If nothing else, I hope it makes my opinion on this film clear.

Overall, I’ll say it’s a better film than most of the other sequels. Granted that wasn’t a difficult thing to be, but this movie also could’ve been worse.

A lot worse…

The effects are on par with Dominion, the action is still decent, there’s slightly more character development and the dinosaurs are cool. Ultimately, when you compare it to the other crappy sequels it’s not half bad. However, when you pit it against the original it’s pretty darn insulting. This movie came out over 30 years after Jurassic Park and it in no way shows its respect for that. In fact, like I said before, it goes out of its way to defile the original’s memory.

By making this movie, the studio is clearly wanting us to forget the original and throw money at more sequels. At least the other sequels weren’t kidding us (barring Lost World and Jurassic World). They knew what they were, mindless popcorn fodder, and they leaned into it. If Rebirth did something similar, it’d at least be par for the course at this point. Although, let’s get this straight, there’s only one Jurassic Park: Jurassic Park.

The original will always be revered as a true classic while the rest of these big piles of shit are tossed into the fossil pits of history. Maybe one day we’ll dig up their remains and study where we went wrong, but that’s not happening soon. I’m not saying the original was flawless. I acknowledged as much in my review. What I’m saying is, these sequels never took the time to study what made it so paradoxically great. All they cared about was money.

With that said, I’ll give Jurassic World: Rebirth a 2.5/5 Snickers wrappers. This one scores higher than some others for it being more competently made. But yes, this is the absolute highest I can rate it. If it wasn’t clear already from my ranting, I’d steer clear of this one. Do not extract that sample from amber, do not clone it on a massive scale, just leave it. We were never meant to tamper with things we didn’t understand and look where it’s gotten us.

Come on, it’s still funny.

I got a bit heated back there, but I’m still glad I went on this journey with y’all. It’s always a fun trip going through a franchise and it feels so good when we get to the end. Thanks for joining me and feel free to check out all the other Jurassic Park reviews below. Stay tuned for the next franchise and let me know if there’s one you’d like to see.