Jurassic Park Rebirth does pretty much what fans of the franchise expect, and seem to want: Director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Creator) and original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp (Presence) gather up a bunch of characters with varying motivations and throw them into a wilderness setting where they risk getting eaten by dinosaurs. Some die, some survive, but before the final tally is taken, the humans spend a lot of time running, screaming, and looking panicked. All except covert ops agent Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), who smirks and shrugs her way through a lot of the action — an acting choice that’s drawn a lot of sneering criticism about her “extreme for-the-paycheck energy.”
Or as one critic put it, “[Johansson]’s many attempts to appear as if her character is thinking about some devilishly clever plan onscreen only suggest the actress’s fraught mental calculations regarding how much this gig might pay for, say, her home renovations.”
It’s true that Johansson plays Zora without a lot of the range or nuance she’s brought to movies like Under the Skin, Lost in Translation, or Vicky Cristina Barcelona. When Zora first meets pharma bro Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), who kicks off the plot by hiring her to run point on his illegal, dangerous trip to dinosaur-occupied equatorial regions, she plays the entire encounter with the patient tolerance of a cool aunt humoring a cosseted young nibling who’s just learned how to tell knock-knock jokes. Her half-amused smirk barely flickers when Martin offers her $10 million for the mission.
When she helps him recruit paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and her old partner-in-combat Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), she maintains the same Mona Lisa semi-smile the whole time. Even when Zora and Duncan run a pre-arranged gambit to force Martin to double their fee, she never once bothers to pretend she believes Duncan’s doubts and demurrals about the gig are true. Her entire attitude is “You know we’re scamming you. We know that you know. And it doesn’t matter, because we know you need us and you have infinite funds. You’re going to pay our price, so why should we bother putting actual effort into this con we’re running on you?”
Johansson’s choices for Zora as a character haven’t landed well with a lot of viewers, who’ve said she “never shows a hint of human emotion,” and that her “almost impressively unemotive” performance mean that “absolutely nothing about [her] says “warrior,” “veteran,” “leader,” or anything along those lines.” A common thread in reviews claims that, “At no point […] is she remotely believable as a world-weary, battle-scarred mercenary looking to make one last big score.” Others have just complained that she never comes across as committed to the role.
I saw it in a completely different way. From the moment Zora first arrives on screen — unexpectedly appearing in Martin’s car during a traffic jam, startling the hell out of him and letting the audience know she’s already three steps ahead of him — she’s channeling an identity that’s familiar from decades of action movies. It’s just a type of identity that women play a lot less often than men. As Zora went into that first salary negotiation with Martin, again looking smug as hell at having anticipated everything he was going to say and do, I thought, “Oh wow, she’s doing a Bruce Willis impression.”
I don’t have any reason to believe that’s literally true — I’ve been reading up on Johansson’s pre-release interviews, and mostly just finding her talking about her lifelong Jurassic Park fandom and how she wanted to avoid seeming “desperate” for the role when she pitched herself to Steven Spielberg. (Which certainly seems to counter the “in it for the paycheck” accusations.) She’s talked about Zora as “burnt out” after a career of traumatic, violent experiences, but I haven’t seen any sign that she modeled the character on any particular past actor or role.
Still, her entire performance in Rebirth has extreme Bruce Willis energy. Zora cares about other people enough to fight for their lives, and she gets angry when Martin’s greed, other characters’ poor decisions, or the dinosaurs themselves endanger her charges or her mission. But she doesn’t care about much else — at least, not in ways she’s willing to let other people see.
It’s an unusual choice for a female lead in an action movie. Sigourney Weaver in 1986’s Aliens redefined women in action, and created a new mold where they often tended to be fiercely maternal protector figures. As roles changed for women in action movies over the decades that followed, they were most often either coded to imitate the masculine heroes of the ’80s (big muscles, impossibly high pain tolerance, minimal emotional expression), or presented as kick-ass aspirational figures that a male character could surpass, impress, and possibly win romantically. Recent studies showing that women-led movies do better at the box office help explain why female action leads are so common in the 2020s.
But if you page through any long list of woman-fronted action movies, you’ll see a lot of movies with roughly the same lead character: a grim-faced, tougher-than-nails type who probably has a secretly soft heart that emerges in one or two downbeat scenes, but has learned not to show it the rest of the time.
I can only think of a handful of women in action movies who’ve taken the specific tack Scarlett Johansson takes with Jurassic Park Rebirth: Gina Carano sneering her way through Steven Soderbergh’s excellent, efficient 2011 MMA vehicle Haywire, for instance, or Lori Petty in Tank Girl, or Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight. Usually, that kind of cocky, too-cool-for-school swagger is reserved for minor characters — Jenette Goldstein as Vasquez in Aliens, for instance. (And that attitude tends to get punished; arrogant characters in thrillers generall go down early. Rebirth has its own example of that dynamic.)
But not in Bruce Willis movies. His entire career was defined by that kind of swagger and an “I’m above all this” smirk. His most common action-movie persona suggested that no matter what he was facing in any given movie — even when pulling shattered glass out of his lacerated bare feet in Die Hard or navigating an agonizing personal history in Looper — he had already been through so much in his lifetime that his latest crisis was just a laugh.
That’s a mode more and more male stars in action films embody these days. Dwayne Johnson and Vin Diesel each have their own signature version of the “I’m cooler than whatever trials or trauma I’m facing” character, for instance. And the popularity of Marvel Studios movies, with their bantering, smirking heroes, has launched a new wave of male action heroes whose characters either sneer at danger to cover up their own vulnerabilities (think Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark), or are puffed-up, self-parodying, and not intended for an audience to take entirely seriously. (Think Chris Hemsworth’s Thor.)
ScarJo’s portrayal of Zora doesn’t consistently work as well as the best of these characters. Zora’s inevitable downbeat “let’s bare some past traumatic history to show this character’s secret depths” scene feels shallow and rigid, as if Johansson is trying so hard to hang onto the character’s swagger that she can’t let any sincerity creep through. (It doesn’t help that the scene is written as obligatory, halfhearted, and by-the-numbers.) The back half of the movie, which mostly centers on running and gunning as the dinosaurs close in, doesn’t give her much room for nuance or personalized characterization.
And her whole arc builds toward a moral turning point, where she has to decide whether to turn over Martin’s illegally acquired data to the scientific community for the greater good, sacrificing her $20 million payday. Playing that moment as a “Eh, whatev, no big deal” moment is consistent with the character we’ve seen throughout the film, but the performance undermines any sense that the decision has any weight for Zora, which raises the question of why it was ever a debate for her at all.
But that doesn’t negate how refreshing the early sequences feel, when Johansson gets the freedom to play around a little with the role, bringing something to it that we’ve rarely seen in her as an actor before. When she works in action movies, she tends to take roles where she’s intense and emotional, pained and under pressure. It would have been easy for her to turn Zora into another take on Black Widow in the Marvel movies, another mama-bear type who protects civilians and her teammates with equal fervor. The lead in Lucy gave her more room to play with persona in the early going; starring in Ghost in the Shell gave her a lot less. But in both cases, she winds up as the same kind of hard-charging, goal-focused badass.
In Rebirth, she’s playing around with a different kind of persona, one that’s far less familiar either in the action realm or in her personal filmography. The script does her choices in the role no real favors: It doesn’t give Zora much room to develop as a character in ways that would pay off that hipshot smugness, that dismissive attitude, in satisfying emotional ways, or let us peek meaningfully under the character’s trauma-forged surface.
But in spite of some of the criticisms, it never feels like Johansson is bored, checked out, or just cashing a blockbuster-movie paycheck. She’s taking on an action-movie persona that male stars in similar modes have been experimenting with for decades. You don’t have to love the character, or the performance. But it’s worth recognizing it for the flex it is.