Just Stay Away from the Island

I have been up front in the past about the fact that I don’t really care much for the 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. films, both under their original branding and then the Jurassic World continuation series. I was a pedantic 11 year old when the first film came out, in large part because (even at that age) I had read the original novel, really enjoyed it, and hated all the changes that were made to the novel to make it fit into a Hollywood film. Sure, the dinosaurs looked great, probably the best they’ve ever been on screen, but that wasn’t enough to sell me on the story or characters. The film fell flat for me, as have basically all of the sequels.

Sure, sometimes the films have had bright points. The second film had a winning turn from Jeff Goldblum being very Jeff Goldblum. The fourth film, Jurassic World, was stupid but at least creatively so, and I did like Blue and the other velociraptors. I’ve managed to watch all the films in the series and never once find the awe and spectacle that others have with the series. It keeps coming back, keeps making money, and every time I sit there wondering, “why?” Why does this film series keep churning out bland sequels while other films I’d really like fail to capture the imagination of the general public in the same way.

We’re now facing the release of the seventh film in the franchise, Jurassic World: Rebirth, which looks to be another soft reboot for the franchise. None of the old continuity has been thrown away, but all the legacy characters (and legacy-legacy characters) are gone, replaced with an entirely new crew of idiots that go to an island populated by dinosaurs so they can get chased around for a while, some of them can get eaten, and poorly rendered CGI dinosaurs can wander around for a bit giving us all mild thrills. If it sounds like I’m not looking forward to this film, you would be correct.

Looks, I have nothing specifically against the idea of a Jurassic Park / Jurassic World / Jurassic Whatever film if the studio happens to make one that’s good. I keep going back to these, each time, in the hope that this time the series can find some magic and actually crank out an adventure that’s at least halfway affecting. I’ve seen the fourth movie a few times now, when it’s on and I’m bored enough to watch it, because it has just enough thrills that I can find it tolerable. I’d gladly take a tolerable entry in this franchise over Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom or Jurassic Workd: Dominion, both of which were wretched. Watchable is preferable to outright bad, and it certainly feels like Universal really only knows how to make bad movies in this franchise. This seventh movie, so far, is not dissuading me from this opinion.

The trailers indicate that the film is about a team of hunters – led by Scarlett Johansson's Zora Bennett and Mahershala Ali's Duncan Kincaid, joined by Jonathan Bailey's paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis – heading to one of the islands the dinosaurs were developed on. Of course, if you thought those islands were destroyed when a volcano came along, wiping away every dinosaur previously seen before, well, I’m sure that’s hand-waved away in the film proper. Whatever the case, the team has to go in and find the three largest dinosaurs in existence.

Why? So they can extract DNA from the dinos and use that in some magic pharmaceutical serum that, supposedly, will save countless lives. How do they know this will work? Well, something, something, magical dinosaur DNA. Really, at this point we need to not think with these films. Regardless, while the covert team is on the island, a vacationing family somehow ends up there as well, and now the team has to save them as well while also getting what they came for and avoiding a ton of dinosaurs. That’s the movie.

I have a number of issues with what I’ve seen so far, and I couldn’t just ignore it because, seriously, why are we still getting these films. Everyone seems to agree the last couple of movies were awful… although everyone also went to see them, leading every film in the Jurassic World sub-franchise to make over a Bil at the Box Office. Hell, the sixth film, Jurassic World: Dominion, came out post-COVID when everyone seems to have decided that blockbusters aren’t cool anymore, and it’s still made over a Billion. So audiences do seem to care and, certainly, Universal wasn’t going to stop making these movies. I just wish that wasn’t the case considering they all suck.

But more specifically, the two trailers that have come out so far (trailer one and trailer two) do a terrible job of selling this film, which might very well just come down to the fact that the film looks really bad. For starters, the plot is entirely bland. The plot seems to be a retread of the second, The Lost World, and third, Jurassic Park III, films. On the one hand we have a team of trained mercs going to an island to hunt down dinosaurs. And then that’s mashed with a story about a family trapped on the island, just wanting to escape. Nothing about this story feels fresh or new, it’s just the film series regurgitating its own plot threads, over and over again, in the hopes people keep coming back. So far it’s been working.

Secondly, the characters look utterly unremarkable. Johansson’s character is the bland, female action lead that has nothing more to her personality than being the “tough chick”. Some of that may be down to Johansson’s performance, with the actress looking utterly bored in her scenes in the trailer. She still gets more to do than poor Mahershala Ali who not only looks bored, but also doesn’t get to say much of anything in the trailer. I certainly hope he gets more to do and isn’t sidelined for Jonathan Bailey's paleontologist because Ali is a fantastic actor with real presence and Bailey… is not.

Worse, though, the film doesn’t have any way to really rise above its terrible pieces. At this point we keep seeing films about people that should really know better going to places where there are dinosaurs and then acting surprised when, oh wow, dinosaurs are dangerous. I don’t have any sympathy for these people at all. Maybe the family that’s shown in the second trailer ends up there by accident, but they seem like fodder inserted simply so we’re forced to care about someone. “Oh no, there’s a little girl, and she has a baby triceratops as a friend! The bad dinosaurs want to eat her! Do something!” It’s forced and stupid and I can’t care.

And, if we’re really getting into the weeds here, the dinosaurs look terrible. The CGI used in this film looks worse than what we were getting in Jurassic Park, the original film, over thirty years ago. I understand these are trailers and special effects can improve by the time a movie rolls into theaters, but the second trailer should at least look good enough to make us feel like the film is ready to watch, and this trailer fails at that. Backgrounds look flat, dinosaurs are poorly textured, and everything feels very fake and weirdly lit, as if the whole film were done in the Volume, the giant, round-screened stage that has become so popular in Hollywood now. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if that were the case because, well, it does look the part.

However you slice it, this film looks bad. The two trailers do not sell the film at all, and that’s likely got to be because the film itself is awful. You can only shine up a turd so much, and right now, from all we can see, Jurassic World: Rebirth is looking like a real stinker that can’t be polished at all. It’s sad, but also entirely expected for this reanimated one too many times franchise.