REVIEW: ‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’ Is Best When Nobody Is Talking

Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) put it best early on in Jurassic World Rebirth: humans, with their great, big brains, cannot get out of their own way in the pursuit of greed and ersatz dominance over the Earth. Jurassic World Rebirth, directed by Gareth Edwards and written by David Koepp, cannot get out of its own way as it tries to hit every quadrant of movie-goers while sacrificing everything that could have made the movie more than just okay.

Rebirth begins, as all Jurassic movies seem to do. There’s an uber-wealthy man, Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), with a hairbrained scheme to use dinosaurs to get even richer. It’s masked in an altruistic mission, which he hires mercenaries Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), along with Dr. Loomis, to complete.

The setup is intriguing. All three of these people are desperate for an opportunity to reset their lives, so they agree to help the obviously sleezy Krebs procure live genetic samples from three of the largest dinosaurs to have ever lived. Since the events of Jurassic World: Dominion, most of the dinosaurs that were let loose in the world have begun dying off because they couldn’t adapt to modern climates. Those that remain live along the equator in areas that the world’s governments have deemed completely off-limits to all people.

Jurassic World Rebirth mixes too many metaphors.

But Jurassic World Rebirth very quickly starts mixing metaphors and tones. While the movie starts with this slightly vague climate change analogy, it’s dropped completely thereafter. Then the corporate greed angle takes over, but the irony of a movie produced by a mega corporation trying to paint corporate greed as the enemy is never lost. Instead, the movie boils down to Krebs just being a cartoonishly evil individual, whom you can only hope gets eaten alive by the end.

Sadly, the emotional beats also rarely land. The opening few scenes work so hard to spell out exactly what kind of baggage Zora and Duncan are living with. The dialogue for the first half hour is almost purely expository and shot with aggravating coverage and breakneck editing where only one of their faces is on screen at a time while the back of the other’s head is vaguly in the foreground, trying to convince you that both actors were on set talking to each other, but not with great conviction.

It’s not that anything either character reveals about themselves is a distraction, but it rarely pays off. Johansson is always so chipper and sarcastic that her emotional breakthroughs don’t land with full weight. Meanwhile, Ali’s character arc is completely paused for the majority of the movie as characters become separated from one another.

The characters in Jurassic World Rebirth feel largely incomplete, especially Jonathan Bailey’s.

Duncan’s final triumph is sincere and nice, but it lacks emotional impact because it’s not built upon a strong enough foundation throughout the movie. As for Henry, he’s mostly eye candy and the mover of the plot. He has no inner life to speak of, unless somebody else is imposing something onto him. He serves his role well enough, but the character is vastly forgettable.

While this team is trying to procure dinosaur juice, an entirely separate plot is ongoing, too. As the mercenaries sailed towards the island where they would find their quarry, a family was sailing too close to the dinosaurs’ habitat and was shipwrecked by them. Duncan makes the call to go and save the family, but they’re quickly separated again once they reach the island, not to be reunited until the very end of the movie.

The Delgados, two daughters and a boyfriend led by their father, Ruben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), suffer similar problems to the other group. However, the action sequences they endure nearly make up for it. When nobody is offering thin dialogue about whether Xavier (David Iacono) is annoying or a good boyfriend, the family is running from one dinosaur after the next.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight-up thriller.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight-up thriller. The kills come early and violently, and the different groups of characters are in mortal peril at nearly all times. The scenes are all equally strong and diverse, taking place in various locations, depicting how the characters escape, and featuring different kinds of dinosaurs. If the movie were focused more tightly on dinosaur survival horror and interpersonal stakes than on half-baked, humankind-scale moral quandries, it would be far more successful.

The tense dinosaur scenes are quite good, albeit plagued by some mediocre CGI (this movie boasts the worst-looking CGI Snickers bar wrapper ever). The moments of grandeur, however, are held back by weird artistic choices.

The score is all over the place for the first half of the movie, never quite finding the right tone at the right times, even though it is well-composed in isolation from the action. But when the famous Jurassic Park theme finally plays for the first time after being noticeably absent for so long, the dinosaurs it’s playing over are so unbelievable that there’s no wonderment in the moment.

The artistic choices in Jurassic World: Rebirth are too over-the-top.

Obviously, there are no “real” depictions of dinosaurs, but because Jurassic World Rebirth focuses on megafauna and mutated monstrosities, some of the designs are harder to swallow than others. In some instances, such as with the D-Rex, its terrifying nature works.

When so many humongous or gnarly-looking creatures are constantly juxtaposed with the relatively smaller creatures that everyone is familiar with, the giants begin to feel uncanny. It doesn’t help that the ones in question are designed with obscenely long and floaty tails that feel like they belong on a creature in Avatar, not a dinosaur.

When nobody is talking in Jurassic World Rebirth, the movie is at its best. The thriller chase sequences and the continuous dinosaur shenanigans are pretty fun. But as soon as the overly obvious dialogue begins, the characters are diminished, and the movie becomes much harder to enjoy.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is in theaters everywhere July 2nd.