The first trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth—which I think should be called Jurassic Reborn—dropped this morning, and as with yesterday’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps teaser, I expected to see this during the Super Bowl. We still might, a lot of people do not pay attention to trailers online and getting in front of the single largest live television audience of the year is worth its weight in gold, but do you remember ye olden days when we didn’t know what the Super Bowl commercials would be until game time, and every spot was a surprise? This is my way of saying that I am old.
Anyway, Jurassic World Rebirth is a continuation of the Jurassic Park/World franchise. We are now past two failed theme parks featuring designer dinosaurs and dinosaurs are just living life out in the world, a thing these movies simply refuse to show us. How there isn’t one of these movies dedicated to just showing what regular life is like WITH F-CKING DINOSAURS THROWN IN is beyond me. It’s the simplest f-cking premise and they just won’t do it. The closest we’ve gotten is Battle at Big Rock, a short film about a family camping trip interrupted by a f-cking dinosaur. It’s all any of us want.
Rebirth stars Jonathan Bailey (looking extremely scrumptious but what is his accent supposed to be?), Rupert Friend as the probably inevitably evil business guy, Scarlett Johansson as the Chris Pratt “vaguely military operative” character (lol okay), and Mahershala Ali as the vaguely smuggler type this franchise has decided these movies need. At least Universal is doing what Marvel can’t—letting Mahershala Ali be wildly charismatic on screen in a franchise film. (Blade is still in limbo!)
The film itself looks fine. These movies are just never going to recapture the magic of Jurassic Park—a real “you had to be there” moment to fully appreciate what it was like to look up at a forty-foot screen and BELIEVE dinosaurs are real. I still don’t like walking into dark rooms because every time someone walked into a dark room in Jurassic Park, they got eaten by a raptor. That was over 30 years ago! That movie made me afraid of the dark and dinosaurs that don’t even exist! That’s how real and thrilling it was! You’re never recreating that moment, no matter how hard you try.
But they will keep trying. In some kind of Don Quixote windmill madness, Universal will keep hiring A-list talent to make these movies and not show us people just living with dinosaurs. Rebirth is directed by Gareth Edwards, who directed the 2014 Godzilla, kind of directed Rogue One, and more recently directed 2023’s The Creator. Sci-fi is his bread and butter, he’s good at large-scale action, but…I don’t know. Rebirth just looks fine. There’s potential for this cast to carry it beyond mediocre expectations, as even in the trailer, it looks like Bailey, ScarJo, and Ali have more chemistry than Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard EVER did. At the very least, these movies should be fun, but the Jurassic World movies got less fun with each entry. Now that we’re rebirthing this franchise, maybe it can reinvent a little bit as, at minimum, a fun action-adventure franchise.
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