The first time Alan Grant sees a dinosaur, he nearly pukes. Steven Spielberg’s characters often gaze at the unexpected with wide-eyed wonder, but Jurassic Park’s esteemed paleontologist is so bowled over by the sight of a 40-foot brachiosaur grazing on treetops that it almost literally knocks him out. It’s only after he’s bent double to keep himself from fainting and finally grabbed a seat on the ground that we can see the tears in his eyes, the joy and disbelief at witnessing something he never thought he would—in fact, something he never should have seen.
But in Jurassic World Rebirthdinosaurs aren’t wondrous anymore. They’re not even worth looking at. When a long-necked herbivore escapes from a New York zoo and stalls traffic near the Brooklyn Bridge, no one’s astonished by the majestic beauty of the once extinct creature towering over them; they just lean on their horns. After 30 years as zoo attractions, dinosaurs aren’t marvels or menaces. They’re just over.
Rebirth Brings David Coffee, and Screenwriter On The First FIRST Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost Worldback into the franchise fold after a nearly three-decade absence, but rather than a joyous reunion, Koepp’s return feels as if he’s been dragged in by the ear, mumbling sullenly in the corner and wishing he were anywhere else. The movie’s plot is skeletal, almost desultory, like a video-game synopsis they forgot to hang a game on. Expert mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) are hired by pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to track down and extract blood samples from the three largest dinosaur species on Earth, the flimsy justification being that their extra-large hearts hold the key to preventing heart disease in humans. (Read that sentence twice: Now you’ve thought about it more than the movie does.) That requires traveling to the equatorial zone that, despite humanity’s widespread lack of interest in dino-kind, it has apparently just abandoned to the creatures, including the mutant hybrids that were too dangerous or too unsightly for public consumption.
This isn’t the first movie in the series to pad out the known species of dinosaur with genetically modified spinoffs: The original Jurassic World featured a souped-up tyrannosaur called Indominus rex. But it’s the first to be so nakedly apathetic about them. Most aren’t even identified by name, perhaps because no actor could say the words Distortus rex without succumbing to a fit of the giggles. Apart from sheer laziness, the problem with introducing made-up dinosaurs is you never know whether you should be gasping at the lifelike re-creation of a Mosasaurus or a Quetzalcoatla or discerning newfangled mashups like the “Mutadon.” Digital imagery is leagues more sophisticated now than it was in the mid-1990s, but these dinos aren’t going to stop anyone in their tracks, because Rebirth director Gareth Edwards disregards what Spielberg always understood: that it matters more whose eyes we’re seeing through than what it is they’re seeing.
Edwards has studied his Spielberg, at least. His 2014 Godzilla made that plenty clear, but now that he’s stepping into the master’s shoes, he takes it one step further. When Zora and her crew, which includes her old comrade-in-arms Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), take a boat to Mutant Dino Island, the scenes deliberately evoke Jawswhich you can tell by the way the camera swoops around them as the characters climb from one deck to the next. (With his scraggly beard and glasses, Bailey at times even looks as if he’s styled to resemble Richard Dreyfuss.) Blockbusters are often compared to amusement-park rides, but they rarely recall that the thrill of a roller coaster goes hand in hand with the fear. Koepp and Edwards struggle to get the balance right, but at least they’re trying for it, even importing a handful of children—courtesy of a dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) who thinks an ocean filled with aquatic dinosaurs the size of apartment buildings is the ideal spot for a pleasure cruise—to increase the sense of peril. But it’s plain early on that the movie lacks the courage to kill off anyone we really care about, so it’s mostly a matter of feeding nameless nonentities to the beasts while our protagonists squeeze through unscathed.
The disdain with which Rebirth introduces its genetically garbled behemoths feels like a way of shaming the audience for its own waning interest, as if saying, We’re making up new dinosaurs only because you ungrateful chumps lost interest in the real ones. (That Johansson’s mercenary charges a $20 million fee for her unsavory mission likewise feels like a comment on the price of a movie star’s half-hearted commitment.) But the problem isn’t that audiences have lost interest in dinosaurs. It’s that the movies have. Once he’s recovered from his fainting spell, the first movie’s Alan Grant is practically giddy at the opportunity to answer scientific questions that seemed doomed to linger in the realm of conjecture. But though his pupil Henry Loomis is lured onto the expedition by the prospect of seeing dinosaurs that aren’t cooped up in zoos or nature preserves, there seems to be nothing left to learn. When Alan coos, “They’re moving in herds,” he’s relating a fresh discovery, but when Henry warns his colleagues that spinosauruses are amphibious—and therefore can follow them from the ocean onto land—he might as well be reading out of a textbook.
Jurassic Park famously contains only a few minutes of digital imagery—estimates range from four to six—and although that’s due in some part to the then-tremendous amount of time and money it took to generate every single second, it’s also due to the lesson a young Spielberg learned from a malfunctioning mechanical shark: Less is more, and necessity is the mother of invention. Rebirth’s dinosaurs are everywhere, but the more you see, the less it means. They’re good for a scare now and then, but the sense of awe is long since gone.
