My take on Jurassic World: Rebirth wasn’t what I’d call “glowing,” but after seeing some of the vitriol directed at this movie online, it’s made me feel like an apologist for the franchise.
I’ve seen commentary about the questionable ethical footing for the whole movie, having its main protagonists be mercenaries with little motivation beyond money, but some of the comments seem to be from people who hadn’t bothered to check the title of the movie before they bought a ticket. No, this is by no means an “essential” movie; it’s a franchise picture. What part of “Jurassic World” were you not understanding?
But then I saw this take on the YouTube channel The Nando Cut, and while I disagree with specifics, I think I agree with the overall idea. Consider the movie based on what it’s trying to do. And by that measure, I think it’s fine. But the most interesting idea in that video is the thought experiment of coming up with alternate versions of the movie, if it hadn’t been so completely predetermined by the constraints of a huge-budget summer blockbuster sequel.
Nando’s version was a dinosaur version of Jaws, but I’m more taken with the idea of a movie that leans more into the disjointed nature of the existing story. What if it were really about a family stranded on a deadly island along with a bunch of dinosaurs and the mercenaries trying to hunt them?
I realize that this version would never, ever happen in this universe. So this post basically has all the weight of someone trying to describe their dream to you. But I’m still intrigued by the idea.
In this version, we get rid of Rupert Friend’s character entirely. Or better, since morally-compromised corporate stooges are a core component of the whole Jurassic Park franchise, have him be more like Bryce Dallas Howard’s character — fully in denial that he’s the bad guy, gradually learning that he’s gotten in way over his head by trying to deal with mercenaries.
Because Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and maybe even Jonathan Bailey’s character are full-on villains in this version. The most glaring problem with this is losing your big-name actors as blockbuster movie heroes.
But one thing that becomes immediately apparent in Jurassic World: Rebirth is how much it feels like a bunch of extremely charismatic, talented actors without any material to work with. I feel like each of them in particular has made career choices that let them play interesting characters, instead of just being blandly competent action movie leads. I can imagine they’d be interested in taking on roles that have actual character arcs, even if they’re not immediately sympathetic.
Their archetypes are exactly the same, but their motivations are stronger and clearer, and they’re not positive. Jonathan Bailey’s character could still be a dinosaur nerd, but now more pointedly engaged in corporate espionage, in league with Friend’s character if not replacing him entirely.
The family on the boat is no longer a weirdly disjointed B-story that happens to cross with the main story every so often; they are the main story. They’re at sea, minding their own business, and something gets them off course and into a restricted area. Strongest would be if it were the result of the boyfriend’s laziness or incompetence, to make that conflict between the dad and the boyfriend stronger from the start.
While they’re trying to get back on course, they cross the paths of the dinosaurs which have been angered by the mercenary ship. It’s no longer just a random encounter, but was directly caused by the reckless behavior of our villains. Their boat disabled, they need to head to the nearest piece of land, which is the forbidden island with all of the abandoned InGen research.
The family is going to call for help, so it’s immediately in the mercenaries’ best interest to stop them. Get rid of the mushy idea that Friend’s character was going to let the teenage girl die instead of calling mayday, and instead give the entire crew the same motivation. Not to kill them, but to stop them. A disposable member of the mercenary crew — disposable, because we want our big stars to be the villains, but not irredeemable villains — either attacks the family directly, or sics the dinosaurs onto them.
So the family’s goal is largely the same as in the existing movie: get to the abandoned InGen facility, either to call for help or to get a working boat. The mercenaries’ motivation is to get to the abandoned InGen facility to steal the DNA from the research projects there. No more of the video game premise of “get DNA from the three biggest dinosaurs,” but have those encounters happen more organically as boss fights along the way.
Both groups are having to contend with the dinosaurs as they’re also coming into conflict with each other. No, it’s not plausible or realistic that a normal family would be able to hold out for long against a group of highly-trained mercenaries, but 1) the dinosaurs are a problem for both, and 2) since when have these movies had anything to do with being plausible?
Finally, our heroes reach the facility, the surviving mercenaries in close pursuit. There, they discover exactly why the facility was abandoned, and why they’re the first group to try to go in and retrieve the research: the weird hybrid dinosaurs have taken over and are impossibly deadly.
Now, the villains and heroes are aligned in motivation: they’re all going to die unless they find a way to help each other out. It’s in this act where the double-crosses and tests of loyalty happen. Ali’s character sacrifices himself to save the little girl, because he doesn’t want anyone else to go through what he did with his son.
Bailey and Johansson get the research, but Friend’s character betrays them, shoots Johansson, takes the research and leaves them for dead among the dinosaurs. They’re saved at the last minute by Hot Dad or lazy boyfriend. As the survivors are making their way to safety, they witness the gruesome death of Friend, cleverly sneak past the super-boss dinosaur, and ride off to safety.
On the ride away, Bailey reveals that he grabbed the vial of dino DNA or whatever, but laments that they have no one left to sell it to. Hot Dad reveals he works for a research org that could develop life-saving drugs with that DNA, but they’ve never been able to compete with the funding of the big corporations. (Maybe he reveals that this wasn’t just a random encounter during a family vacation, but that he’d deliberately chosen a course close to the restricted area as a test run to see if it were possible?) Our villains get their redemption arc by agreeing to turn over the DNA, possibly in exchange for the family not pressing charges against them.
The structure of this imaginary version of the movie is very similar to that of the real one, but it dispenses with all of the scenes trying (vainly) to establish that our mercenaries are really good people at heart. In fact, the premise so clearly lends itself to a version where everybody has stronger motivations that it makes me wonder if there were a draft in which that was the original intent. That they’d let Johansson and Ali and Bailey really relish being the (redeemable) villains in a big-budget blockbuster, but any weird ideas like that had been completely sanded down in one revision after another.
I don’t know if the version I’m describing here would’ve been any better than what we got, or if it would’ve been any good at all. But it does seem like it would’ve been very different from anything else in the franchise. At the moment, I can’t think of any other blockbuster action movie that made its biggest, highest-profile stars the antagonists. Is that even possible anymore?
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