When there is a new big budget dinosaur movie around, I’m usually going to watch it, eventually. The age of streaming means that I don’t have to wait that long until I can watch a movie if real life responsibilities get in the way of going to the theatre, and this leaves me with a couple of weeks in which I’m being exposed to the true measure of our times, Internet opinions. In case of the most recent Jurassic World movie, Jurassic World: Rebirth, what I was getting from trailer commentaries, YouTube thumbnails and cursory glances at review scores, was that this was not going to be a good movie. Accordingly, I adjusted my expectations. After all, consensus on the Internet is always, without any doubt, impeccably right. Add to that my gut response to seeing the trailers, and all indicators were pointing towards Rebirth not being a good movie.
And I was kind of right to feel that way, yet also kind of wrong. It’s complicated. Because Jurassic World: Rebirth is, barring some mishaps, a perfectly fine movie. Not great, but not bad either. Would I recommend it? No, probably not. But aside from it being a fairly okay movie, it has some fun ideas it plays around with, and there’s one scene in particular that kind of stuck with me because I think it’s kind of brilliant.
Spoilers ahead.
But first, I will spare you the synopsis and get straight to a few of my gripes with the movie. For starters, I never enjoyed the hybrid dinosaurs, and I hope that after Rebirth the powers in charge finally decide to put that particular trope to rest. It was bad idea from the start, because dinosaur fans don’t want to see fantasy monsters, they want to see dinosaurs. And if your team of concept artists runs out of ideas, please just hire one or two of the amazing, hard-working paleoartists around the world (for example the excellent Andy Frazier). On a related note, there are flying raptors in this movie. Yes, they fly now. Which I personally find super lame, but even putting that aside, the movie doesn’t really do that much with them. They mostly skulk around derelict buildings and even sewer tunnels, both of which being places inside of which they can not fly. A feature that, as much as I personally dislike it, could have unlocked literally a whole new dimension of terror1 becomes a pointless gimmick. It is just baffling to me. Because why give them wings at all, when regular raptors could have done the trick as well?
Additionally, larger beasts such as the Mosasaurus and especially the D-Rex seem to be changing size from scene to scene, with especially the latter at times coming off as almost Kaiju-like before shrinking down to a more manageable size. I don’t actually have that much of a problem with it, but I think it’s weird that my bird brain was able to notice it. In one scene, the D-Rex munches on a helicopter, in a later scene, it appears to be not that much bigger than a T-Rex. Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me here, so take that impression with a grain of salt.
Finally, on a more structural level, elements of the movie feel a bit rushed and undercooked, primarily the characters and their relations, although there are a couple of smaller character and bonding moments that convey at least enough to make me care about most of the characters.
Some viewers might also take issue of the callbacks and references to previous movies, especially the first one, because apparently we live in a time in which such simple pleasures are forbidden. Yes, I’m a simple man, but I found most of the references to be playful and sometimes even a little bit adorable. Your mileage might vary on that, but to put it into perspective, I’d like to offer that we now live in a world in which kids, teens and young adults who saw legendary movies at an impressionable age are making movies in the same series now that they are adults, so of course filmmakers are going to play with references. Honestly, I would do the same if I was a filmmaker.2
But let’s get to the positives. Jurassic movies are, at their core, adventure movies with heavy themes of corporate capitalism as well as corporate espionage deeply woven into their, pardon the pun, DNA. In previous World movies, I felt that these latter two themes had been too much of the focus. Rebirth, however, cuts back on them as much as possible to give room to an almost Lost World-style adventure, not in the sense of the 1997 sequel to the first Jurassic Park movie, but in the sense of „there’s a hidden world we don’t know of.“3 One scene in particular features an almost fantastical view over the jungle island with a geographical element that would feel more at home in a Xenoblade game than in actual Earth geography (but what do I know about actual geography). Fittingly, dinosaurs appear to be a bit more colorful now and there’s quiete a few sequences of wonder and awe, which is nice. In addition, the plot has characters making an anti-corporate decision, which I enjoy a lot personally but also think in general is the right decision for Jurassic movies going forward, since previous films often shamelessly reveled in the symbols, structures and aesthetics of fictional corporations.4 In other words, just give me the dinosaurs, I don’t need to see more of inGen.
There is, however, a final point that bolstered my enjoyment5 of Jurassic World: Rebirth. Because this movie appears to me, at least, to be interested in actually depicting dinosaurs as animals rather than as monsters. And here I’m going to talk about what might be either one of the best or worst scenes in the movie, depending on where you stand. Around the middle of the movie, the characters of the B-plot6 decide that they need to continue onwards on a nearby river when they find a yellow, inflatable raft. Unfortunately, there’s a sleeping T-Rex nearby, and of course it wakes up when the gang starts inflating the raft right under the T-Rex’s nose. What follows is a fascinatingly slow chase scene between a T-Rex, which is *checks notes* a giant predator animal that just six movies ago almost caught up to an accelarating jeep, and a small yellow raft with four terrified people in it, all of them paddling for their dear life.
I love this scene. Because the T-Rex isn’t a monster here. It’s a curious animal that just woke up from a nap. It’s hunting in the same way your dog would hunt a treat-filled dog toy right after lunch time, and it’s almost goofy how sleep-drunken yet at the same time intrigued it chases the raft. It’s not hungry, which we now from the carcass of a Parasaurolophus near the T-Rex’s resting place. It’s not angry (we have all seen the T-Rex when it’s angry). It’s playing. It is engaged by the bright colours of the raft and the flailing, humanoid shapes on it. And this is both adorable and terrifying, because what is play for the Tyrannosaurus is a dangerous threat for our set of characters.
I could list everything that is wrong with the scene here on a technical level or how irrational it seems to carry on with dragging an inflatable boat along a sleeping T-Rex instead of waiting until it wakes up and goes hunting or something, but what do I know about what would be rational behaviour in a situation like this and also I am not boring enough to actually care whether or not this is good filmmaking or not. This scene works because it shows the T-Rex as something different than a monster, which neatly contrasts with the abominations the characters are trying to get away from in the end of the movie.
It’s also not the only depiction of more animalistic behaviour of dinosaurs. There’s a pack of Spinosaurus hunting alongside a Mosasaurus. This Mosasaurus only attacks the main character’s boats,7 as one of our characters remarks, because it might perceive it as rival animals. A scene in which the team attempts to steal a sample from an egg gets interrupted by a Quetzalcoatl, with the scene leaving little doubt that this animal just came back from doing Quetzalcoatl stuff and reacting appropropiately when it found three human intruders inside it. Furthermore, dinosaurs react to each other and the world around them in this movie. There are instances of dinosaurs not engaging, for example not chasing potential prey beyond a certain point. Aforementioned T-Rex decides it’s not worth the hassle at some point in the raft scene (even though it could have easily found a way), and a Dilophosaurus disengages from its infamous threat pose when it realizes that there’s a T-Rex going to wake up soon. Even the D-Rex, one of the last things I want to see in a dinosaur movie, is influenced by certain environmental factors and decides not to chase when these factors are gone.
The naturalistic depiction of dinosaurs is probably most beautiful in a scene that mirrors that famous Brachiosaurus scene from the first movie. When our main characters find a herd of Titanosauruses, they are struck by their beauty and gentleness; one of the main characters even manages to touch them, teary-eyed. The team gets their sample (which doesn’t even bother the gigantic animal), the Titanosaurus go their way, and that’s it. No predator attack, no sudden panic, no stampede, no chase. Just a short moment to take a breath and see these animals as what they are.
Back then, I cried when he first saw the famous Brachiosaurus scene in Jurassic Park, and it’s what I’m coning back for when I’m going to the big, loud and dumb dinosaur movies. I just want to see them depicted as the animals that they might have been, not as the monsters film executives want them to be. And for that, I have to respect Jurassic World: Rebirth. If I was a kid today, I would have probably cried at the Titanosaurus scene, and I think none of the Jurassic World movies so far did that for me.
footnotes
1If you want to see them as monsters, that is.
2It’s honestly half of the reason why I write anything.
3So, basically, The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, lol.
4It’s telling that a series about dinosaurs has always felt the need to also market various kinds of vehicles with fictional corporate logo branding as merchandise, because the giant de-extincted terror lizards are apparently not enough of a draw.
5Look, English isn’t my first language, and sometimes the only fragments of meaning that come to my mind are verbose. Let me have this.
6I’m going by billing here, because I’m lazy.
7Yes, there are two boats that get destroyed in this movie. If I had a nickel…
christoph-david volbers 