The Jurassic Park/World franchise has had its good/great films and some not so good/bad films in its thirty plus years of its existence. Steven Spielberg and ILM revolutionized CGI and visual effects with the first Jurassic Park movie. Since these types of visual effects have become old hat. The visual effects, except for one or two occasions, haven’t been the problem with this franchise. It’s the human characters the directors choose to populate the films with that are the problems with these movies. That’s the case here as well with Jurassic World Rebirth. They’re just not very believable in these roles and that, along with a bad design of the main dinosaur, took me out of the movie.

In a world where dinosaurs exist beside human beings, a businessman, Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), is the owner of a pharmaceutical company. He has a crazy idea of extracting blood from three mutated dinosaurs to help prevent heart disease.He enlists the help of an archeologist, Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a mercenary for hire  Zora Bennett (Scarlet Johansson) and a boat ship captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) to help him accomplish his mission. There are some other shady members of his team as well.  These aren’t the only people who get involved in the extraction of the dino-blood. A father and his kids on a boating excursion inadvertently get swept up in all the illegal activities. 

Gareth Edwards has directed a handful of movies I’ve been a fan of over his career. Monsters, Godzilla 2014 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and The Creator have all been solid films in his filmography. Jurassic World: Rebirth, not so much. He falls into the same hole a lot of the previous directors of this franchise have fallen into. David Koepp, the screenwriter of many of the Jurassic Park films, has repeated what he did in the past, so Edwards is hamstrung by what he has written. The human characters are always the Achilles heels of these movies. Yeah, sure, the first time around in the Spielberg directed Jurassic Park filmgoers didn’t care because the dinosaurs looked so realistic. It was all about them in the end. As the franchise progressed through the human characters, he kept on getting more and more annoying.  Especially in the last two installments of the franchise, Fallen Kingdom, and Dominion. Why do there have to be human characters put in danger all the time? I just don’t understand this. I would have been fine with the protagonist trying to get the dinosaur blood, and that mission was the entire film. 

I want to touch on a couple of the main characters besides the family that was put into danger during this excursion.  Scarlet Johansson has played all kinds of characters in her career thus far. Not all of them that believable, Black Widow anybody? Here, she plays another character I couldn’t buy her as, at all. A mercenary for hire. She is the last person I’d buy in this role. She just came across as a shady lady mercenary for hire to me. Yeah, I understand the producers want star power in their movies but get somebody who is believable in the role. Not America’s sweetheart to play a shady morally devoid character. Now, on the other hand, Mahershala Ali is a perfect casting for a shady boat captain.  He and his crew were fantastic . Ed Skrein is another guy who is very believable in a bad guy role. He is a henchman for the Friend character. Some of the casting is questionable, and others are good. It’s a mixed bag here, which was odd to me.

The biggest thing fans of this franchise always want to know is do the dinosaurs look cool and / or believable.  I can say most of them look pretty cool and amazing looking.  Three of the main dinosaurs are very realistic in their size and scope. When they appeared on screen, I was genuinely thrown aback by how big and dangerous they were. One particular dinosaur near the end of the film that was also alluded to at the beginning of the film wasn’t very good looking, though. Even though it was menacing in the context of the story, I just didn’t buy the look of it. Whoever designed this monster dinosaur didn’t do a good job. I wasn’t impressed by it as I was of the others in the story, including the T-Rex that pops up. You know that was going to inevitably happen. This is a key element in the film, and the fact that the main dinosaur looked so bad was a disappointment to me.

Roger Ebert  coined the phrase mcguffin and I’m always fascinated by how these are used in movies in different ways. This time around, the mcguffin is a case where the blood is stored once the characters collect it from the dinosaurs.  This case is an interesting thing because a few different characters are either holding or trying to process it. It’s very valuable as you’d imagine for who has it at the end of the film. I don’t think it was used properly, though, as a whole. The director could have made it a bigger part of the overall story and got rid of some of the other aspects of the film. Namely, all the extra characters.  I like a good mcguffin, though. This one was an okay one. 

Jurassic World Rebirth was a mixed bag for me. It was definitely better than the last two Jurassic World movies, that’s for sure.  Even though I liked most of the dinosaurs, the big one that appeared mostly at the end of the film didn’t look that good or very interesting to me. The others were cool. The human characters are always going to be divisive from my perspective. I think some of the casting was good, and others weren’t good at all, and there were way too many characters in general. This took away from the main story. Which was to collect the blood from the dinosaurs. Overall, the direction was good by Edwards, but the script could have been better from a few different perspectives.  I think this is a good popcorn film, but if you think too hard about it,  you’ll find some issues like I did.

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen