Jurassic World: Rebirth
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey
M
3.75/5
A soft reboot of a soft reboot, Jurassic World: Rebirth is the middling seventh film in the Jurassic Park franchise.
At the behest of a pharmaceutical company, Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and her team of mercenaries travel to a remote island populated by dinosaurs to extract blood samples from three gigantic Mesozoic creatures.
The characters are thinly-written but well-acted, and Johansson has solid chemistry with Jonathan Bailey as Dr Henry Loomis, a nerd who shows plenty of courage and therefore avoids tired stereotypes.
The plot awkwardly stitches together Zora’s mission with a shipwrecked civilian family and has a lurching, episodic pace with contrived set-up – making heart medication using blood from large dinosaurs is loopy logic – and watch out for a functionally useless betrayal at the end of the first act.
The camerawork makes eerie use of the gloomy jungle setting and the film has some exciting set-pieces, including a tense T-Rex chase down a river and a scuffle with a pterosaur that looks almost like a roided-up macaw run amok.
Like the first two Jurassic World movies, Rebirth features hybrids as major antagonists, and while they have some cool moments (including a really clever visual twist with a helicopter), they lack the imposing presence of past dino dangers.
Rebirth has a disappointing lack of practical effects in a franchise once celebrated for its puppets and animatronics, and the original Jurassic Park trilogy (and even the slasher/haunted house-esque conclusion of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) delivered far stronger horror than Rebirth, as the action carries little peril given that only the least-developed characters get chomped (and the annoying boyfriend sadly doesn’t get eaten).
A dinosaur thriller that lacks the suspense, smarts or scares of the early Jurassic Park films, Jurassic World: Rebirth is playing in most Victorian cinemas.
