The seventh instalment in the Jurassic Park (now Jurassic World) series, Jurassic World Rebirth might be the first of the sequels to really come close to capturing the kind of wonder, excitement and horror that the 1993 original offered. That might be in part because it cribs liberally from it, with both moments and entire sequences closely evocative of their 32-year-old counterparts. But there’s plenty else that’s new here, and Rebirth is a characterful expansion to the Jurassic Park story.
Thoughts of containment have finally been totally discarded – dinosaurs have now been roaming the Earth for some time, to the point that they’re dying out everywhere other than a narrow band around the equator, which is illegal for human travel. So that’s where we’re headed, of course, as a pharmecutical exec seeking to make a fortune from dino-sourced drugs hires a team of mercenaries to extract blood from three creatures: one that swims, one that walks, and one that flies. It’s a decent structure that tells you what to expect and allows for a variety of settings and action, into which are placed such charismatic stars as Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey and Rupert Friend. Director Gareth Edwards builds the world beautifully, exploiting it for that sense of scale that so defines his aesthetic, and reminding Mike in particular of his feature debut Monsters; and although in simple terms – this is, ultimately, a blockbuster sequel – the film has a moral message worth expressing.
Jurassic World Rebirth is easily the best of the Jurassic sequels and equally easy to recommend. Just try not to focus too much on how it reminds you of a better film from 1993.
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With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.
