Rebooting a piece of beloved intellectual property is hard enough, but rebooting a reboot is a far more unenviable task. Filmmakers must capture the audience’s nostalgia while also combating it, attempting something fresh enough to stand apart from what viewers have already seen. A rebooted reboot also has to be hyper-avoidant of retreading the same territory as a franchise’s first reset, for fear of alienating skeptics even more, which is a move that can very easily backfire. (See: Every instance of Henry Cavill’s Superman.) In the case of “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the seventh film in the “Jurassic Park” franchise and what’s being positioned as a standalone sequel to the more recent three “Jurassic World” films, the rebooted reboot comes out swinging with one extra, super secret weapon: charm.
After the increasingly disastrous three “Jurassic World” movies, which were vacuums of appeal as their star Chris Pratt plodded about bemoaning his precious housebroken velociraptors, the “Jurassic” series desperately needed a shot in the arm. The franchise is, after all, far past the days of Steven Spielberg’s practical, animatronic dinosaurs and the grand sound of John Williams’ theme sweeping over hills dotted with brachiosauruses. We’ve seen people gobbled up by prehistoric creatures in every conceivable way and exhausted the slight commentaries about the evils of capitalism — all painfully ironic, given the number of sequels that followed Spielberg’s initial 1993 blockbuster. What the “Jurassic” franchise needed was something or someone so affable that viewers could withstand another two-hour adventure into the jungle, even if the story suffered the same rhythm that made its predecessors feel tired.
Its stars may be a refreshing, new sight among a whole lot of primordial fare, but by casting for charm, “Jurassic World Rebirth” unintentionally questions just how much appeal this franchise has left.
Enter Jonathan Bailey, fresh off the goodwill of “Wicked” that made him a household name in every household that wasn’t already binge-watching “Bridgerton.” After paying his dues in small roles on British television for years, Bailey’s star has officially crashed through the mainstream stratosphere, thanks not only to his rugged good looks but also his natural, effervescent charisma. “Jurassic World Rebirth” is Bailey’s first leading role in a film of this size, but you wouldn’t know that by the nonchalance he wears it with. Unlike Pratt, who made every line of the previous three films feel like a marble-mouthed, unconvincing challenge, Bailey glides through the latest “Jurassic” with ease, buoyed further by his equally lovable co-lead, Scarlett Johansson. Together, Johansson and Bailey prop up a flagging franchise, but their combined magnetism creates a frustrating push-pull effect with the movie’s well-trodden narrative beats. Its stars may be a refreshing, new sight among a whole lot of primordial fare, but by casting for charm, “Jurassic World Rebirth” unintentionally questions just how much appeal this franchise has left.
Taking place five years after the events of the previous film, “Jurassic World Rebirth” envisions a world where dinosaurs and humans coexist, largely because our rapidly changing climate has made most of the planet inhospitable for the prehistoric creatures. This is alarmingly conveyed by Johansson’s Zora, a covert ops specialist, getting stuck in traffic while a team moves a dead dino from a zoo-like captivity in New York City — one of the film’s most stealthily political images, recalling bleak photos of real-life animals being displaced from their habitats due to climate change. But “Rebirth” never hones in on that theme because it doesn’t need to; audiences will come for the dinosaur thrills and chills regardless, and screenwriter David Koepp rushes to ensure that they’ll get what they came for.
Bailey, then, is an added bonus, scooped up along the way while Zora plots a mission to Earth’s tropical climates in the Atlantic Ocean, where the last remaining dinosaurs thrive and humans are expressly forbidden to travel to. Bailey’s character, the bespectacled paleontologist named Henry, evokes Harrison Ford’s “Indiana Jones”-era heartthrob, with director Gareth Edwards making sure to capture his wire-rimmed glasses beaming in the natural light. Henry is intelligent and resolute, so frustrated with humanity’s newly developed apathy toward his life’s work that he’s taken to neurotically popping Altoids into his mouth and chewing them loudly enough to echo through the halls of New York’s (sparsely attended) Museum of Natural History. Bailey is extraordinarily adept at making Henry’s quirks feel natural. So, when Zora invites Henry along on her mission to the Atlantic to collect dino data for a pharmaceutical study, it’s easy to overlook the fact that those stakes are about as dull as it gets.
Nearly two hours are spent jumping between concurrent storylines, and had Koepp’s screenplay allotted all 120 of those minutes to the film’s stars, “Rebirth” might actually feel worthy of its presumptuous title.
“Rebirth” does, of course, boast plenty of tense, life-or-death moments of nail-biting tension. But when we remember that this peril is coming at the expense of, uh . . . pharmaceutical research, it’s difficult to maintain the same level of interest, no matter how compelling or gorgeous its pair of leads are. The “Jurassic” franchise is no stranger to societal critique, but the human villains on the side of Big Pharma in this expedition are thinly sketched and predictable. Worse, “Rebirth” is just one of the many pieces of media this year to rebut the pharmaceutical industry, and has the most superficial take on this theme so far. (When your film can be thematically dogwalked by “Death of a Unicorn,” that’s saying something.) While Zora and Henry get the chance to debate the merits of their work along the way, Koepp’s screenplay gallingly diverts attention to a far less charming parallel storyline just when things are getting good.
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A “Jurassic” film wouldn’t be a “Jurassic” film if children weren’t in jeopardy, and in “Rebirth,” Koepp devises a truly horrible B-plot about the Delgado family, whose summer vacation spent on a sailing trip through the Atlantic gets thwarted by a massive plesiosaur. While their danger is exceptionally fun to watch, their rescue by Zora and Henry’s team of operatives is far less satisfying. Not to point fingers, but if you’re taking a sailboat through possibly dinosaur-infested waters, whatever happens is on you. In seven films, the “Jurassic” franchise has not had a more obnoxious group of people than the Delgados, whose job is, it seems, to constantly make the most boneheaded, nonsensical choices in any given scenario. When the parties separate once more after their vessel is shipwrecked on a mysterious island, every moment Edwards spends away from Johansson and Bailey is time wasted. Nearly two hours are spent jumping between concurrent storylines, and had Koepp’s screenplay allotted all 120 of those minutes to the film’s stars, “Rebirth” might actually feel worthy of its presumptuous title.
This is not a new problem for this franchise. The “Jurassic” films have been fighting this war between characters and carnage since their 1993 progenitor. Viewers want chaos and dinosaur-inflicted bloodshed, yes, but they also need leads who are well-rounded and cast for more than their star power. While Chris Pratt may have been a fount of charisma in the early 2010s, his well dried up by the time he ever got in front of a green-screened tyrannosaurus. “Rebirth” wisely puts two genuinely engaging stars — one seasoned actor and another fresh-faced (relative) newcomer — in Pratt’s place, only to fundamentally misuse them just when the film achieves a steady rhythm. It’s not enough that the actors are fantastic at their jobs; they need to have the space to create characters who are realistic enough for an audience to latch onto. Otherwise, all of the dinosaur danger is for naught. While one could argue that “Jurassic World Rebirth” is a sturdy enough vehicle to prove Bailey’s leading man status, it would be nice if his tentpole action blockbuster were able to match his prowess. I don’t know about you, but I like watching films worthy of their engaging talent. But like life, charm, too, finds a way to survive. It’s just a shame the “Jurassic” franchise can’t say the same.
