Jurassic World Rebirth Review

Jurassic World Retread Rebirth Review

 

Ten years ago, I was pretty excited for Jurassic World. Wow, I thought, a new Jurassic movie, after fourteen years! I grew up loving the original trilogy, the first Jurassic Park is one of my all-time favourite films, and when I first saw the first reboot, I was entertained by its glossy surface of new and old creatures painted over a familiar backdrop of a dino theme park with new people running in terror. Then, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom happened…and it showed just how wrong a Jurassic movie could go. But oh no, Jurassic World Dominion proved that if you add in more characters from the original film, as well as hundreds of thousands of locusts, and take away all sense of logic and reasoning, it can go even more wrong. I ended my Dominion review saying I’d had enough Jurassic anything for a while.

When I walked into Jurassic World Rebirth, I was understandably not excited. The first line spoken on screen is, and I kid you not, “Alright, let’s just get this over with.” My sentiments exactly, and how sad is that? I wanted this new one to be good, I really did. I wanted it to recapture the magic, and it did have some things going for it behind the scenes to at least pique my interest yet again. Before I get to the good and the not so good, let me quickly sketch a picture of all the elements that should have resulted in a better final product than what we ended up with.

Director: Gareth Edwards. He made waves with the successful 2014 Godzilla reboot, which started the lucrative MonsterVerse. This movie reminded me of another MonsterVerse movie: Kong: Skull Island, and no, that is not a compliment.  He followed it up with the more divisive Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which was only Disney’s second crack at the galaxy far, far away, and the first solo film, the bold plans for which (one new “story” every other year for eternity) came crashing down with, well, the Solo solo film, and Rise of Skywalker. Next, he directed The Creator, an original movie, and I know I saw it, but I don’t remember a damn thing about it, because it was all style, no substance. Still, he’s a guy who knows visual effects, and has all the Spielbergian sensibilities, as shown in Godzilla with numerous Jurassic Park references.

Screenwriter: David Koepp. What an honour it must have been for Edwards to direct pages written by the guy Steven Spielberg chose to rewrite Michael Crichton’s script for the original Jurassic Park and write the sequel The Lost World: Jurassic Park, too. He wasn’t really involved in any others before this reboot to the reboot, but I knew it wasn’t going to be a surefire hit having him write it. Yes, he has sole screenplay credit on The Lost World, which I maintain is the second-best Jurassic Park movie, but he also has screenplay credits for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Mummy (2017).

Concept: creative reset. Gone are Chris Pratt’s Owen Grady and Bryce Dallas Howard’s Claire Dearing and Maisie, the little clone girl. Gone, too, are the old guard. No more Dr. Sattler, no more Dr. Malcolm, no more Dr. Grant (although he does get a name drop), and even Dr. Wu, the only guy to appear in all three previous movies, is seemingly extinct. In their place is a new cast of characters, with a mix of mercenaries, a paleontologist, and everyday people, played by some notable actors like Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali. No more parks, no more dinosaurs taking over the world, no more locusts. Dinosaurs are front and center again—until they aren’t. Again.

So, knowing all that going in, let me get to what I actually thought of the movie. It’s not very good, but is it worse than the previous Jurassic World movies? Overall, no, I guess not, but it finds new ways to be bad, which I will get to. Speaking of things that are gone, Koepp decided to leave out a plot for the movie. He also left out a lot of logic, which is nothing new as of late, but one thing I missed, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, was someone, anyone, from any of the previous movies. This is the first one of these movies where not a single human character from a previous film returns. I actually would have accepted seeing Chris Pratt with this team, and I’m getting kind of tired of him being in everything, frankly, but this whole new cast of characters, many of whom I’m supposed to care about, are completely forgettable and uninteresting, despite most of the cast doing a serviceable job. When I start keeping a tally of characters I want to see get eaten, I know I’m watching a B-grade monster movie. If someone were to contest that this is the worst film in the franchise, I couldn’t argue against that sentiment.

The opening scene is almost laughably bad. Remember how Jurassic Park opens with such a scary event at night with the raptors being transferred into their new enclosure and a handler getting killed? Rebirth starts with a Snickers bar wrapper catching in a door mechanism, causing it to fail, which then leads to the entire facility and the entire island getting abandoned! What’s scary is how pathetic of a riff on the original that is. Then it’s a slog of unnecessary exposition and character setup. We meet Scarlett Johansson’s character Zora Bennett in a dry dialogue scene, then we meet Jonathan Bailey’s Dr. Henry Loomis at a museum that’s closing down, and it makes the previous scene with her feel redundant, because we get a lot of the same info again, including about her character, and the reason I’m commenting on this is because the whole first act was unacceptably languid. In both The Lost World: Jurassic Park and the original we get to the island by the twenty-minute mark, and we already start to care about those characters by that point. It takes much longer in this one, and I can’t even remember what the island was called, because they show the name with on-screen text at the beginning then no one talks about it with any interest ever again, even when they inevitably become stuck there. Isla Nublar and Isla Sorna are iconic island settings. There are even random ancient ruins on this new island, which a character asks about, but we never get an answer.

Speaking of on-screen text, the movie opens with “Seventeen Years Ago…” and the first thought I had was, from when? Then it says “Present Day” after the disastrous opening, and again, I’m confused. I know Jurassic World was set in the present day of 2015, but it didn’t need to spell that out for us! The opening text continues with exposition explaining that all the dinosaurs released around the globe in Dominion died, except around the equator. This just felt like David Koepp didn’t know what to do with that idea (which he has admitted in interviews) so instead he made up yet another island and borrowed heavily from Jurassic Park III, Deep Blue Sea, and Michael Crichton’s novels, poaching a number of ideas from the latter that hadn’t made it into previous Jurassic films. The premise of needing to extract samples from the three largest animals is pretty dumb, and it isn’t really explained why they need material from three different large animals and not just three samples from the same one. Once again, science is thrown completely out the window.

I have to go on a side tangent here for a second. There’s a prehistoric amphibious creature shown a couple times (one of those times it’s up in a tree—why the hell is it up there? It should be down in the swamp!) and the severed head of a Dunkleosteus spills out of a fishing net in a quick shot early in the movie, and I know I’m not supposed to take these movies very seriously anymore, but there is absolutely no way scientists could get DNA from either of these creatures in order to clone them, so why feature them at all? The internal logic has not been restored to this film’s universe. You could explain it away that scientists just made these creatures somehow through genetic manipulation of modern animals and they aren’t clones at all, but no one cares at this point, so I guess no explanations are needed. The Megalodon exists in the Jurassic series now, too, by the way. Maybe Jason Stathan will show up in the next one for a crossover.  

Back to the plot (or lack thereof). The largest dinosaurs are the Titanosaurus, the Mosasaurus, (which is the largest marine reptile, not dinosaur, and I still wonder how they cloned that one, too—I don’t see a lot of mosquitos divebombing sea-going creatures), and the Quetzalcoatlus (pterosaur, not dinosaur, yet again), and while all of those creatures are done justice in their respective scenes with well shot action and mostly consistent CGI, it’s pretty much all in service of a nothing premise. On a scene-by-scene basis, the second half is reasonably entertaining. The movie could have started at the end of act one and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the audience’s attachment to any of the characters, but it would have gotten to the good stuff sooner. Rebirth reminded me of old school 60’s dinosaur movies (fun easter egg: One Million Years B.C. is playing on a TV at one point) where you have to sit through the boring setup to get to the exciting dinosaurs, but that has never really been a problem for this franchise before now.

Then, there’s another storyline, and this is where the Kong: Skull Island similarity begins. A dad and his two daughters plus the teenage daughter’s boyfriend are on a sailing excursion, somehow end up way the hell out in the middle of the ocean, and get attacked by the Mosasaurus. The mercenary-led team and the family’s plots converge for a short time, then they finally get to the island, but the groups get split up, and this is why the movie feels more tedious and more poorly paced than it needed to. We go back and forth between the team hunting dinos and the family trying to survive dinos. Mileage on both plot lines will vary and which one you will like or dislike more will as well, but for me, I didn’t really care about either. Even though this Jurassic World is only about fifteen minutes longer than the original, it felt long, and the dinosaur-free scenes were, for the most part, unengaging, but not every dinosaur scene had me riveted, either. Just like with pretty much all Gareth Edwards movies, I found the visuals great, but the characters and story dull.

Let me cover all the positives before I get into more of the negatives. Visually speaking, yes, it looks much better than any of the previous Jurassic World films. I didn’t spot many animatronic effects, but the CGI showed a marked improvement, and that is all thanks to Edwards and his visual effects background. He made Godzilla look great again, he recreated the aesthetic of A New Hope for Rogue One astonishingly well, and leave it to him to make the T. rex look better than it has since The Lost World. The T. rex river raft sequence was my favourite part of the whole movie, not just because it was something from the original book that never made it into the original movie, but because the T. rex actually brought some menace for the first time in a long time, and the action was inventive. I also enjoyed the scene in the field with the Titanosaurs. It felt very Jurassic Park. When the filmmakers say in interviews they wanted to recapture the tone of the original, this is what they mean. The cinematography looked good throughout, and the sound design was effective. On a technical level, I have few qualms. All the real dinosaurs looked good and I liked the jungle environments they filmed in.

To pivot over to negatives while on the technical side of things, the designs for the new mutant dinosaurs were bogus. I never liked the Distortus rex from the moment the design was revealed with the toys released months ago, and in the movie its size and scale are inconsistent, which surprised me, given Edwards’ ability to maintain scale pretty well in Godzilla. I’m sick of fake dinosaurs, but I’m also annoyed at the inconsistent redesigns. Remember the spitter from the original? The real Dilophosaurus did not have a frill and was much larger, but in its cameo appearance here it looks the same as always, and I’m confident that’s just so it could be used in the trailer. The T. rex looks great, but also, we all know at this point the design is not accurate to what paleontologists now know T. rex looked like—and yet, we get a redesigned Spinosaurus that swims, but also looks worse and is way less fearsome compared to the outdated Jurassic Park III version. The Titanosaurs were technically a different species from the Brachiosaurus so I’ll accept that they look different, but why not just change all the dinosaur designs instead of only a few? Oh right, for publicity reasons. Speaking of nostalgia bait, the music disappointed me, especially because Alexandre Desplat scored Edwards’ Godzilla and gave it a very fitting new theme that enhanced the film effectively. The original Jurassic Park theme is used very inappropriately (twice!), and the new themes just sound like warped riffs on the original John Williams score. Even Michael Giacchino’s derivative Jurassic World theme was better.

There were many attempts at humour that fell flat. I gave a few exhales out the nose and that was it. In the scene at the museum it’s established that Dr. Loomis eats Altoids from a tin, and the camera just holds on him chewing them, and the other characters wait as he crunches, and then they leave in a hurry and it hard cuts and you can feel the intended comedic timing, but I didn’t laugh. No one in my audience laughed. It was rough, but the roughest fumble of all I would say was the inclusion of a particular dinosaur for the little kids in the audience. An Aquilops befriends the little girl, and this tiny ceratopsian is literally only in the movie to sell toys. It hops in her backpack and somehow survives the whole river raft sequence, and while I found it annoying, it’s still less annoying than turning the Velociraptor into a protagonist. The dinosaurs actually feel closer to real living animals again, and that was also thanks to seeing them in more natural environments, though that’s abandoned by the end when the characters end up at a derelict gas station and get pursued by flying raptors down the aisles. Two things: one, it’s clearly meant to emulate the raptors in the kitchen from the original, only it’s super distracting to see 23 flavours of Dr. Pepper all turned toward the camera for product placement reasons while the creatures stalk their prey, and two, I have to quote Rise of Skywalker to comment on the flying raptors AKA Mutadons. “They fly now? They fly now!” 

You may have noticed that I never issued a spoiler warning up front but have reviewed Rebirth quite in depth without any warnings, and that’s because I haven’t spoiled anything the marketing didn’t already spoil. There were such few surprises I don’t even feel like I could spoil much, really, other than the deaths. One of the only things I was guessing about by the time they kicked off the mission was in what order the team was going to go after the samples. Whereas Fallen Kingdom and Dominion were both messes but went for it with whacky ideas, mish-mashed plots, and detours into other genres, Rebirth plays it very safe and goes back to basics, while still retaining enough elements from the previous six movies to be recognizable enough to get butts in seats. I know that sounds cynical, but hey, we’re seven movies in at this point, and this sequel is cynical. My expectations were very low, and even with them being so low, I was still let down.

I don’t think Koepp’s script was too stellar, but I also wonder if perhaps Edwards just wasn’t as confident directing his rushed material as Spielberg was back in the 90’s. Koepp is 62, and his dialogue frequently sounds like a 62-year-old trying to write a modern-day blockbuster in the vein of the old Jurassic Park. Maybe the problem is these new young actors just can’t make the material work, but however you slice it, Rebirth really does feel like a retread, despite not often stooping to the same kind of pathetic nostalgia levels as previous sequels. It’s worth noting that Spielberg, who still only produced, asked for Koepp to come back, and they cranked this one out fast. When Spielberg comes a calling, I’m sure it’s hard to say no, but between throwing in more mutant fake dinosaurs and ticking off boxes of every type of character we’ve seen before throughout the last six movies, it makes me wonder if Koepp just did what he was asked and wrote a basic reboot to try to wipe away the mess of Dominion while still keeping enough of what worked to rake in the money.

Jurassic World Rebirth needed to be better than it turned out in order to win back fans who have been steadily dropping off since all the way back with Jurassic Park III. I knew going in that reviews would be mixed, as they always are with anything that has Gareth Edwards’ name on it, and I’ve read reviews complaining about so many of the same issues as myself. People online claim they are tired of the tropes and repetitive elements, that they have just outgrown the franchise, and I even saw one article where the guy has now sworn off all dinosaur movies for good. That is rather extreme, but I get it. I appreciate that an effort was made to steer away from the Fast and Furious-style filmmaking that took over in Dominion and make the danger feel more real, the dinosaurs feel more threatening, and the adventure more thrilling, but it still didn’t thrill me the way I’d hoped. Will I watch another one of these? Probably, but I don’t know what they could possibly do now to convince me it will be different next time. If it isn’t, and it’s worse, then yeah, I might be done with these Jurassic sequels. Given the box office, there will likely be an eighth, even though this one does not end with a sequel setup and leaves little worth revisiting, character-wise or plot-wise. I guess dinosaurs are still out there, but no one cares anymore, apparently.

This is a good final complaint to end my exhaustive review with. It has been amplified with every sequel, and if they do it one more time, I think I will reach my breaking point: these movies have become hellbent on convincing audiences that the people in these movies do not care about dinosaurs anymore. I call bullshit. Ian Malcolm said it mostly as a joke in Lost World: “oh, ah, that’s how it always starts, but then later there’s running and, and, screaming…” but at this point in Rebirth dinosaurs are an inconvenience in the real world and museums are being shut down due to lack of interest. This idea isn’t inherently bad; if it was explored in a more intelligent way, there could be something to say there, but that is never going to happen. Stop trying to gaslight me, Hollywood! I love dinosaurs and I always have and even Dr. Grant who was almost eaten by them (twice!) still loved them, and that is what I want more of.  There is still potential in the Jurassic franchise, but they’ve been barking up the wrong tree for too long now. Dinosaurs are scary and delightful and fascinating and ferocious, and we want more, but the characters should, too.

No, I will not quote Ian Malcolm’s famous, aptly applicable line about Triceratops droppings from Jurassic Park. I will quote a simpler, more elusive line from John Hammond: “Could you please shut down the system.”

Back to the Future (1985): Favourite Films Series

Back to the Future (1985): Favourite Films Series

 

The first time I saw Back to the Future was on TV on New Years Eve, around age seven. I tried my hardest to stay up to see it all (and make it to midnight) but I had to go to bed by the halfway point, so I made my parents promise to watch it again with me. I don’t remember how long it was until I saw it again, but about five years later I got the Back to the Future trilogy on DVD and watched all of them over and over, eventually tiring somewhat of the third, not so much the second, and never the first. The original is one of those movies that I have seen so many times I could probably close my eyes and watch it in my brain if I tried hard enough—but that’s too much work, so I still just put it on to watch again at least once every couple of years or more.

It wasn’t until I bought the trilogy on Blu-ray sometime in the early 2010s and downloaded the digital copies of all three to my iTunes that I saw it listed in the comedy genre for the first time. I found that a bit odd, because I always thought of Back to the Future primarily as science fiction, but as I got older, I came to realize it was far funnier than I initially realized. The basic plot summary (Marty McFly accidentally gets stuck thirty years in the past and has to get his parents to fall in love so he won’t cease to exist) is a combo-dramatic-comedic premise. It’s a storyline I just got from the get-go at such a young age I didn’t really grasp how funny it was. What I saw as the primary driving force behind the entire story is what gets things going before Marty even has to face his teenage mother falling for him: a friendship between a teenage boy and an eccentric old scientist that ends up spanning a far greater amount of time than Marty has even been alive.

Marty McFly and Doc Brown are one of those iconic film duos who are so ubiquitous with quintessential time travel characters that it’s easy to forget two things: one, they would not be as iconic had they not been played by two fantastic actors with the perfect chemistry, and two, a pairing like that would never happen today, because it would be seen as strange or inappropriate. I wonder if it seemed unusual even back in the mid-80’s, but the idea of a scientist who no one else seems to really believe in being friends with a kind teenager who is clearly interested in his crazy experiments makes sense to me, and is what helps Back to the Future appeal to audiences of all ages. When Doc Brown gets shot by terrorists, I was horrified the first time I saw it, and the idea that Marty had a chance to save him by going back and preventing that from happening fired up my imagination, but it was so frustrating when Doc didn’t immediately understand! When it seems Marty’s too late, it’s even more devastating, but then the reveal that he did protect himself, he did read that letter Marty wrote him, is the true resolution to the entire story, and one that makes it feel whole.

Even though I enjoy the evolution of Marty and 1955 Doc’s friendship and the culmination of it all with 1985 Doc being saved and getting to actually pursue his goal of seeing beyond his years, obviously the central conflict of needing to resolve the destinies of George McFly and Lorraine Bains is what the meat of the movie is really about, and the problem of Marty inadvertently taking George’s place in getting hit by Lorraine’s dad in the street is a great way to set the problem into motion, because we have already heard the story recounted by their future selves, so we instantly recognize what just happened, but it takes Marty a few more scenes to catch up. I adore that Marty gets himself into all these problematic situations but never comes off as a dumb kid making bad choices and being oblivious. He’s no scientific genius like Doc Brown, but still capable of navigating the bizarre situations he finds himself in. He has his own romantic mission while Doc figures out the technical stuff with the Delorean, and he accomplishes his goals with creative solutions, like donning the radiation suit to scare George into asking Lorraine out. I doubt anyone but Michael J. Fox could have pulled off the role so perfectly—likewise for Christopher Lloyd’s quirky take on Doc Brown.

Beyond Fox and Lloyd as Marty and Doc, the entire cast is perfect, able to make both their younger and older personas fully believable. Crispin Glover was always a unique actor, but George McFly has to be the best showcase of his ability to be unlike any other person you’ve ever seen (especially in a high school movie setting), yet he’s still likable and you want to see him get the girl. Thomas F. Wilson’s Biff Tannen starts as a primary antagonist for George and a secondary antagonist to Marty (having crashed the family car, ruining Marty’s weekend plans with his girlfriend Jennifer), but then he becomes one of the main problems for Marty when he’s displaced to the 50’s and Biff starts getting between George and Lorraine. It’s fun to imagine how it all went before Marty showed up, based on the story Lorraine recounts in act one—obviously Biff never got over Lorraine, based on how he acts in 1985, but the resolution to the character conflict is cheer-worthy, yet also funny. At no point do you really detest watching Biff because Wilson plays him in such a dimwitted yet oddly charming way.

One part that really freaked me out when I first saw it was the idea of Marty being erased from existence and actually seeing him lose the ability to play guitar before his arm starts to fade away. The very first thing we learn about Marty is that he loves playing guitar, as he hooks up to the giant amplifier, so it’s a darkly clever way of demonstrating his potential failure to preserve his own existence by him breaking down on stage unable to play. When I watch the scene now, I’m a little distracted by the way his fading arm looks—it’s as if it doesn’t quite line up with the position of his shoulder and the rest of his body—but this, along with maybe one or two other tiny details are all I can think of in terms of flaws. I’ve said many times before and I’ll say it again: there is no such thing as a perfect movie, but of all my favourite films, this one, along with only a few others, would be in the running were I to try to pick some that may be considered.

Something Back to the Future does so well is take the audience along to some low moments (like when Marty almost disappears and dies, essentially) then bring us back up to unbelievable heights. The movie culminates in the ultimate example of this: Marty is just about to drive down the road to prep for hitting the wire as the lightning strikes the clock tower, then after a bunch of dramatic buildup with everything going wrong, it all comes together in the last possible second, the Delorean travels back to the future, the music swells with the theme punching through the speakers, and then the Doc, stunned, is left in silence. You hold your breath. Did it work? Is it all ok? Doc lets us know when he cheers triumphantly, and when that music swells back up sounding even more whimsical and hopeful? It just moves me every time.

Back to the Future is a versatile movie-going experience, in that you can watch it on numerous levels. You can tune in and just go with the flow of the funny dialogue (underrated line from Doc about the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance: “Look. There's a rhythmic ceremonial ritual coming up”) and the quick-moving story, or, you can really pay attention and collect bits of the story and characters along the way through the rich visual storytelling happening in every scene. The uninterrupted opening shot of Doc’s lab is the first prime example, foreshadowing moments to be revealed throughout the runtime, but even to just take a moment and look in the background of the town square in the 50’s will reveal fun Easter eggs and references. Even all these viewings later, I still discover new hidden visuals. I don’t think director Robert Zemeckis ever put as much thought into the backgrounds of every shot in any of his other films.

Who doesn’t love the idea of time travel? Back to the Future is and always will be a paradigm for this kind of story told through the medium of film. Even though it is so 80’s in so many ways, it’s also timeless (no pun intended) and like most of my top tier favourite films, there aren’t enough words for me to fully express how much I love it and what it means to me. I’ll end with one of my favourite Back to the Future quotes, which is also one of the most optimistic and meaningful quotes from a film that I carry with me always. “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” 

 

Related:

Top 10 Movie Theatre Experiences: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/09/top-10-movie-theater-experiences-ccc.html

Top 10 Underrated Sequels: https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2014/07/ccc-issue-33-top-ten-underrated-sequels.html