On Monday I went to another of AMC’s “Screen Unseen” mystery movies, 100% convinced that it was going to be the sequel to M3GAN. Same rating, very similar run-time, a week before release: it couldn’t be more obvious what this one was going to be.
I got to the theater after the trailers had already started, to find a camera crew both outside and inside the auditorium, plus posted warnings that we were going to be filmed. The room was packed full, and everybody cheered when Scarlett Johansson and the guy from Wicked appeared on screen to thank everyone for coming. I was holding out hope that it was going to be a comedy fake-out, and they’d reveal they were there to promote an unrelated movie, but no, it was in fact Jurassic World: Rebirth. And with so many studio types around, I thought it’d be rude — not just to them, but to the people in the audience hyped to be there — if I’d just stood up, gave a thumbs down and blown a raspberry, and walked out.
I skipped the last Jurassic World movie, but I wasn’t boycotting the new one or anything. I’d already made a reservation for next month, in fact. I’d just expected to be watching it in IMAX for the full summer blockbuster effect. But I honestly wasn’t expecting much from it, and I had been hoping to see a different movie, so take that into my account when considering my early-ish review.
Because it’s fine. Actually, I’d even call it the third best Jurassic Park movie, after The Lost World. That movie was disappointing at the time and remains baffling: yes, it has the young girl using conveniently-placed parallel bars to defeat a velociraptor with the power of her gymnastics, but it also has what is undeniably one of the best sequences that Spielberg has ever made, with an RV getting pushed over the side of a cliff. Rebirth doesn’t have any sequences that reach that level (very few movies do), but there are some very cleverly-choreographed kill scenes, and an extended sequence with a T-Rex that is outstanding.
Which was a relief, because I was sitting through the first 30 minutes or so completely stone-faced, worried that I was messing up the night-vision crowd reaction footage or something. I avoided the camera crews on the way out, even though I like the idea of being part of an ad campaign that just has an old man in a goofy T-Shirt saying, “I dunno, I thought it was fine. The guy playing the dad was crazy hot.”
The best image during the entire introduction was a traffic jam caused by a dinosaur lying in a park near the Brooklyn Bridge, slowly dying while the New Yorkers seemed more concerned about traffic than about the fate of the creature. Rebirth established repeatedly that the dinosaurs that went global after the events of the last movie are now concentrated only around the equator, not just because of the climate, but because of a lack of interest from the general public. Like the space program in the early 1970s, what had once been a source of breathtaking wonder was now so commonplace that people didn’t care anymore. That felt to me like a pointed bit of self-awareness about this franchise in general.
So in short: this really is one of the better entries in the franchise. There are a lot of charismatic actors doing their best with what they’ve got, which sounds like damning with faint praise, but the reality is simply that they’re fun to watch. There are a couple of really good action sequences, and an awareness that the dinosaurs themselves are no longer the main draw, so you’ve got to make everything else compelling. It’s a by-the-numbers summer blockbuster that holds its own, and it really shines in a few key moments.
One moment that stood out to me as hilarious: the group has all assembled at the site of a dead and abandoned InGen facility, near a convenience store. The generator rumbles to life, and all the lights start to flicker on, accompanied by “Stand By Me” playing over a speaker system. Our little-girl-in-peril character looks frightened, and her dad holds her close and says something like, “It’s okay, baby.” It was funny simply because it was so weird: is this girl who’s survived multiple dinosaur attacks frightened of corny needle drops in general, or just Ben E King?
But the most interesting thing to me about Jurassic World: Rebirth is how it works within its action/monster movie template, and saying so would require spoilers for a movie that’s still a couple of weekends away from release. So spoiler warning in bold not to read the rest unless you want to be spoiled.
I just said that Rebirth was “by the numbers,” or that it was working within the template of a summer blockbuster action movie, and that’s overwhelmingly what the first half feels like. But the longer it went on, the more I got the sense that it was doing something subtly different: not so much working within the constraints of the template, but more taking the template completely for granted and then building an action movie on top of that.
I’m a little reluctant to over-stress the idea that Rebirth is formulaic, because that implies that it has nothing going for it, which isn’t fair. I was watching it still thinking of 28 Years Later, which is so defiantly weird stylistically that it often had me wondering, “wait, are you even allowed to do this kind of thing in a mainstream movie?” That approach definitively would not have worked for Jurassic World: Rebirth, and in fact, it would’ve ruined it. Not just in terms of franchise obligations or playing to as wide an audience as possible, but simply in terms of what the movie is trying to do. Adding in tons of stylistic flourishes or unconventional editing would’ve killed the pacing and distracted from the overall goal, which is to execute on a Jurassic Park movie’s familiar story beats the best it possibly can.
So the template becomes a kind of shorthand. And it actually makes the movie feel a little bit smarter and more self-aware, since it assumes that the audience is already on the same wavelength. It doesn’t need to waste a lot of time establishing stuff that you already know; it can just set up a character and be confident that the audience gets what they’re all about with a few lines of dialogue. ScarJo is a mercenary with a heart of gold wanting to get out of the business. Jonathan Bailey is a dinosaur nerd with a pragmatic side. Mahershala Ali is haunted by the death of his child. Etc. etc.
This is most evident in Rupert Friend’s character, who traces his lineage back to Paul Reiser’s Burke in Aliens. (And whoever the analogs are in Jurassic Park. The lawyer, maybe?) You know his entire deal instantly, you know he’s not to be trusted, you know there’s a gruesome death waiting for him by the climax. It’s such a given what his story arc is going to be, in fact, that it allows him not to overplay it. I’m not suggesting that he becomes a fascinatingly complex character, but he does get to spend less time obviously mustache-twirling and feels more like a real person as a result.
But that also backfired a bit, which is the most interesting part to me. There’s a very strange sense of ethics and morality to the whole movie, where it just seems to take for granted that the audience is going to feel a certain way about the characters and about what happens. When the character who seems to be the ship’s first mate is violently killed, it doesn’t even get acknowledged by anyone else, even the captain. It’s as if everyone in the movie knows that this side character (who doesn’t even speak English!) is so obviously going to die before the climax, that they’ve all just been waiting for it to inevitably happen.
And Friend’s villain is a representative of a huge pharmaceutical company financing the mission, so he’s obviously entirely motivated by greed and self-interest. The problem is that 99% of the other characters are, too; we just saw them renege on an agreement in order to con him out of an additional $10 million, but the movie takes it for granted that we’re automatically on the side of Johansson and Ali, because they’re the protagonists.
A bit later, the crew gets a distress call from the stranded boat family and their distractingly hot dad, and Friend’s greedy, selfish, villain recommends finishing their mission first and then going back to help. But that proposal actually makes sense! Some of the “good guys” even acknowledge as much. They’re only a few minutes away and already set up to do what they want to do, and significantly, they have no idea that the family is in immediate danger. The audience knows that the family is surrounded by ominously circling dinosaurs, but the crew doesn’t.
The scene that’s supposed to seal the deal on how much this guy sucks starts after the family has been brought on board. The ship’s attacked by dinosaurs, teen daughter uses the radio to call mayday, the villain tries to stop her because he doesn’t want any authorities to know they’re sailing into a restricted area. The problem is that half the people on that ship are knowingly conducting a mission in a restricted area for the purpose of making millions of dollars. They’re not going to be calling mayday, either, if not purely out of greed, then because they’ll all have been killed by the time anyone comes to their rescue.
But still, the boat starts to capsize, and teen daughter is thrown over the edge. She’s calling for help from our villain, and we in the audience are supposed to understand that he’s deliberately letting her fall overboard so that she can’t endanger the mission. But here’s the thing: the way it’s shot, the ship is dangerously tilted, and he’s barely holding on himself. To me, it read just as much as panic, or an awareness that he didn’t have a way to help without falling over himself, as a sinister desire to watch her fall to her death.
Even in a plot-focused movie like this, it might’ve been interesting to keep that ambiguity alive. Was he failing to act out of cowardice, or hesitation, or evil self-preservation? But Rebirth is so completely convinced that we’ve been against this guy from the start, that there’s no room for ambiguity. The girl is furious and declares repeatedly that he effectively tried to kill her, and no one questions it. That was the moment when he became irredeemable, and the rest of the movie is just waiting for him to get his inevitable karmic payback.
But during that stretch waiting for the payoff, almost every other character in the film had a moment where they watched or waited while another character was in peril or killed. No one made any effort to help the doomed first mate, and several characters including our heroes stayed safely in hiding while our villain was in immediate danger of being eaten by a dinosaur.
Basically what I’m saying is that almost every character in this movie kind of sucks, and at best they’re all deeply ethically and morally ambiguous. But the movie has assigned their roles from the start, and it assumes where the audience’s sympathies are going to lie no matter what it shows to us.
At the end of the movie, our heroes decide to give this important medical discovery “to everybody” instead of turning it in to the greedy pharmaceutical company. That’s intended to be Johansson’s character’s arc, showing that she was initially motivated solely by money, but has found her integrity and now wants to give back to the world.
Except that the greedy pharmaceutical company financed the whole mission, and multiple people died to get the dinosaur DNA our heroes are now holding onto, and it’s left completely unanswered how they’re planning to go from 3 vials of dinosaur blood into an open-source heart medicine that will save millions of lives. Unless there are non-profit DNA sequencing companies that have popped up in this alternate reality, they’re going to have to sell it to a different pharmaceutical company for it to be turned into a drug. At best, they’ve taken it upon themselves to solve the trolley problem by conducting industrial espionage.
So essentially, our heroes are just Dennis Nedry from the original Jurassic Park.
If I were more cynical, I’d say that the only thing separating Nedry the craven, self-serving villain from Johansson and Bailey the noble heroes is that they’re hot and he’s fat. But I honestly don’t think that these criticisms are cases of Rebirth being shallow, crass, or ethically bankrupt, so much as depending too much on the formula of action movies to do the heavy lifting.
Oddly, the idea that I keep thinking of is how kanji evolved over time. They were originally devised as pictograms, directly representing a specific thing or idea. Over many, many years, they became so stylized that most are no longer recognizable as the thing they were originally supposed to present, but they retained the same meaning. And years after that, many of them have evolved to where they no longer even retain the meaning, except in the most abstract sense.
Jurassic World: Rebirth has characters that are so clearly-established archetypes that they’re almost symbolic. Their roles in the story are determined from the very start, and the audience’s reaction to them is taken for granted, mostly independent of anything they actually do. We have a villain who’s surrounded by villains, but he’s the one who gets all the karmic payback, simply because we expect it. We have heroes who have the exact same motivation as the villain, but they’re given unrealistic plot armor simply because we expect it.
The advantage, again, is that the movie knows what it’s about and knows what it’s trying to achieve, so it doesn’t have any pretense of being a character study. That’s not a bad thing, either. Rebirth has a scene between Johansson and Ali where they talk about their lives as mercenaries, establishing that she’s lost too many people and is feeling unfulfilled by a life motivated by money, and he’s motivated by not letting what happened to his own child happen to anyone else. It’s allowed to remain at the level of broad character sketches, and it’s underplayed so that all of their accumulated trauma doesn’t feel like a dissonant tonal shift, in a movie that’s just catching its breath between dinosaur attacks. Trusting that the audience immediately understands their archetypes means that it doesn’t have to indulge in too much clunky and unnatural exposition, or corny, shallow epiphanies as a character makes a crucial self-discovery.
I actually like the idea of plot-heavy movies existing in a state where the characters are symbolic; it cuts out the awkwardness of a movie trying to convince the audience of something we already know. But it also means there’s more opportunity for the characters and their archetypes to get out of sync.