Still, Rebirth did at least mildly intrigue me - coming quickly off the nostalgia-bait disaster that was Dominion, it’s jettisoned that cast in favor of new faces, led by Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey, and got itself a new director in Gareth Edwards. So what has the film done?
Same old, same old.
I was already pessimistic going into the film, and Jurassic World: Rebirth sadly confirmed my fears. Gareth Edwards directs it well, and the plot isn’t as nonsensical and overstuffed as the trilogy that preceded it, but this still reeks of all the usual Jurassic Park cliches. Head of a corporation turns out to be a duplicitous money-grabbing monster? Check. Annoying kids? Check. Big scene with a T-Rex? Check. The box-ticking that these movies do to attract an audience has never felt more shameless, and it might win the award for the laziest script given to any Jurassic Park film - and it’s written by David Koepp, the guy who wrote the first one.
Its efforts to simplify the plot reminded me of Jurassic Park III. That film was harshly received at the time but seems to be getting more credit nowadays as a faster-paced survival thriller take on the Jurassic Park formula, and Rebirth follows in its footsteps with its back-to-basics nature. The problem of course is that Jurassic Park III is a wonderfully tight 90 minutes, while Rebirth trudges on for over two hours. You can feel Edwards and Koepp stretching each setpiece and action moment out as long as it can go, and while there are some in the first act that are entertaining enough, by the third act I had completely checked out of the narrative.
The characters range from mildly competent to so dumb and intolerable they’ve escaped from Prometheus, and the endless references to the original films were really quite pathetic. I counted two in the first five minutes alone, which is proof that this franchise used up all clever ideas it had years ago and has been coasting since. They’re just there in the hopes that the audience will react. Well, I was sat in a massive audience for this and there were barely any reactions all night, apart from one disgruntled old man that loudly swore at a particularly egregious plot convenience.
And that disgruntled reaction basically sums up my reaction to this film. A new instalment of a franchise that feels so incredibly old, refusing to die because its box office numbers somehow stay on top form, coasting by on the same tired elements for over 20 years, and one that needs to go extinct.
So of course it’s grossed over $800 million and of course there’ll be another one.