The Latest Jurassic Park Sequel Might Be The Worst Yet

To date, there have been six Jurassic Park sequels. None have lived up to Steven Spielberg’s colossal ’90s classic, but while two entries have gestured toward novelty — J.A. Bayona’s haunted house romp Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Spielberg’s San Diego-set creature feature The Lost World — Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World: Rebirth can’t be counted among them. You’ve seen most of it before, and despite the star power involved, it’s too visually flat, too narratively scattered, and far too thematically slight to make an impact.

A reboot of a reboot penned by David Koepp (the original movie’s screenwriter), Jurassic World: Rebirth is practically a post-postmodern reflection on rote sequel-itus whether or not it means to be, since it follows an existing dinosaur formula to a T. Not the formula for a good Jurassic Park movie, mind you, but rather the formula for a factory-produced follow-up that makes lofty promises with its setting — like Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Dominion — but delivers a Temu version of Spielberg’s original.

After an alluring prologue set in 2008, which sees a shadowy mutant T. rex experiment break containment (a scene that recalls the intense opening of Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla), Rebirth quickly bites off more than it can chew. As if harkening back to both Trevorrow films, it features dialogue about how people have grown bored of dinosaurs, and it also frames our de-extinct neighbors as a common fixture of our world. One can even be seen hanging out under a New York bridge, covered in graffiti, as the movie introduces its central characters. This is also the first and last time Rebirth includes the wider world in its purview. From there on out, it develops extreme tunnel vision while establishing its plot, involving a small team of scientists, soldiers, and businesspeople traveling to a secluded island for some dino-chasing antics that may as well take place during any of the other movies.

Are the new characters and their goals at least intriguing or entertaining? Initially perhaps, as cinematographer John Mathieson creates a noirlike allure around their introductory conversations, with hints of hard light streaming in through museum windows. Rupert Friend’s ruthless pharma rep Martin Krebs needs the DNA of three enormous dino species living in a cordoned off zone near the equator — the only region that protects them from our climate-ravaged world — though don’t expect Krebs’ motives to have imaginative explanations. His research doesn’t involve cloning or immortality, or human-dino hybrids (any of that fun supervillain stuff), but rather, run-of-the-mill cardiovascular patents. His two-pronged ploy involves hiring the skilled, expensive security expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) to handle the logistics of extracting samples and convincing enthusiastic paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to tag along on the illicit mission to identify the targets.

The pretext for involving Loomis seems paper thin — there don’t appear to be too many different species in the film; even a kid could identify the ones they need — but it’s easy enough to accept, since it gets things moving. Bennett brings along her own team of mercenaries, led by Mahershala Ali’s charismatic boat captain Duncan Kincaid, whose objective is to help Krebs draw blood from one dino on land, one in the air, and one under the ocean, a fetch-quest structure that sounds like a lot of fun. And yet, Rebirth seldom manages to create moments of delight, despite promising a plot spanning surf and turf and sky.

Part of this is owed to its extraneous detour involving a family on a seafaring vacation — father Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), daughters Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise), and the latter’s lethargic boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) — who end up in the mercenaries’ care after a tense encounter in the ocean. The film is at its most visceral when teetering on the edge of a sea monster B-movie with seemingly disposable fodder. However, the aforementioned family sticks around longer than you’d expect and becomes far more central than their half-baked drama might deserve. (Will the father and prospective son-in-law get along despite inconsequential disagreements?) It would be one thing if Rebirth found a way to combine and streamline its military and civilian plots, but it immediately divvies them up again as soon as the characters reach their island destination. The result is in an uneven, bifurcated structure, but the story treads that familiar, Fallen Kingdom/Jurassic Park III territory of characters traversing abandoned territory while evading dangerous lizards.

The two stories, one following the family and the other following the mercenaries, seldom reflect on one another. They’re also most often connected by coincidence, leaving Rebirth feeling like two different movies cobbled together: an Amblin-esque adventure through an abandoned research facility and an exotic pursuit across harsh terrain, buoyed by the appearance of moral dilemma where none really exists. Bennett and Kincaid’s dialogue is filled with backstory about loss — the two friends often wax poetic about their respective paths, affording Johannsson and Ali the chance to conjure depth through fleeting expressions — but this never meaningfully translates into drama or action. It feels practically tacked on. All the while, Loomis remains a vestigial organ whose only function is to suggest moral complexity for Bennett to consider for approximately 0.8 seconds, as the possibility of romantic chemistry rears its head, but quickly retreats. Like the vacationing family, you could delete him from the plot and very little would change.

Edwards’ prior films (even the ones that don’t really work) have excelled at capturing texture and scale, but neither of these strengths are present here. Aside from the mutated T. rex glimpsed in the opening scene — whose engorged skull resembles an Alien Xenomorph — few of the creature designs are eye-popping, though it’s hard to know if the film would’ve improved dramatically had they been more fantastical (or the CGI more fully formed). From the moment everyone reaches the central island, the filmmaking on display is just plain bad. Moments of horror, action, and awe are cut together without nearly enough consideration of rhythm or emotional impact. If a character cranes their neck at something enormous off-screen, the camera seldom follows the movement of their gaze all the way up to emphasize an appropriately scary or spectacular image in the subsequent shot.

Practically every scene unfolds this jankily and awkwardly. It gets to a point where the movie feels fundamentally broken — and not just aesthetically either. As its characters move from Point A to B to C, Rebirth never develops a semblance of theme, or underlying dimensions that pose challenges for any character, despite the verbal suggestion of moral grays surrounding the mission. Interesting ideas are usually discarded, too. One set in particular, an ancient indigenous temple with dinosaurlike statues, feels pulled from an entirely different franchise, since no one seems to acknowledge the sheer strangeness of its appearance in this series. (Ironically, it feels like something out of the Monsterverse that Edwards’ Godzilla helped birth.) The worldbuilding is ill-considered, which is a strange outcome for a logline as simple and exciting as “oops, we brought the dinosaurs back again!” Even the basic premise of mutated dino hybrids yields only a few minutes of screen time for exactly one slightly bizarre version of a creature we’ve seen before.

Rebirth has nothing truly new, and it seldom presents anything old with ingenuity or with a mischievous spark. It should, in that case, come as a relief that it has only nominal connections to the rest of the series. This means Edwards’ entry can be easily cast off as canonical outlier. Franchise mainstays like Sam Neill and Laura Dern are nowhere to be found, and they’re better for it. They had a rough enough go of things with the last movie, and dragging them back for this one would’ve only added insult to injury. Then again, maybe it’s just a matter of time before they show up in Jurassic World: Re-Rebirth, since the people constantly reviving this franchise never seem to learn their lesson, and insist on treating familiar IP as an infinite money printer. They’re so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they don’t stop to think if they should. In their hubris, they keep re-animating things that are better left dead, often at their own peril.

Jurassic World: Rebirth opens July 2 in theaters.