Posted by Tansy Gardam

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Our shareholders have been patient but let’s be honest: no one’s impressed by a dinosaur anymore.

In one monologue, ten minutes into 2015’s Jurassic World, Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) set the stakes of the franchise. De-extinction might have been magic twenty years ago, but now, people were bored, and the shareholders were running out of patience. Never mind the packed park or the metatextually packed cinemas, the throngs crowding in to see dinosaurs; Claire insisted that “consumers want them bigger, louder—more teeth.”

Jurassic World: Rebirth has done away with Claire, and her three-film journey from corporate shill to dinosaur rights activist—as well as her adopted daughter Maisie Lockwood, the cloned granddaughter/daughter of Jurassic Park’s previously unmentioned co-founder, who has a special connection with dinosaurs as a fellow clone. But her thesis lingers over the film. In an explicit echo, Doctor Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) laments that his museum’s exhibition of dinosaur bones has only sold a dozen tickets in the past week because “nobody cares about dinosaurs anymore.” The fact that the three previous Jurassic World films made more than a billion dollars each is immaterial, as is the idea that a museum full of bones might lose its shine if real live dinosaurs were out on the street causing traffic jams. The franchise continues to bemoan its own irrelevance, and after four films, it feels like the script is trying to neg the viewer—you’re not like other girls/audience members, you really get dinosaurs. 

Perhaps the best summary of Jurassic World: Rebirth is its title: It promises a rebirth, a return to the highs of Jurassic Park (1993), down to a passionate palaeontologist protagonist who was trained by that first film’s hero, Sam Neill’s Alan Grant. It lacks the callously sky-high body count of Jurassic World, and ignores the supposed extinction-inducing volcanic eruption on Isla Nublar from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), as well as quickly writing out the free-range dinosaurs of Jurassic World: Dominion (2022). Instead, Rebirth goes back to Jurassic Park Sequel basics, best summarised by Tom Cardy: 

1. Let’s go back to the island! 
2. Oh boy they’re truly beautiful and deserve our respect
3. run.
4. Let’s never go back to dinosaur island.

The result is a generic riff on Jurassic Park, far less than the sum of its parts for the sake of making its release date. And it’s also still a Jurassic World film, carrying all the qualities of a mid-2010s action franchise: a gun-toting tough-guy action hero(ine), a sinister scientific use for dinosaurs, and genetically engineered hybrids with more teeth than ever.

Rebirth has had an odd, rushed journey to screen. Steven Spielberg and David Koepp, the director and writer respectively of the first Jurassic Park and 1997’s The Lost World, began cooking up ideas for a new Jurassic film not long after the release of Jurassic World: Dominion, keen to reboot the franchise and lose the increasingly convoluted characters of the Jurassic World series. Koepp began writing in earnest in autumn 2023, and in December the script was sent to the producers, who had no idea it was in development until they received the draft. Nevertheless, Universal fast-tracked the project, setting a summer 2025 release date and a summer 2024 shoot, leaving any potential director with a limited creative role and less time than usual for every element of pre- and post-production. Initial negotiations with mooted director David Leitch broke down over that limited creative input: According to one report, Universal were looking for a director “who could accept that the role would be more shooter than an auteur.”

It was an odd twist, then, that the job eventually went to Gareth Edwards (Rogue One [2016], Godzilla [2014], The Creator [2023]), whose unique, improvisational working style had defined his previous films as visually stunning but often lacking on the story front. Edwards’s background in visual effects was also often cited as a reason for his hiring on Rebirth, given the film’s heavy visual effects load (which had to be completed in thirty-two weeks instead of the usual forty-four); but Edwards’s approach to visual effects is often counterintuitive, shooting as much in camera as possible in order better to sell the visual effects that are needed. Edwards avoids green screen and motion-tracking references wherever possible, even on The Creator, in which many characters had digital facial augmentations. In the past, he’s been known to chase moments and images rather than sticking to planned coverage, often operating the camera himself: On The Creator, arguably Edwards’s opus, he prioritized a small, nimble crew with small, nimble gear which could shoot efficiently in stunning locations that a larger crew couldn’t access. 

Perhaps predictably, Rebirth is the first Gareth Edwards film which doesn’t really feel like a Gareth Edwards film. That strict production timeline left little room for the more experimental elements of Edwards’s style, as did the decision to shoot on 35mm film, which adds a cost to every minute of footage shot and uses cumbersome cameras that do not allow for the looser, “get-it-in-the-moment” style of Edwards’s previous films. Likewise, scale has long been one of Edwards’s real strengths as a director: From the HALO jump sequence in Godzilla to the NOMAD space station in The Creator, Edwards has successfully made big things look big. But, while Rebirth occasionally shows that flair, it is the smaller dinosaurs, like the amphibious Spinosaurs and the perennial favourite T-Rex, which really shine here. Why? Because, for all the film’s throwbacks to the original Jurassic Park, and its central mission showcasing the three biggest dinosaurs (for those following along at home: the Titanosaurus, the Mosasaurus and the Quetzalcoatlus), Rebirth uses a cinemascope aspect ratio (2.39:1) rather than Park’s boxy 1.85:1, which is traditionally associated with dramas but allows for much more vertical space in the frame. Many of Jurassic Park’s iconic shots simply couldn’t work in a wider aspect ratio, which would cut off the tiny human figures at the bottom of the frame or the dinosaurs looming at the top—1.85:1 allows for height, where 2.39:1 is all about width. 

The film’s production choices have stripped away the unpredictable, innovative elements of Edwards’s filmmaking, then, but it has also left many of his weaknesses. Koepp’s unchangeable screenplay was possibly a plus for Edwards, who dislikes writing—he’s described it as “like having the worst homework in the world”—but it is a script that is far from watertight. The film clunks between setpieces and subplots, with no real friction between the characters and their impossible tasks. Where Edwards’s characters could previously be accused of being underwritten, Koepp’s script gives them one “this is my deal” scene early on, then has nothing else to say for the rest of the film. Likewise, it’s unclear who the film’s protagonist actually is. Extraction expert and shady-past-haver Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is hired by a pharmaceutical company to infiltrate a previously unmentioned dinosaur island, Île Saint-Hubert, and collect blood samples from the three largest dinosaurs, which may contain the secret to curing heart disease. Bailey’s Dr. Loomis is brought along as the mission’s dinosaur expert, while Bennett handles smuggling them on and off the island. Bennett has the closest thing to a character arc, but the film often defaults to Loomis’s perspective, and with its multi-stage mission to collect the dinosaur blood samples and cross the island to the extraction point, the film ends up feeling like a video game—it’s just never clear who you're playing as.

Jarring with this is the film’s much better B-plot about the Delgados, a family who are shipwrecked by spinosaurs and picked up by the mission crew. The Delgados—father Reuben and daughters Teresa and Isabella—are, in many ways, a box-ticking exercise, filling the “survival story with kids” quota and giving the film a B-story to cut back to: They soon split from the mission crew and must fend for themselves on the island, armed only with the same handful of dinosaur facts that the audience have. From the outset, however, the Delgados have more interesting character dynamics than Bennett’s crew (largely propelled by Teresa’s useless boyfriend Xavier), and their island crossing is a genuinely new spin on the well-trodden Jurassic family territory. The Delgados get the best action sequence in the film, trying to raft away from a T-Rex, and also encounter the one exciting new dinosaur, the puppy-like Aquilops, which Isabella immediately puts in her backpack and names Dolores. But for all the strengths of the Delgado scenes, the film’s two plot threads are never truly integrated: They each feel like a distraction from the other. 

The dialogue doesn’t help. It is a mix of predictable, cyclical sentences (“We didn’t find it … it found us”) and truly nuts statements that a more interesting film would have followed up, like Loomis’s assertion that it’s a sin to kill a dinosaur (!). Likewise, the entire array of dinosaurs were designed in six weeks, and the result is a paint-by-numbers mish-mash of the previous film’s creatures, with the fig leaf of genetic experimentation to explain why they look so familiar without technically being the same. Rebirth’s crushed production timeline has led to a movie that exhibits an overwhelming generic-ness. And it even seems to know it. 

Just listen to Alexandre Desplat’s score. It has more in common with Michael Giacchino’s Jurassic World than John Williams’s Jurassic Park, but much of that can be attributed to modern trends of film scoring, and what they assign meaning to. So let’s focus on what we now think of as the “Jurassic Park Theme.” In the original film, it plays when living dinosaurs are first seen through the eyes of Grant and Sattler. It is the music of a miracle. In Jurassic World, that same theme plays over dinosaur-free shots of Jurassic World, the theme park artifice that has been built around the scientific miracle: the franchise, so to speak. In this latest film, Desplat’s score hints at the theme throughout the first half, but truly kicks in when the crew watch Titanosaurs wandering through the grass, in a tribute to the original scene from Jurassic Park: The dinosaurs are bigger, the interaction between them and the humans has increased thanks to technological advancements, but the film is still trying to chase the feeling from thirty years ago. This is the closest the film gets to a tacit admission that, pace Claire Dearing, we don’t in fact want things bigger and louder or with more teeth at all. We want dinosaurs and characters we actually care about.

http://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/jurassic-world-rebirth/

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