In 2018, Universal Pictures’ Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom gave the 25-year-old Jurassic Park franchise its most ambitious, startling shift since the first movie brought dinosaurs into the modern world. Until that point in the series, the various resurrected dino species had been confined to parks, islands, and experimental facilities, which hapless humans had to enter for various reasons. Fallen Kingdom ends (seven-year-old spoiler!) with dinosaurs escaping captivity en masse and spreading around the world, infiltrating urban areas as well as the wilds, and launching a new age where humanity lives among gigantic predators that gulp people down like potato chips.
It was a massive, thrilling shift in the Jurassic Park paradigm. It was also both a generous invitation to future screenwriters, and a challenge to explore the possibilities of a completely reimagined world, the way the modern Planet of the Apes movies have. Instead, Jurassic World Rebirth gives the whole premise a hard “Nope!” The writer and director of the latest series installment don’t just refuse to contend with a world of dinosaurs, they slam the door on future writers as well.
2022’s sequel Jurassic World Dominion rolls with the “dinosaurs everywhere” concept to some degree, though director Colin Trevorrow and his co-writer Emily Carmichael still doggedly channel most of the action into the series’ most familiar settings: a remote biolab and a dino preserve. But in Jurassic World: Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Creator) and original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp (Presence) sharply reverse course. The beginning of the movie informs the audience four separate times that dinosaurs couldn’t survive anywhere but in the warm, moist climate around the equator, so by five years after Dominion, they’ve died off everywhere on Earth except in this forbidden zone.
Suddenly, the original Jurassic Park’s famous quote “Life finds a way” isn’t a truism, it’s just a snappy T-shirt slogan. In the original movie, mathematician and chaos theorist Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) utters those words as part of a longer speech about how “life will not be contained,” about how the history of evolution shows that living species do not accept barriers. He might be disappointed at how quickly, offhandedly, and mercilessly Jurassic World Rebirth proves him wrong.
It’s the biggest, weirdest walkback for a franchise since J.J. Abrams used Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker to nervously retcon everything Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi established about Rey’s parentage, the future course of the Jedi, and just about everything else. It seems like Koepp and Edwards just don’t want to contend with dino-world. (Or their producers didn’t, possibly due to the profitability of just repeating roughly the same Jurassic story over and over.) But for Rebirth in particular, the refusal to yes-and Fallen Kingdom’s setup seems monumentally strange. Because it absolutely wasn’t necessary in order to frame any of the action that follows.
Jurassic World: Rebirth follows pharma bro Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) on a quest to the equator, where he wants to harvest blood from some particularly enormous dinosaurs for a vaguely hand-waved R&D project. The goal is to produce a phenomenally lucrative heart-disease cure — the explanation amounts to “Dinosaurs can live a long time, and the really big dinosaurs have really big hearts, therefore… Science!”
(Let’s all agree to just not think about the fact that all of these dinosaurs were created in labs in the first place, and there’d be an incredible amount of data on every aspect of their bodies. Let’s not mention that Martin’s company already has that data, since it bought out dino-reviver corp InGen when it went bankrupt. And we probably shouldn’t talk about how we’re told the blood samples absolutely must come from living dinosaurs, because blood cells outside of the body break down almost instantly — but no one mentions cellular degradation when the blood samples get popped into a cooler-case and toted through swamps, streams, and sewers for the whole movie.)
To keep himself alive and make sure he comes back with the goods, Martin throws tens of millions of dollars at some mercenary troubleshooters, particularly covert ops specialist Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), ship’s captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), and various so-thinly-characterized-you-know-they’re-dinosaur-fodder teammates. He also insists the team has to get samples from the largest mega-dinos living on land, sea, and air, for reasons Koepp’s script doesn’t even bother exploring. (Why bother? Everyone knows how a three-part fetch quest works.)
The thing is, nothing about this premise remotely required the filmmakers to trash Fallen Kingdom’s setup. The apparent intention is to isolate the protagonists, putting them beyond immediate help when the mission inevitably meets supersized-saurian obstacles, and the characters have to fight to survive and escape the equator. Requiring Zora and company to head to a remote, wild forbidden zone (where they also meet a shipwrecked family led by a dad who cavalierly sailed them all into dino-danger) is meant to put them all in mortal peril, and out of easy rescue range.
But that framing doesn’t require the dinosaurs everywhere else on Earth to die off. Rebirth’s shallow, surface-level science could just as easily claim that history’s biggest dinosaurs, the ones Martin’s project requires, can only survive in areas with plenty of space and no human competition. That means deep waters, high mountains, and jungles with plenty of prey that isn’t packing military-grade weapons. Or, given that Martin’s blood-harvesting project is secretive and illegal, and he’s worried about interference from pharma competitors, Koepp could have just as easily mandated that Zora’s mission needed to be carried out somewhere distant and difficult, where no one could plausibly spy on the work.
At the same time, Rebirth informs us over and over and over again that humanity has utterly lost interest in dinosaurs. Paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) mopes that over the course of five years of worldwide dino occupation, his museum exhibit on dinosaurs, which once had people standing in around-the-block lines to try to get in, is now gathering dust and being dismantled to make room for something new. Relegating dinosaurs to a boring landscape feature that no one cares about feels weirdly undermining for Rebirth’s energy, and defeatist for the franchise as a whole. It’s also just as unnecessary for Rebirth’s storyline.
“Humanity is easily bored and needs newer, bigger, nastier dinosaurs” has been a mainstay theme in the Jurassic Park franchise since the first Jurassic World movie in 2015. But it remains the Jurassic movies’ most implausible beat. Even in a franchise that features bioengineered velociraptors that can open doors and a six-limbed T-rex that snatches a helicopter out of the sky, the one really unbelievable element in the whole series is that people are bored with the building-sized predators that keep reemerging to gobble up anyone who messes with them.
In the real world, the fascination with dinosaurs has driven seven movies and two TV shows in the Jurassic franchise alone. Also in the real world, people are fascinated by anything dangerous or lethal. The constant drumbeat of “Dinosaurs are boring now” running throughout the Jurassic World movies in particular has started to feel sour and sneering — half a cynical indictment of humanity’s shallowness and fickleness, half an odd dismissal of the franchise itself. While every Jurassic movie tries to up the ante on the previous ones, with bigger, more violent creatures and more intense humans-trying-not-to-get-eaten action, the overemphasized “dinosaurs, yawn” refrain is working directly against the awe and wonder Steven Spielberg leaned on in the first Jurassic Park, where paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) nearly weeps upon seeing living dinos for the first time.
So what to make of Jurassic Park Rebirth? Koepp and Edwards try to deliver dinosaur thrills while reminding the audience again and again that dinosaurs aren’t thrilling. And they exploit the excitement of human-vs.-prehistoric-beast face-offs, while unnecessarily shutting down other writers’ options for where to stage those face-offs in future.
These choices come across as arbitrary and short-sighted, like deliberately breaking a tool because you don’t need it for a particular project, without thinking about whether anyone else might want it down the line. Simultaneously pooh-poohing Spielbergian wonder and the franchise’s biggest plot shift to date doesn’t particularly hurt Rebirth, which gets by fine on its own straightforward, familiar action story. Reversing course on the series’ most game-changing development, on the other hand, seems like a failure of both nerve and imagination — especially with so little reason behind the change.
It seems ironic that this installment in the franchise is called “Rebirth” when it’s doing so little to reimagine the inevitable Jurassic movies to come, and doing so much to close them off.