The Jurassic Park franchise is one that has, honestly, not exactly been firing on all cylinders in quite some time. Even Spielberg’s original didn’t create particularly memorable characters save Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm. The better ones have basically just been special effects extravaganzas where dinosaurs, usually a T-Rex or a raptor, ran around eating people, and that was all people really wanted to from the movies. The last one, Jurassic World Dominion, tried to do a thing with the casts of both previous trilogies, and I think the people making it really overestimated how much people were attached to the characters when, I suspect, even people who like those movies could tell you the names of the characters played by Chris Pratt or Bryce Dallas Howard without looking them up.
Anyway, now there’s a new one that had something going for it that none of the other post-Spielberg sequels had: Rogue One director Gareth Edwards, a guy who has a knack for big things on screen.
It’s been a number of years since cloned dinosaurs became a thing, but now the majority of them are dying out across the world due to incompatibility with the modern world’s climate save various areas around the equator. Big pharmaceutical company rep Martin Krebbs (Rupert Friend) has a need to collect DNA from three of the largest dinosaurs on a remote island that was used as a lab for the express purpose of creating mutant dinosaurs. Said DNA can be used to create medication that may prolong the lives of people with heart disease by as much as twenty years. To that end, he hires covert security specialist Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and scientist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to get it, and Bennett in turn hires boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and his crew to get them there and back.
Complications arise when a small sailboat containing a man, his two daughters, and the older girl’s seemingly worthless boyfriend is attacked by the Mosasaurus, one of the dinosaurs Krebbs needs DNA from anyway. After rescuing the family, cracks begin to form within the group over whether or not they even should have rescued them, and things get worse as the aquatic dinosaurs force the boat aground, separating the survivors into two groups that need to survive on the island. They have a destination in mind where they may get a pick up, but there are a lot of dinosaurs on the island, including at least one massive mutant predator. Can enough people survive to get the DNA and themselves off the island?
Let me get some stuff out of the way first: viewers should be able to pick out which characters will get off the island alive pretty fast. As far as that goes, the movie has no real surprises, but Rebirth does something that arguably none of these movies have managed to do in a long time if ever: create good characters and do some really good stuff with the dinosaurs. For the characters, this isn’t exactly a franchise that has created memorable ones, and while I don’t think people are necessarily going to love, but they are more developed than a lot of other Jurassic Park characters. Zora and Duncan have a conversation at one point where they are catching up with each other. They reveal just enough to tell you what has happened in both characters’ respective pasts without spelling it out too explicitly, but the real treat is these two did sound to me like old friends. Zora and Henry don’t necessarily have romantic chemistry (and they maybe weren’t supposed to), but Zora and Duncan actually do, and that may be chalked up to just how good an actor the two-time Oscar winner Ali is.
As for the dinosaurs, Edwards does some really cool stuff with them. Given the size of so many of them, he actually lets them blend into the background many times, letting them just pop up in plain sight in ways that would be expected for an animal in its natural habitat. There’s more than a few cool moments where a dinosaur seems to appear to disappear in ways that actually make a certain amount of sense. A scene with a sleeping T-Rex works in part because the characters don’t see it right away, and it doesn’t seem to see them right away when it wakes up. This may also be the first time in a while where the plot doesn’t resolve around someone’s wanting to clone more dinosaurs, and it brings back some of the sense of awe that the series has been missing for far too many movies. My girlfriend and I didn’t think the movie was perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but as summer fare, it was actually a lot of fun, and we felt was one of the best movies from the franchise since the original. I was pleasantly surprised how much I enjoyed this one.
Grade: B+
0 Comments