Jurassic World Rebirth makes dinosaurs scary again with the best set pieces since Jurassic Park (original) (raw)

A mere three years after Jurassic World Dominion supposedly acted as a culmination of the Jurassic franchise, the dinos are back in Jurassic World Rebirth which – as hinted at by the title – provides a soft reboot to the series.

It's not a surprise that we didn't wait long for another Jurassic World movie; despite diminishing returns critically and commercially, Dominion still took $1 billion worldwide. As much as that trilogy, and also Rebirth, wants to say that people aren't bothered by dinosaurs anymore, the real-world public appetite remains.

Whether or not people will want to see a Jurassic movie without any direct links to the original remains to be seen. But if fans decide to skip Jurassic World Rebirth, they would be missing out on some of the best set pieces since Jurassic Park.

Jurassic World Rebirth may well be a soft reboot for the franchise, but the story is still familiar. InGen messed around with dinosaurs to create new ones which, inevitably, went wrong, leaving them with a bunch of mutated dinosaurs that they abandoned on an island when one escaped.

Years later, Big Pharma company ParkerGenix thinks they could use those dinosaurs to create a miracle drug to tackle heart disease for the greater good lots of money. Enter skilled covert ops expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) to head to said island to capture the dino DNA in a mission that definitely won't go wrong.

And since it's a Jurassic movie, of course there are some children in peril thanks to a family whose boat was capsized by a dinosaur, stranding them on the island with terrifying creations such as the Distortus Rex (think a Xenomorph meets a Predator meets a T-Rex).

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Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

Before you get to the good stuff of Jurassic World Rebirth though, you have to get through the sluggish first act. An atmospheric cold open is an engaging start, but then writer David Koepp has to get a lot of pieces on the board, from the current state of the world (five years post-Dominion) to establishing the various new characters.

It's often clunky, such as one sequence where both Zora and her team leader Duncan (Mahershala Ali) conveniently share their past traumas, and you're just waiting for the dino action to start. Nobody is given enough depth to break free from their one-note roles either, although Jonathan Bailey is the stand-out as the endearing science nerd Henry Loomis.

As soon as the Mosasaurus comes into contact with both Zora's team and the family though, Jurassic World Rebirth improves considerably. There's still pacing issues as the movie cuts between each storyline, but director Gareth Edwards outsets those momentum dips with terrific set pieces.

Universal

A flaw of the Jurassic World trilogy is that it rarely felt like the characters were in that much danger, even the kids could hold off a Velociraptor with a cattle prod. Here though, Edwards brings the terror back to the dinosaurs where the only appropriate response is to run the hell away.

The strongest set piece in Jurassic World Rebirth involves a T-Rex and a raft, taken from the original Jurassic Park novel by Michael Crichton, which is incredibly tense, playful and gripping. It pushes the boundaries of genuine fear that's allowed at a 12A, and is a worthy successor to the iconic T-Rex moment in the first movie.

It's far from the only notable set piece to savour, with a late-stage convenience store encounter with Mutadons coming close to matching the raft sequence, and there's genuine peril for the characters throughout.

The weak final encounter with the Distortus Rex is a let-down by comparison though, with a ludicrous character survival even by Jurassic standards. It ends the movie with a disappointing whimper, one shrouded in smoke perhaps in an attempt to hide the movie's dodgier VFX moments.

Universal

Edwards and Koepp are careful to balance the scares with lightness though in classic Amblin fashion. There's an adorable little Aquilops called Dolores that you'll fall in love with, an awe-inspiring sequence with the Titanosaurus (scored by Jonathan Bailey himself), and some hit-and-miss humour.

The movie would have been better served taking more risks, abandoning the overly familiar 'Big Pharma is bad' storyline and telling something completely new for the series. But as familiar paths go, Jurassic World Rebirth does at least deliver some excellent set pieces to make it worth your time.

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Jurassic World Rebirth is released in cinemas on 2 July.

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Movies Editor, Digital Spy Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor. Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies, attending genre festivals around the world. After moving to Digital Spy, initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.