Jurassic World: Rebirth (Edwards, 2025)
“Did everyone who got eaten deserve it?” my wife asked as I walked through the door, returning from Jurassic World: Rebirth.
After over three decades of marriage, I probably should no longer be surprised at her ability to sum up movies sight unseen. Ever since Malcolm told park owner John Hammond that he was so busy trying to figure out how to clone dinosaurs that he hadn’t stopped to ask if he should clone dinosaurs, the franchise has been been so obstinately set on not exploring questions of culpability and responsibility that it has been impossible to take it seriously as anything other than an endless series of horror/chase set pieces.
The answer to the question, by the way, is “no,” though writer David Koepp and director Gareth Edwards bet a lot of money on the proposition that as long as as least our protagonists make cursory efforts to avoid civilian casualties, we will overlook or forgive their role in endangering others in the first place.
In this case, our “heroes” are Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), a pair of mercenaries who want the money offered for blood samples from dinosaurs enough to drag a rescued family into the danger zone but not so much that they can countenance standing idly by when a child is hanging off the side of a boat over the gaping jaws of a predator.
Jurassic Park movies have always been a bit too cavalier for my taste about using children as dinosaur bait to up the ante. What’s particularly disappointing about Rebirth is that it spends a good portion of its first half showing its youngest character, Isabella, genuinely traumatized by the attack that capsizes the family boat and forces her dad to send out a rescue plea. When Zora asks Isabella’s father why he would even take the kids into these waters, his answer — that they have sailed the same waters many times and never been hurt — is weak. But she can’t exactly call him in on it because she won’t delay a potential payday long enough to take the family to safety. That and because the real answer — that they need to be there for the movie to happen and Koepp can’t think of a good reason for why they would be — is something nobody wants to think too much about.
Rebirth opens with a flashback set piece from before the island being visited is abandoned. It has no necessary connection to the plot proper, which posits that dinosaurs are gradually dying everywhere except in tropical zones around the equator. But thematically, it shows a careless worker dropping a candy bar wrapper on the floor. That wrapper gets sucked into a vent causing a containment malfunction that leads to another worker dying horrifically. It is hard to read this prologue as saying anything other than that carelessness is almost as bad as intention when one is dealing with lethal stakes . . . and that the cost of carelessness, malice, and corporate greed is often borne by those the careless and greedy never see, much less give thought to.
If the film had followed through on that theme, perhaps by giving Zora a genuine character arc that moved her from mercenary selfishness to empathetic human being, I might have thought the use of the non-professional family to add stakes were justified. Instead it presents her self-interestedness as literally a performative masque, and allows her redemption through deciding to eschew the money the mission would pay her in favor of “open sourcing” the blood samples so that nobody will have to pay for the drugs created from it. (That is exactly how medical patents work, right?) Late in the film, there are some nameless, faceless helicopter pilots who die pretty horrifically to whom, if I followed the dialogue correctly, Zora had promised a portion of the mission’s profits. Their deaths — the deaths of anyone who *didn’t* have a change of heart, is lazy, convenient writing at its most grating. Zora’s transformation costs her nothing, nor is she forced to confront her share of the blame for or complicity in any of the decisions that came before.
Given that Rebirth is rated PG-13 and the franchise has a whole line of action toys marketed for adolescents, any hand-wringing about trauma in Act I feels awfully cynical, and the unwillingness to admit that violence that doesn’t end in death can still be traumatic feels unironically meta. Rebirth tries to channel the original’s brontosaurus scene by having the parties witness some non-carnivores with long tails necking. The humans whoop and holler and we are meant, I think, to feel shame that, like the civilian population early in the film, we have ceased to find wonder and exotic beauty in these marvels of science. The scene doesn’t really work, neither as meta commentary nor as a credible part of the narrative given where the characters are at. It would be as if someone in Oppenheimer said, “You know, if you can just look past the radiation and destruction for a second, mushroom shaped clouds can be kind of beautiful…”
As an aside, Isabella adopts a pet dinosaur that fits in her backpack and looks suspiciously like the cute but poison critters that killed Nedry in the original. I guess in the Jurassic World Universe, kids are surrounded by magic force fields protecting them from the cruelty of others and their own stupid decisions. Either that , or Edwards and Koepp were one Mattel action figure short of their required quota.
