Jurassic World Rebirth: Capitalism Finds A Way

can't just suppress thirty years of corporate greed

Jurassic World Rebirth (dir. Gareth Edwards)

Summer blockbusters are an art. My favorite kind of art. An almost impossible art. Is there such a thing as good mainstream art under the constraints of capitalism? That’s debatable. I’m not touching that. When I think of a good summer blockbuster though, I’m not typically thinking of franchises. I’m thinking of studios and directors taking big, wildly original swings that happen to catch on with the public and make serious bank along the way.

I’m thinking of Jaws, Star Wars, Jurassic Park. Yes, they turned into franchises, but they started off as movie miracles. They started off with sharks and aliens and dinosaurs and a dream. There were no promises of success, just the hope that great filmmaking could be recognized and applauded by audiences around the world. With the Jurassic World franchise, a billion dollar box office is practically guaranteed for these sequels at this point and that art-forward approach has long been thrown out of the window. Jurassic World Rebirth isn’t a miracle. It’s not box office brilliance. It’s just dumb.

I’m somewhat of a franchise avoidant, so even giving this movie a chance was big for me. I like to preserve my memories of and love for the first one or two films in a franchise before things inevitably get shaky. I’ve only ever seen the first two Terminator movies, the first two Alien movies, the first Jurassic Park movie. That’s actually a lie. I did see Jurassic World Dominion back in 2022, but I have no recollection of any part of that so it doesn’t count. I don’t recall that movie making me feel much of anything besides a desire for a dinosaur to jump out of the screen and eat me whole just to put me out of my misery. I figured it was the last in the franchise and nothing is really out right now. Why not? When the box office started hitting a billion, I should have known that was far from the last time those dinosaurs threatened to haunt our big screens once again. I should’ve saved myself, but I refused to learn my lesson and I’m back again just three years later.

A greedy pharmaceutical shill (Rupert Friend) says not even ten minutes in, “They may be through with us, but we’re not through with them.” Whether he’s referring to the dinosaurs or subtly talking about the audience is anybody’s guess. If it’s the former, I could already tell. Thank you, Captain Obvious. But if it’s the latter, he can talk as much about me as he wants because I’m the one stupid enough to sit here for the next two hours.

It’s almost laughable how many attempts this movie makes to convince its audience to turn away, step out the theater, save themselves while they still can. “You saw The Odyssey trailer! We got your money! Why are you still here?” Frankly, it’s insulting to the art of filmmaking and to the audience. Blockbusters don’t have to be revolutionary. They just have to be a good time. But when nobody on screen or behind the scenes is having a good time, the audience isn’t going to either. Nobody involved seems to care about anything going on. They’re evidently just here to do it for a check and book it.

Most of the characters in this film are literally only in it for the money too until they either die or have a quick change of heart. They’re just mouthpieces for the studio executives who green lit this because they want to buy another mansion. They’re shells of characters, all first drafts or NPCs. Scarlett Johansson plays a mercenary who lost their friend on a mission. Mahershala Ali plays a mercenary who lost his son. Jonathan Bailey plays a paleontologist out of his element. Even though they’re giving good performances, I couldn’t care less about the people they’re playing. It’s just age, name, occupation, motivation over and over again. Why are we checking off boxes? This is a movie, not a job interview. Entertain me!

There’s a family who gets stuck in the middle of this for no reason and they’re so useless and unnecessary that I’m half-convinced they were pulled out of the Jurassic World water ride queue, thrown onto set, and fed their lines through an earpiece like they were hearing them for the first time as they were being written. Based on the trailers, I thought they were just going to be the opening kill and I was more than fine with that, but no. That’s unfortunately not the case because why would anything in this movie go my way.

The little girl (Audrina Miranda) is the saving grace here. She gives a good performance with what she’s given, but she’s so clearly being exploited to sell baby dinosaur toys that I just felt bad for her. The dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is fine, but the extent of his personality is to love his daughters and hate his eldest’s boyfriend (David Iacono) which isn’t treading any new ground. The teen girl (Teresa Delgado) is an incredibly annoying and frustrating teenage girl stereotype who has no personality outside of her defense of her idiot boyfriend. The boyfriend is such a terrible character with such terrible writing and acting that at a certain point, he circled around to camp for me. When everything is this painfully dull, some kid giving a B-movie Gen Z caricature performance becomes the funniest thing in the world.

The family just feels like such a trivial obstacle with no real purpose for being here besides the fact that the studio wanted to check off the other sequel box and get some kid characters into the mix. I hate to break it to them, but that’s not how this works. James Cameron is the king of blockbusters, franchises, sequels, you name it. He has a tried and true tactic of adding kids to the equation in his sequels to amp up the stakes, but he manipulates the tension and emotion so that the audience never feels safe and the kids on screen never feel completely secure from the plot. The kids here however all survive and I never had any inclination it would turn out otherwise. I’m obviously not rooting for kids to die. I just wish this movie made me feel anything other than bored.

I woke up the next morning and completely forgot I watched this until I sat down to write this review. The set pieces aren’t even really set pieces. The characters are out on the ocean and then they’re in a cave and then they’re in an abandoned village. Cool. I don’t care. Again, those are check boxes. Those are not set pieces. The movie, of course, has no interest in getting this right.

Everything is a MacGuffin. There are three dinosaurs they need to find to fill up three vials. There’s a village they need to get to by dawn. The rescue helicopter is going to circle above said village for two minutes. I mean, shut up already! It’s check box after check box like some guy sat in on a single Screenwriting 101 course and was handed the keys to this franchise. But what’s frustrating is that I know that’s very well not the case. David Koepp wrote Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, and even Jurassic Park for Christ’s sake, but when it comes to sequels for some reason (he’s also responsible for the last two Indiana Jones movies), studio interference is clearly a hell of a drug.

“Nobody cares about these dinosaurs anymore. They deserve better,” they have Jonathan Bailey recite as if being held at gunpoint. Captain Obvious strikes again. Yeah, clearly nobody involved cares about these dinosaurs anymore outside of the money they make them, so why should I? I’m not the one making any money from these dinosaurs somehow returning. I just spent my money buying a ticket to watch this garbage, to sit through a bunch of capitalists laughing in my face for two hours, and to listen to them repeatedly ask themselves, “Am I really going to defile this grave for money? Of course I am!” To that I say, “Your studio was so preoccupied with whether or not they could bring this franchise back before the dust settled on the ‘finale,’ they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Rebirth where? Let those damn dinosaurs rest already. They’re already dead! I don’t know. At least we moved on from Chris Pratt. I’ll give them that.