Jurassic World Rebirth film review — a lumbering beast that manages to make even mutant dinosaurs dull

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Jurassic World Rebirth opens in a laboratory, with an experiment that feels like a bad idea. Art, meet life, a cynic might say. On screen, researchers are making monstrous new dinosaurs. Off it, more genetic tinkering is afoot. The movie is both the sixth sequel to Steven Spielberg’s original 1993 Jurassic Park and a splashy reinvention for the franchise. Fresh high-end stars (Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey) will soon be here. But first, the fictional scientists find their work going awry. Never mind the carnage. The results, it is said, are “damn hard to look at”. 

It isn’t the only point when the movie seems to speak frankly to itself. Cast as an ardent paleontologist, Bailey mourns shrinking public interest in his field so long after T-Rex first re-stalked the earth. “Tired old entertainments,” another character sneers. 

You sense the veiled self-pity Hollywood movies now sometimes slip into about the status of cinema. And yet box office is a problem the Jurassic movies have never had, whether the initial Parks or later Worlds. After Spielberg’s original, the follow-ups have often been aggressively dull, while still drawing huge crowds. The series is the closest thing Hollywood has to McDonald’s for sheer sameness of product and reliability of profit.

But the need for a makeover is acknowledged by the fancy new blood. And for a time, the new era has pep. Johansson is wittily cast as security muscle, hired by Rupert Friend’s slick pharma exec for a “really illegal” mission. The pair soon head for the remote equatorial islands where the last dinosaurs rampage at a safe distance from human life. Bailey’s prehistorian is roped in too, with sea-dog Ali shipping the gang to their destination. 

And so we come to a witty little conceit. Fifty years after Jaws, there are bonus callbacks to Spielberg’s greatest game-changer. Fins haunt the water; composer Alexandre Desplat does his best John Williams. My advice? Swim for it now while the movie is still half-fun.

Below deck, Jaws had Robert Shaw’s tale of the USS Indianapolis. Johansson and Ali must swap horribly clichéd tear-stained backstories. As if embarrassed by his own work, veteran writer David Koepp — who also scripted the first Jurassic Park — swiftly pivots to another set of characters entirely. Nearby, a dad and two daughters enjoy a family sailing trip, joined by the eldest girl’s feckless boyfriend. From here, the movie veers like a bad-tempered drunk between the two groups, who each reach land to find it filled with fearsome, occasionally mutant dinosaurs. 

The more famous actors hardly need a reduced workload. The longer the film goes on, the more they are merely asked to pull faces and scream. Reading the script may have helped with that, given it hinges on their characters making one wholly inexplicable decision after another. Even the dinosaurs often seem puzzled. 

With Koepp losing the plot, a lot rests on director Gareth Edwards. Maker of the fine 2010 indie sci-fi Monsters, Edwards is a talent whose blockbusters since (Godzilla, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) suggest a surer touch with effects than people. Human interaction is not a strong suit here either. You may choose to cover your eyes when the film aims for sexual tension between Johansson and Bailey.

The surprise is how flat things feel as spectacle. The result is ugly where it should be stunning, and bland when it should be ugly. How can a movie about mutant dinosaurs be this forgettable to look at? 

It’s a shame. Great schlock is one of life’s real pleasures, but Koepp is too bored for that, and Edwards too earnest. The still bigger question might be how a major studio movie even gets released in such choppy, gruelling form? This beast never even needed to escape. It was simply set free to lumber towards the mountain of cash awaiting it — and therein, of course, we have our answer.

★★☆☆☆

In cinemas from July 2