Why Are We Remaking Jurassic Park 3?

With each successive Jurassic ParkWhile ever kid has dreams of seeing dinosaurs, Michael Crichton gave that dream a reality, at least on paper. His two Jurassic Park books spawned a movie franchise that's gone five movies strong (with no signs of slowing down), all because people love seeing dinosaurs made flesh. film I have to wonder why we keep making these. The first film (and, by extension, the first book) said all that needed to be said about the concept. It’s a theme park with genetically resurrected dinosaurs. Every film after that point was basically, “what if people are stupid and go back to the dinosaurs?” Sometimes it was a different island. Sometimes it was a different lab. You could cross-pollinate the ideas together and end up with a new film, but it was only new via release date. The films stopped feeling new, in terms of their story, around the release of the second one.

At this point, Jurassic Park (or Jurassic World if you prefer) is a zombie franchise, still shambling around, unable to die even though we’ve long passed the point where any kind of new ideas could be grafted onto this thing. Any time a film even feints towards some new chain of events that could play out, like Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom saying, “and now the dinosaurs are loose in the world,” the next film then rolls that back. We can’t have new ideas in this franchise, just an endless regurgitation of the same story over and over again.

That brings us then to the latest film in the series, Jurassic World: Rebirth, which is functionally a grafted remake of The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III. People go to an island that acted as an Ingen lab, find some new dinosaurs, attempt to steal the genetics from them, and in the process end up working to save a family that’s gotten themselves trapped on the island. We’ve gone so far down the pipeline that the films themselves are copies-of-copies. All originality has been lost, we’re just going through the motions so CGI dinosaurs can get trotted out on screen once again.

Directed by Gereth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla ‘14) and written by David Koepp (who as written some of the worst films of the last decade, like The Mummy ‘17 and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny), Jurassic World: Rebirth focuses on Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a covert field operative hired by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a Big Pharma bro, to head to one of the islands along the Equator where dinosaurs still roam. They can live there as the climate and atmosphere around the Equator are conducive to dinosaur life. But it’s also a forbidden zone where humans aren’t supposed to go, which is why someone like Zora is needed. She grabs her top guy, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), and a willing paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), for the trip so they can gather the genetic material of three mega-sized dinosaurs for… medical… reasons (don’t think about it and just sit back).

While they’re heading on their trip to the island, a family – Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the father, Reuben Delgado; Audrina Miranda as younger daughter Isabella; Luna Blaise as older daughter Teresa Delgado; and David Iacono as Teresa's boyfriend, Xavier Dobbs – ends up trapped out on their sinking sailboat after it’s attacked by a Mosasaurus. Their distress signal is picked up by Zora’s team, and they double back to pick them up. But the Mosasuarus chases them to the island, crashing their vessel and spreading the team across parts of the island. They have to all find a way to meet up at an abandoned village on the far side of the island, while also continuing to collect the genetic samples they need, all so they can finish the mission. And they have to do it without falling prey to the new breeds of dinosaurs unleashed on the island.

There really isn’t much story to Jurassic World: Rebirth. Hell, oftentimes it feels like even the movie is bored by what it’s doing. Everyone here is going through the motions, playing the roles assigned to them because this ship can’t stop and we have to keep getting Jurassic World movies whether we like it or not. That’s seemingly why this film doesn’t even try, it just slaps a team of a fetch quest together with a family of randos and says, “go survive the island.” It’s so threadbare that it feels more like an early Jurassic Park video game than an actual movie.

Not helping that feeling is the fact that the CGI here is so shoddy that it looks like video game graphics. It’s weird to think but the original Jurassic Park had beet looking dinosaurs all the way back in 1993, and it was made on a budget of $63 Mil. Jurassic World: Rebirth looks worse, as if all the characters in the movie were filmed against The Volume instead of actually being on location, and it cost $225 Mil. Perhaps audiences could tell that this one was a real stinker, because this film also is the first in the franchise, since 2015’s Jurassic World, to not crack $1 Bil at the Box Office. Hard to think of that as money well spent for a movie this awful looking.

There’s no wonder or majesty in this film. Everyone working on it, in front of and behind the camera, feels utterly bored. All the life and spark about dinosaurs that the very first film cultivated is missing here. Like the audiences within the film, everyone outside is starting to find these dinosaurs pretty tiresome. It would be nice if the film could find some of that wonder again, the awe that comes from seeing a massive dinosaur on screen. But for that to happen we’d need a better director than Gareth Edwards who, for all the decent films he’s made, seems utterly unable to understand the majesty of the beats he’s working on.

Honestly, the only person that seems to be putting any effort into the production is Scarlett Johansson, but then she’s an old hat at these kinds of CGI-laden summer blockbusters. She put in her dues with the Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. machine, and this is the kind of film she could make in her sleep. She smiles, she quips, she gives us some of that Black WidowNatalia Romanova was one one of the greatest and most effective Russian spies, a deadly killer who could blend in anywhere. Then she was turned and became one of SHIELD's most effective, and trusted, agents. charm, and she reminds everyone that she’s an A-list fucking actress who is way too good for this shit. She earns her paycheck as her scenes at least feel like there’s some semblance of life. She’s a real person in this world, despite how stupidly that world is written, and Johansson is trying. No one else really is, but she gives it her all.

It would just be nice if the rest of the film could rise to the occasion. This is a terrible, paint-by-numbers film that never once is able to get the audience invested in the story. You know, from the outside, who is going to live and who is going to die. You can predict almost all the plot beats before they happen. Even when the film tries to throw a curveball, such as introducing a pair of weird, new, genetically modified, hybrid dinosaurs it still doesn’t really know what to do with them. There’s no awe, there’s no horror, it’s just more CGI grist for the mill.

I was bored of the Jurassic World movies after the first one came out. That one already felt like a hollow cash grab trying to resurrect a franchise that didn’t need resurrecting. It did make a boat load of money, though, so we all had to accept that we’d get a sequel, and then another, until the franchise finally ran out of steam. With Jurassic World: Rebirth, we’re finally at a point where that steam engine is running dry. It’s a tedious, messy film that never comes together, and just about everyone has started to figure out that there’s no reason to even bother with these films at this point.

Maybe this film made enough at the Box Office to warrant one more stab from Universal, but if they decided to throw in the towel I wouldn’t blame them. Hell, I’d cheer for them. The Jurassic Park franchise needs to go on ice for a while, locked away in amber so we can start to miss the movies and reminisce about what we liked. But I have a feeling if Universal tries again any time soon, the downward trend for this franchise will continue and they won’t even be able to say an eighth one somehow made money.

Jurassic World: Rebirth isn’t just a bad film, it’s a harbinger for what’s coming. And we’d all be better off if Universal heeded that warning. Otherwise we’ll all be stuck doing this again in another couple off years, and the result probably will be even worse than this terrible, stupid movie.