Don Reviews "Jurassic World: Rebirth"

When is enough… enough?  With so many franchises and spinoffs, a lot of them end up suffering in the end because it feels like the studios are just looking to make another quick buck over making a great film.  Sometimes, the franchise takes a long break and when they decide to bring it back, it works like with Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Given all of that, let’s talk the seventh film in the Jurassic franchise.

Jurassic World: Rebirth comes to us directed by Gareth Edwards (Godzilla (2014)).  Starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Mahershala Ali, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Ed Skrein this story takes place almost twenty years after dinosaurs were integrated into society with the buzz and public interest in them rapidly declining.  Because of this, many of the dinosaurs are basically surviving in restricted areas around the Equator.  A secret mission is launched by Martin Krebs (Friend), employing Zora Bennet (Johansson), Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), and Dr. Henry Loomis (Bailey) to extract blood from three different dinosaurs that can help make a huge medical breakthrough.  Once on the abandoned island, they realize they are in deeper than they could have imagined.

Getting into the basics, the CGI and cinematography is very good, but it is at the level to be expected in this type of film.  The filming took place in a number of locales and works well. When it comes to the acting, the performances are fine but nothing to write home about.

Let’s get into the meat and potatoes: the plot.  Keeping in mind that there have been two different phases in the Jurassic franchise (the original three in the 1990s era of society dealing with the new discovery, and the second phase was the three Jurassic World films starring Chris Pratt in the 2010s era that dealt with theme parks and society getting used to the dinosaurs), this film tries to go in a new direction with all new characters while trying to integrate parts of the original films, and falls flat. The first third looked like a rip off of The Meg while the rest of it is basically the cast being chased by cloned monsters, not dinosaurs.  One of the main monsters actually reminded me of Rancor monster that was in Jabba the Hutt’s palace in Return of the Jedi.  There are a few other dinosaurs in this film, but the majority are cloned ones.  

This film had no feel as being a Jurassic Park film except in name and music.  I understand wanting to go in a new direction, but this just ended up being people being chased by monsters.  Some of the human characters even started to get so annoying that I started to root for the monsters chasing them!  There were some good points to seeing Jurassic World: Rebirth in the theater, but that it not worth it in the end, which is why I can only recommend seeing it on a home cable streaming service.