If you’ve kept up with right-wing tech oligarch Peter Thiel (or at least his interviews) you’ve probably noted his obsession with the term “stagnation.” While I don’t want to give too much credit to a thoroughly evil individual whose company, Palantir, is currently concocting a database of every single American citizen for nefarious government means, I must do a bit of a stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day admittance. Stagnation, not innovation, is the norm in modern mainstream cinema––hence why I’m reviewing Jurassic Park 7, which runs off the fumes of a 32-year-old blockbuster. Frankly, one wonders what the world would be like if John Sayles’ rejected script for a Jurassic Park 4 (featuring gun-wielding mercenary dinosaurs sent on rescue missions) had been made. It’s not a high standard to ask, but a single risk-averse decision may have pointed towards Hollywood moving at least incrementally forward.
Jurassic World Rebirth at the very least offers the one appealing factor of carrying over no characters from the previous six films, making you hope this series will move in some new direction. But it carries continuity of the previous World trilogy, with dinosaurs roaming amongst human society and finding themselves dying off due to an uninhabitable environment. Yet dinos are still thriving in forbidden islands near the earth’s equator, and pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebbs (Rupert Friend) invites badass military whatever Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson, making wincing faces while delivery soy banter) to join him on a mission to retrieve DNA from those forbidden creatures that may hold the key to life-saving materials for the human race. The two recent Wes Anderson mainstays find themselves recruiting a whole team of dispensables, including Mahershala Ali as a boat captain who wears a Curtis Sliwa hat. Along the way they cross paths with a family who listen to Vampire Weekend while sailing, just so you can get some slight traces of Spielberg sentimentality in there.
It can be said that Rebirth is a stronger entry than Colin Trevorrow’s films simply because low-budget VFX whiz-turned-director Gareth Edwards has a much better eye for shooting dinos, while the overqualified cast is better company than Chris Pratt’s wack pack. Yet it’s pretty hard to shake how dull and perfunctory the entire thing is; a lack of passion emanates from almost everyone involved. You can’t even picture them getting rankled by the rampant product placement herein––they were in Jurassic Park 7, after all.
Rebirth somewhat tantalizingly sets up one good idea: the crew arrives on an island of bioengineered misfit dinosaurs who were too unappealing for the original park. In characteristically safe fashion, the film mostly resists any truly disgusting or frightening monsters––something that would’ve at least been new––just to have a set piece involving a T-Rex again. Maybe it’ll have a chance to deliver on the idea when we inevitably get an eighth film by 2030.
Jurassic World Rebirth is now in theaters.