Jurassic World Rebirth: Who Let The Dinos Out (Again)?

GENETICALLY ALTERED FREAKS. Engineered entertainment. Responding to audiences. These are some of the phrases used to describe mutated dinosaurs and the programme that ‘created’ them in Jurassic World: Rebirth. But these phrases apply better to the long-running film franchise itself — so genetically altered from its original DNA, so engineered to entertain younger audiences, that they’ve become big dumb monster movies rather than the poignant sci-fi adventures that Steven Spielberg introduced to the world. The best part of Rebirth — the seventh of the long-running series and the first following the doomed Jurassic World trilogy — is the pre-film teaser of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. Wait, who am I kidding? The teaser didn’t even play before my matinee show in Mumbai. But even the anticipation of the teaser is the best part of this prehistoric movie.

I don’t say this lightly. I’m a dino-head. I’ve loved dinosaurs since Jurassic Park (1993) and The Flintstones. But Gareth Edwards — the former indie darling whose low-budget sci-fi masterpiece Monsters (2010) propelled him into the Hollywood-blockbuster ecosystem with Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One (2016) — tries so hard to recapture the ‘90s mood that he ends up paying ode to Spielberg (the Jaws nods are blatant) instead of reinventing anything. Rebirth is stranded somewhere between a trashy Jurassic World tone and vintage Jurassic Park treatment. At one point, there’s a dinosaur-mating ritual (a riff on Monsters’ best moment) that’s supposed to be so magical that it alters the morality of the money-minded gang. Their eyes-wide awe is meant to summon memories of the original: that classic and soaring scene when Goldblum and co. first see the mythical creatures in flesh and blood. But the wonder here is theoretical — it just doesn’t land because the imagery isn’t novel in 2025. You just don’t believe their sudden eye for beauty and nature.

The story places humans back in the dinosaur house — an abandoned tropical island for King Kong-coded reasons — on a planet that’s suffering from dinosaur fatigue. No, seriously, that’s written into the plot. Climate change and modern evolution has made it unfeasible for dinosaurs to survive in zoos and parks — early on, one of them is seen sick and dying in the middle of Brooklyn. People are so desensitised in 2025 that all they care about is being stuck in the traffic jam this causes. A prophetic metaphor for the film itself, if there was ever one. They don’t turn heads anymore. The only ones left are in a human-restricted stretch near the equator. Zora (Scarlett Johansson), a covert operation expert and PTSD-afflicted badass, is hired by a greedy pharma giant to assemble an ‘extraction’ team to retrieve biomaterial samples from three remaining species (residing on water, in the air and on land, of course). The water set piece is all Jaws, shipwrecking them on the Atlantic island, while the flying and land ones invoke the fantasies of Kong: Skull Island.

Zora’s team features a hunky paleontologist (Jonathan Bailey), a mercenary named Duncan (Mahershala Ali) and some other destined-to-die-gruesome-deaths bravehearts; the French speakers stand no chance. The pharma sleazeball (Rupert Friend) accompanying the team is the capitalist baddie, so obviously he’s going to be annihilated in ways that would put the Final Destination franchise to shame. The film also brings in a shipwrecked family of an explorer father and his two frantic daughters (one of whom shamelessly adopts a cute baby dino) — overcrowding the humanity of the premise in the hope that there’s something for everyone. The two groups have to fight to not enter the food-chain separately while trying to get to an extraction point. There is a chance that a helicopter on a fly-by might spot and rescue them, but you know how that goes.

Mind you, there’s some dino-racism: the pure-bred ones like T-Rex and other vintage creatures hunt because they’re hungry and normal, while the cross-genetic ones are vile but also unusually smart. The action sequence involving Mr. T-Rex and the human family scrambling for a life-raft in a stream made me feel for him (that’s the pronoun, I assure you), because imagine if your evening snack runs away from you. My pakoras? Rejecting me? How dare they? Can you blame him for getting annoyed?

Anyhow, Jurassic World Rebirth does have a few good habits. Like the way it stages conversations between characters who are already familiar with each other, without any flashbacks or exposition. Zoya and Duncan have done missions earlier together; they refer to each other’s tragedies and setbacks like acquaintances usually do. Ditto for the dad and his two daughters — there’s history, he’s newly divorced, and the older daughter’s boyfriend is presented as the sort of brash and lazy kid who’d be bumped off only for him to surprise everyone. The visual effects are alright, I suppose, but it’s hard to tell anymore. The use of flares in stylish sequences brings to mind the striking one-perfect-shot silhouettes of Edwards’ Godzilla, except the tension in this film feels like it’s in search of a scale that went extinct after Spielberg stopped directing dinosaurs.

I’m not a fan of how Scarlett Johansson plays smartalecky-but-haunted characters, and her Zora is another addition to this oeuvre. You always sense that she’s performing the humour and gravity based on previous fictional characters she may have liked. The role of Duncan is beneath someone as talented as Ali, but he makes do. Jonathan Bailey is cool as the nerdy-but-handsome scientist type, but the film’s ridiculously clunky philanthropy swerve — where he tries to convince Zora to make the samples and future miracle drugs free to the world, not privatise them — is right up there with the worst of summer blockbuster daftness. Given the context and mythology of the film, I can’t understand how nobody stops the little girl from taking her newfound ‘pet’ back to the very civilisation that made it uninhabitable (and boring) for dinosaurs. But then again, it’s setting the stage for another sequel, where that seemingly adorable animal chooses to get lost in a big city and star in a Pixar franchise instead. No more rebirths. Life is hard enough.