Reading and Reeling #5: Jurassic World Rebirth

Jurassic World: Rebirth is as dumb as it is beautiful. Unfortunately, it is stunningly gorgeous. 

Spoilers to follow.

There were several aspects of this move that I really liked. The scenery was spectacular, the dinosaurs are more believable than any I’ve seen since the first Jurassic Park, and the ugly blue tint from the previous three movies is gone. The music was good too, especially the theme that kicks in while our heroes chase down a mosasaur on their way to the island. 

Other positives include the decent quality of most of the set-pieces and a slight turn back toward horror, which has been inexplicably absent from the franchise since the first movie. I also didn’t think any of the acting was too bad. No one will win any awards for it, but the cast’s effort is workmanlike (workwomanlike?) and just fine. Special shoutout to Mahershala Ali, who had the closest thing to a character arc in the film. It wasn’t much, but he did well with it. He was easily the most enjoyable character to watch. 

The setup is paper-thin and nonsensical, but it was a fine excuse to get people to head toward the dinosaurs again. Honestly, I enjoyed the movie more than I expected until the end of the first major action sequence, which involved several dinosaurs attacking a boat.

Jurassic World Rebirth's scenery was incredible (and is very, very similar in look and feel to my current writing project).

Unfortunately, the end of the boat attack scene is where things went off the rails and the stupidity started to distract me. I almost lost it when a father grabbed his ten-year-old daughter and jumped into the water with four hungry spinosaurs in pursuit instead of staying on the fortified metal boat heading toward land. When the other characters get ashore, they take their time gathering equipment on the beach until someone gets eaten by one of the spinosaurs that they’d been fleeing sixty seconds earlier. Do our heroes flee into the jungle immediately to avoid becoming a snack for the other dinosaurs they just escaped? Not before running to the very spot their friend just got picked off, which is in the middle of a wide-open beach, to stand and stare into the water first.

Indeed, the more I think about it, the more upset I am about Rebirth's writing. Simple fixes to several unbelievably silly character decisions and plot contrivances would have significantly improved the movie. Here is a list of the most distractingly stupid things I noticed to give you a flavor of what I’m talking about: 

• A dropped Snickers wrapper brings down a bazillion-dollar research laboratory. 

• A young woman drags an emergency raft onto a dock twenty feet from a sleeping tyrannosaurus rex and pulls the inflation cord.

• The woman's family gets into the raft in a very shallow river twenty feet from the recently awakened T-rex as it gets a drink of water when they easily could have waited or gone another way. BONUS: The T-rex bites the raft several times, but it stays fully inflated.

• Characters shoot flares into the night sky and turn on spotlights fifteen seconds after they escape a giant mutant dinosaur that is attracted to light.  

• The heroes escape the island by taking a small boat into the wide-open Pacific with no radio, no water, no food, and no extra fuel. Their rescue is not explained before the credits roll. BONUS: The boat had not operated in at least seventeen years before they cranked it up.

• A crew of battle-hardened, money-hungry mercenaries brings no real guns to the off-limits, dinosaur-infested island on which they plan to interact with at least one gigantic predatory species. 

The beginning of one of the dumbest scenes in the movie looks great. . . Unfortunately, the characters' actions during the much talked about raft scene were so dumb that I couldn't enjoy it.

I could go on, but you get the picture. The movie felt very much like a first draft that no one bothered to edit. And that’s a shame because Rebirth has the necessary ingredients to have been decent if its creators had spent a little time polishing the writing. The look for a Jurassic movie is there. The dinosaurs were great. The set pieces were well conceived (though tarnished by some of the worst character decisions ever). Heck, even the character dynamics set up at the beginning were interesting enough to do something with. This is especially true of the relationship between Scarlett Johansson’s money-hungry but wounded mercenary and Jonathan Bailey’s idealistic naturalist. They could have gone down a few different paths with these two. Instead, the writers were content to do as little as possible with them. 

I'd be remiss not to mention one of the other major storytelling blunders here, and that is that for most of the movie, the family and the mercenary crew are separated and doing their own thing. It felt like I was watching two movies at once, and neither story had a chance to take off because of it. I haven’t been able to figure out why the family’s story was necessary at all (other than reasons the bean counters at Universal would give). 

Here's hoping that next time, someone tries to tell something resembling a cohesive story between dinosaur attacks. It would make those dinosaur attacks so much more satisfying.

Give this poor woman something more interesting to do next time!