Jurassic World Rebirth

dir: Gareth Edwards

2025

Dinosaurs. Now people are sick of them. Now people are bored of them, apparently.

Except kids. Kids between the ages of, I dunno, 5 and 12 are still fascinated by them, but everyone else is suffering from reptilian fatigue. I guess.

These films do seem to be doing a bizarre meta-commentary on themselves. They seem to be saying “well, sure, we keep pumping these out, and your interest waxes and wanes, but maybe this time…?” The last flick, Jurassic World Dominion, described a world with an abundance, an embarrassment of riches of dinosaurs. A modern world overflowing with them. They were on the streets, in people’s breakfast cereals, on their subways; you couldn’t get away from them.

To combat the plethora of thunder lizards they hired / cast way too many people, humans (if you include Chris Pratt amongst them), including the other OGs of the franchises, being Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum (and 17 other main roles, no exaggeration). And yet when was the last time you heard anyone say anything positive about that flick other than “it was nice to see Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum again?”

I mean, these days… if you quizzed most people, they wouldn’t even be able to tell you what the last one’s title was, they’d probably just say in conversation “the last one.”

Add to that, this one, which people, if they saw it, will just refer to as the last one. As maximalist as the previous one might have sounded, in this one the dinosaurs have made a full retreat by mostly regaining their status as extinct. Only random, narratively convenient dinosaurs still live these days, and that’s mostly around the equator, mostly just doing their thing.

Those areas are marked off limits to humans, and are patrolled etc to keep them out rather than the dinos in, yet of course the characters here will need some reason to break in and be chased by dinosaurs for a couple of hours for our amusement.

It’s very much a return to the traditional model of just having people run around as much as possible as dinosaurs try to eat them. And the classic, most traditional model of this needs kids to arbitrarily be wedged into the story so that kids can be imperiled, which we enjoy more, somehow?

As such the flick seems almost more modest in its ambitions. I am not going to claim that I entirely understood what was going on, because sometimes plots are inscrutable even to someone with a brain as large and stable as mine, but beyond people going to a place they weren’t meant to go then desperately trying to get away from that same place with their limbs and children intact, the rest is just noise.

A pharma company decides that if it gets blood from three dinosaurs, then it will pretty much find a cure for immortality, and therefore be richer than God. Every story in which this has ever been presented before always, always, always ends up with people realising that it was a stupid idea in the first place, and that they should just be happy with what time fate has allotted to them, because the opposite destroys everything. When I say it’s a plot as old as time I’m telling you it’s one of the stories in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates back over 4000 years, and finds the hero failing in his quest to live forever, for good reasons.

Not here, though. The question as presented (it’s so fundamentally dumb) here is not whether pursuing immortality would be a bad idea; it’s whether medical immortality controlled by a company is bad (obviously), or whether open sourcing that data would be a universal good for humanity.

I guarantee you, it will never be mentioned again in any of the future Jurassic movies. Just like they never talk about whether it was, in the wash up, a good idea to recreate species extinct for hundreds of millions of years before, or that clone girl they chose to collectively forget about, they’ll never mention again whether finding a way to allow humanity to live longer through the magic of medicine is a good idea.

So, they subtracted the unnecessary, the loud, the too “thinky” stuff, and we’re back to running, driving, and sailing away from dinosaurs, and that’s fine. That’s all people want; a rollercoaster ride with some occasional talking in between dino attacks.

Scarlett Johansson is in this. Mahershala Ali is in this. That’s about it. There are some other people whose faces are vaguely recognisable, but really they’re just there to be eaten or nearly eaten by the genetically modified horrors created by corporate hubris. I am sure Scarlett’s character has a name, but really let’s be honest it doesn’t really matter. She’s playing a former special forces soldier turned mercenary who is called neither Natasha nor Black Widow, but it hardly matters. She just plays a slightly more subdued version of that character in a presumably more ‘realistic’ setting than the Marvel universe.

She is a practical and cool operator with no conscience that takes on a dangerous corporate gig who eventually gets something of a miniscule conscience when some guy with glasses shames her into it. The guy with glasses doesn’t really matter.

Mahershala Ali is one of the greats, but even he isn’t going to be able to do much beyond what the constraints of such a flick require, which is very little genuine acting and a lot of “oh look at that thing over there that isn’t really there” acting, which, yeah, most people can do. It’s fine. He gets a great moment towards the end where it looks like his character is going to sacrifice himself to save some kids from a very evil dinosaur (we know it’s evil because it’s very ugly), but then, with no explanation beyond “maybe a wizard did it?”, he’s actually okay!

Phew! What a relief, them annoying kids are going to be fine.

The original film which came out what feels like two hundred years ago set the template that a) doing this thing with the dino DNA was a hubristic abomination against nature and God, but b) personal, mercenary greed was grounds enough to get eaten. People who were ‘good’, innocent kids, scientists who aren’t selfish – they get to survive. Accountants, thieves stealing intellectual property, racists, selfish people: They all get the chomp!

That’s pretty much how it plays out here too. Sure, there are a few innocent people who get murdered mostly off-screen, but mostly any time someone does anything out of self-interest, it’s like instant toothy karma.

In a cold and indifferent universe, maybe that’s what we need to get us back on the straight and narrow. We need a sense that our actions matter, and that our outcomes are because of them. Scarlett and Mahershala are playing good people who protect kids, so the dinos can’t eat them, and they’re heroes, so we cheer for them, because we’re simpletons.

Gareth Edwards is now synonymous with big budget, solidly and stolidly entertaining movies that often feature giant things. He made the Godzilla that restarted that franchise (for Americans), and a Star Wars film (being Rogue One), and this in the Jurassic franchise, so clearly he can do anything genre-ish. I guess someone has to do it, so it might as well be him. He has no problem essentially redoing many of the set pieces from the original Spielberg flick, just with newer technology, and that’s all nice and familiar. It’s okay for the characters not to be that memorable or to do anything that interesting, because we all know in our heart of hearts that nothing will ever top the original and its terrifying Tyrannosaurus Rex. Everything else is just variations on a theme.

He, being the director, also neglected to redo my other favourite bit from the “modern” ones, being the scene where a guy is running away from pterodactyls while holding two massive margaritas, but you have to be grateful with what you get, not what you didn’t.

It’s entertaining enough for what it is, in that dinos chase after people, and people desperately try to get away from them. That’s universal. Anyone can enjoy that, and I did.

No one’s going to be winning any acting awards, and no-one’s going to be quoting any of the dialogue or describing any of the scenes to a friend with rapturous detail. We’ll go on with our lives and rarely, if ever, think about this one ever again, but if we do maybe it will be with a momentary positive feeling.

And then something else will distract us, for a while, and we’ll think about something else.

6 times if there isn’t a talking dinosaur wearing a snazzy pair of glasses in the next one I’m going to stop watching out of 10

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“What would I do with mutant dinosaurs from an accounting perspective? Is that really the question?” – yeah but what’s the answer - Jurassic World: Rebirth