There'll never be another Jurassic Park, the film too strong, too sharply drawn to recapture. So maybe we shouldn't try. Rebirth is in that register; beautifully shot, exciting, and understanding of the appeal of a silly diversion without much thought behind it.
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It's difficult to quantify, in the now, how hard Jurassic Park hit the zeitgeist in 1993. Like almost with all the force of an asteroid, and even then it’s an estimate. Spielberg’s opus fusion danced practical effects with the limitless potential of then nascent CGI to spin a satire on hubris as salient as it was visually captivating. But the franchise revival has struggled to capture the point. They became the very thing it was satirizing (World), flattened the message (Fallen Kingdom), or were bad (Dominion). It's a relief, then, to see Rebirth present a strong directorial shift for the better, not for any commentary but by getting to what made the original so fun—the adventure, the heart. It's good, if unexciting. But in a sea of trash, a good time is like a breath of fresh air.
Five years after Dominion, the modern world has proven inhospitable to dinosaurs, with most surviving species now residing only in tropical island locales. To develop a miracle cure, a paleontologist (Jonathan Bailey), covert operations specialist (Scarlett Johansson), and team leader (Mahershala Ali) are hired to extract DNA from three massive dinosaurs—of land, air, and sea. The team collides with a shipwrecked family, and both groups are stranded on an island filled to the brim with mutated experiments that have thrived in isolation for decades.
Jurassic World: Rebirth is a deft standalone sequel, that removes itself from the sandbox of its predecessors to harken back to a tone of pulp and spectacle. Gareth Edwards is a brighter and cheerier director than Colin Trevorrow, and he does away with much of the self-seriousness of his entries. It's a slog, admittedly, to push through the opening act, but by the time the film hits open water you find you don't need to know the lore to enjoy it, because Rebirth doesn't concern itself with anything of it that it can't circumvent for a thrill here, a shock there, a T-Rex chomp or a pterodactyl peck to the side. Edwards excels at the heat of the action stuff—the elemental setpieces are staggering—but his characters and emotions prove a bit underwhelming.
It's a staple of the Jurassic films to have the scientific a-plot be supported by a ham-fisted familial b-plot, but here the situation’s almost reversed. Bailey is the standout of that a-group, but his and Johansson’s writing is really thin, light as a madeline; they aren't characters so much as they are bland action hero ciphers, bland and serviceable (though he, Johansson, and Ali do their best to invest more than they're given). By contrast, the Delgado family, plus a wayward boyfriend played by David Iacono in a scene-stealing turn, were so much more interesting, to the point I kept wishing the film would switch back to their escapades instead of suffering through another round of techno babble, machinations between wealth or morality, and that damnable inclination this franchise has in drawing from a well of messaging pushing 20 years past its expiration date.
I think it proves a point, about dino-trends, about where the culture stands and how to best excite it: there'll never be another Jurassic Park, the film too strong, too sharply drawn to recapture. Maybe we don't care about spectacle as a main feature now that CGI is so widespread. So maybe we shouldn't try to do it again. Rebirth is in that register; beautifully shot, spritely paced, and it understands the appeal of a silly diversion without much thought behind it. This isn't brain empty, and this also won't save the world either, but...it's simple. Clear. A popcorn movie. And maybe that's enough.
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