Jurassic World: Rebirth
Jurassic World: Rebirth
Five years post-Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), an expedition braves isolated equatorial regions to extract DNA from three massive prehistoric creatures for a groundbreaking medical breakthrough.
rg9400 reviewed6d ago
The first half of this movie is shockingly bad, to a degree I really could not believe. The dialogue and script is so amateurish that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that an AI wrote it. Characters will tell you exactly how they feel, their motivations, and the dynamics that are important. Jokes land with a thud, and the timing is so off that moments don't have enough time to breathe while at others it almost seems like the characters are pausing for an audience reaction. The acting is also very bad despite the star power, often making it sound like they are doing line reads for the very first time. The result is something that feels so fake that I couldn't become even remotely immersed. Sometimes ScarJo just stares into the camera and tries very hard to look sad, but coupled with everything else, I felt like I could hear the director telling her to do that while he filmed her. Now, you might tell me that all of this is pointless and that people go to see these movies for the dinos, not the humans. Point well taken. Except it takes half the movie for them to arrive at the damn island. I don't know why they chose to add all this pretense of character backstory and some haphazard moral and thematic dilemma because none of it actually matters or is good. ScarJo will tell you about her mom or her friend, yet none of it comes up. I can't even recall a single character name from the main group. There is this extra family that feels almost like a side plot in a different movie, and they are far more compelling than the main trio of stars. I'm not rating this movie extremely negatively because I enjoyed their story, and when the dinos finally come, Gareth Edwards is finally able to focus on his strong suits. This movie feels distinct in the franchise because the steamy, foggy backdrops and grotesque mutant dinosaur designs make it feel more like a traditional horror movie, more aligned with something out of Alien than past movies in this franchise. This creates legitimate tension and makes the second half engaging. I'm so glad because I thought I was in for a really rough time in the first half, but the second zipped by without me noticing. I'm not entirely sure why they didn't just make most of the movie like this. The humans within this world have stopped caring about dinosaurs, and it feels like the filmmakers think that is true for the world watching it. To a degree, bad movie after bad movie might have lowered interest in this franchise, but people still want to see a good dino flick, not whatever garbage passed for human drama in this movie