The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
This review has a prologue because I had a miserable experience watching this. I missed the first 20 minutes or so of Jurassic World: Rebirth. Oh, I was in the theater and watching the movie. I wasn’t late or anything. I was just completely distracted by my blinding hatred of four little boys sitting in the back row of my theater.
These little shits, who were around 8-9 years old, were yelling, throwing shit, watching videos on their phones, running down the aisles, etc. I left and complained to the theater staff, who, to their credit, went in and gave the kids a warning. It wasn’t long until they started up again and I held out as long as I could. I finally yelled at them and then again left to speak with the theater staff, telling them that, one way or another, these kids were leaving the theater. The staff then removed the kids from the theater. Look, I don’t have kids. I have never wanted kids because I don’t want the responsibility. If you have kids, then you accepted that responsibility. Do your fucking job and teach them how to behave in public so that a random grown-ass man doesn’t have to yell at them. The parents of these kids failed society and owe me an apology.
So, anyway, Jurassic World: Rebirth. I then focused on the movie and my night didn’t get much better. By the time that those Planned Parenthood commercials were kicked out of the theater, our characters were on a boat headed to the island (because of course there is a fucking island) and I didn’t know what was happening because I had been distracted. My brother, who was with me, later informed me of the plot setup: a pharmaceutical company has determined (somehow) that the key to curing heart disease lies in the DNA of three giant, mutant dinosaurs that live on this island. Yeah, there is now an island where they just keep giant dinosaur mutants because, you know, that seems like a good fucking idea. So they hire a couple of mercenaries (played by Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali) to accompany the pharma suits to the island to get the DNA.
I am so fucking done with this series. Of all of the things that could have been done with dinosaurs in the modern world, this series has given us dinosaurs on an island. And dinosaurs on other islands. And dinosaurs in a compound that is pretty much an island. Now we get mutant dinosaurs….on a fucking island. Considering that this is called Rebirth, it is almost staggering how mundane and paint-by-numbers this movie is. Jason Voorhees would find this formulaic.
The plot is basically a video game with the three mutants serving as boss characters. Our leads go through a few scenarios that seem a lot like quick-time events from a game (a rock climbing scene, a boat scene, etc.) before they get to a boss. They beat the boss and the process starts over. The final boss is defeated and the movie ends. That’s really it. It adds nothing to the lore. It does nothing new with the story. It feels like DLC for a Jurassic Park video game.
A formulaic story can still work if the characters are well developed, but Rebirth will have none of that. Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali are mercenaries only because the movie tells us that they are mercenaries. They never do shit, never establish that they are tougher than the average person and are about as useful in a fight as the kids. They are both extremely talented actors but they are given little to do but give thousand-yard stares. There are the evil businessmen who do businessy-business things and we know this because they wear suits. I couldn’t even remember any of their names as I was watching the damn thing.
Oh, and then there is the family. This goddamn family. Rebirth is 2 hours and 15 minutes long, but it could have been an easy, breezy 90 minutes if this pointless family had been cut out. These dipshits are on vacation, sailing through dinosaur infested waters (as you do) when their boat is (shockingly) attacked by a dinosaur. Not allowing Darwinism to take its course, they are saved and taken along for the adventure. Why? Because fuck me, that’s why. These people are worthless. The dad is a pussy with a knee injury that reappears and disappears depending on the plot. The two daughters are just there to do dumb shit to lead into the next generic scenario. The one daughter’s boyfriend is an insufferable twat that makes one root for the dinosaurs because damning humanity would be worth it just to see this shitbag get eaten alive by raptors. These people add nothing to the film other than running time; they have no impact on the plot and could have been completely eliminated with minimal impact on the rest of the film.
Oh, and they find a baby dinosaur that they keep as a pet for the remainder of the movie. There is never any payoff to this. It does nothing. It is so obviously there just to sell toys that there is something almost refreshing about how transparently cynical it is.
But at least there can be awe-inspiring special effects, right? God no, this movie looks awful. How is it that the original movie from 1993 still has the best effects in the series? Seriously, how? The dinosaurs are almost entirely obvious CGI, but they are nothing compared to the worst green screen effects I’ve seen since Red One. I (along with The Film Nurse) audibly groaned at some of these backgrounds. It kind of takes me out of a scene when the actors look like they are standing in front of a screen saver. It looks awful, just awful, yet this is somehow a $180 million movie. It looks like something that would go straight to Netflix, where everything costs a gazillion dollars and still somehow looks cheap. As terrible as Jurassic World: Dominion is, I at least thought it had the best effects that the series has had since the 90s. Rebirth is a massive regression.
Prior to this movie, my mother had gone to the theater with me to see every entry in this series. It was a nice little tradition. At the end of Dominion, she turned to me and said “this is the last one of these that I’m seeing with you.” It turns out that she knew when to bow out and I am just an idiot for continuing to come back. There are talented people involved with this, but seemingly zero effort. There is no creative spark behind these movies and the studio isn’t even pretending that these movies are made for any reason other than to squeeze more money out of idiots, like me, that cling to the memory of their jaw dropping when they saw the original Jurassic Park as kids. As one of those kids that sat in a theater in June 1993, enamored with the magic of movie making, that just makes me sad.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_World_Rebirth#/media/File:Jurassic_World_Rebirth_poster.jpg
