Here they are again: 32 years after the dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park hit the ground running, stomping, screeching and munching everyone in sight like spare ribs, they’re back, searching for a plot that provides a logical reason for their existence. In their seventh slog around the forbidden tropical island that author Michael Crichton originally created, the prehistoric monsters are noisier, the people they terrorize are prettier, and the screams are louder than ever. Otherwise, it’s business as usual.
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JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH ★★ (2/4 stars) |
Sadly, the efforts to blend the world of scaly monsters with the daily activities of their human captors have resulted in an ambience of dinosaur tedium. Movies and TV shows have now turned once-horrifying creatures into a domesticated species as familiar, ferocious (and feared) as cocker spaniels. Big mistake. As a newly formed group of doctors, researchers and scientists is about to find out, the old Jurassic Park neighborhood 400 miles north of the equator, though abandoned and forbidden by the government for years, still exists and serves as home to the most savage horrors of the past. The motto of Jurassic World: Rebirth is “Can You Survive the T-Rex?” Why not? Six times before, we’ve already survived a franchise that has become a cinematic cottage industry.
This time, the humans in peril consist of mathematicians, greedy scientists, evil geneticists and mercenary pharmaceutical executives, on a mission to collect the DNA of the world’s most dangerous dinosaurs, which have, in their blood and tissue samples, 65 million years of power to cure heart disease. Equally divided between villains and heroes, this motley group includes gorgeous Scarlett Johansson as the fearless group leader and uber-handsome Jonathan Bailey (the prince in Wicked) as a humanitarian medical researcher looking for a scientific breakthrough to save the world.
In a parallel subplot, they accidentally rescue a stranded family of vacationing tourists. One of the survivors is a little girl who risks all of their lives while adopting a baby dinosaur in the shape of a puppy dog with fangs that turns out to be as strange and loving as E.T. Utterly preposterous, but just one of the many contrived attempts to preserve the family-oriented concepts in Spielberg films. Gareth Edwards, the director, hasn’t really thought up anything new, but he has an active imagination. The mixture of horror and humor Spielberg had in mind originally is always lurking around the edges of every scene, often surrendering to the brand of hair-raising horror that appeals to teenagers who look for nothing more memorable than the anticipation of whatever mutation crawls its way out of the jungle next. I’ve already forgotten most of it, but I was especially impressed by the assault of flying raptors the size of F-16s, and before the cast even reaches the island, they are attacked by an army of carnivorous fish that look like killer sharks the size of Rhode Island.