'Jurassic World Rebirth' Foregrounds Franchise Origins, for Better and Worse

It shouldn't be this hard to make an exciting dinosaur movie.

We've gotten approximately 10,000 superhero movies every year since Iron Man and The Dark Knight were released in 2008, but for some reason, Hollywood struggles to produce well-liked films about dinosaurs — among the most awe-inspiring subjects for kids across the country. 

The root cause of this problem lies with Steven Spielberg's 1993 thrill-ride masterpiece Jurassic Park. Spielberg perfected the dinosaur movie more than 30 years ago (the same year he directed the Best Picture-winning Holocaust drama Schindler's List, no less), and directors have been living in the shadow of his T. Rex ever since. The man simply has too much sauce; it's hard to replicate the note-perfect set-piece machine that is the original Jurassic Park.

That doesn't mean producers and directors haven't stopped trying. Jurassic World Rebirth marks the latest attempt to reboot the long-running franchise. The seventh film in the series, Rebirth takes place five years after Jurassic World: Dominion, the disastrous final film in the Chris Pratt-starring trio of box office behemoth Jurassic World movies. 

The opening title card mentioning this five-year gap is the only callback to the Pratt-verse; the rest of the movie spends its time both distancing itself from the previous three films and reminding us that it is swimming in Spielberg's precious waters. That means name-dropping Dr. Alan Grant and a number of visual callbacks to the 1993 film. 

Rebirth gets a couple of things very right. First, the story is fairly lean — at least as lean as a modern mega-franchise reboot is allowed to be. There are two parallel stories — one involving a shipwrecked civilian family and one involving a covert operation — that intersect roughly midway through the proceedings. 

Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) are the leaders of a team of special ops contractors working alongside paleontologist Henry Loomis (a star-making Jonathan Bailey turn) for pharmaceutical millionaire Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend). The team's mission is to extract blood from three types of dinosaurs for the development of a heart-disease-prevention medicine.

On their way to Ile Saint-Hubert, the island where formerly experimented-on dinosaurs live, the team comes across the family of Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), whose sailboat has capsized. 

The particulars don't really matter. All that matters is there are now two clear objectives: find and extract the dinosaurs' blood samples, and get the Delgado family home safely. 

David Koepp, the screenwriter from the original Jurassic Park, returns to the franchise with a mission of his own — to restore the series to killer set-piece status. Koepp and director Gareth Edwards succeed. The film's action scenes are thrilling and often scary. Horror was ingrained in the franchise from the beginning. Michael Crichton's novel delves into scares more than the movies do, but Spielberg's two entries — including the unfairly maligned The Lost World: Jurassic Park — proudly feature monster-movie homage alongside the typical Stevie awe and wonder. 

Rebirth includes the franchise's scariest scenes since the first two films; these include a nerve-racking take on the book's famous river raft sequence, which was left out of the original movie. Edwards is among Hollywood's best directors when it comes to displaying scale. In his previous films — particularly Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Monsters — Edwards makes great use of his environment, slotting gigantic figures and humans (or human-sized characters) into the same frame with ease. He does that in Rebirth too, but he lacks Spielberg's trademark moments of awe. 

Rebirth's primary shortcoming: its paper-thin story and characters. One of the most crucial aspects to the original movie's success was how efficiently its first act is structured. It's essentially one giant exposition dump, but it's so entertaining, and it lays the character groundwork so well, that the viewer isn't even inclined to notice. The rest of the movie works as well as it does because of the foundation built in that first act. 

It's unfair to compare Edwards, or anyone, to Spielberg, who might be the most talented director in the history of American film. But unfair or not, any dinosaur movie — much less a Jurassic Park franchise entry making direct references to Spielberg's work — is going to be compared to the original. It's a tough fate. One almost as tough as fighting off a mutated T. Rex with an inflatable river raft.