Jurassic World Rebirth: Where the 'D' in the All-New D-Rex stands for 'Duh!'

By Chris Knight

Rating: C

“What would I do with mutant dinosaurs, from an accounting perspective?”

That’s an actual line spoken by dino-biologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) in the new Jurassic Park/World movie Jurassic World Rebirth. But it could as easily have been lifted from a boardroom meeting at Amblin Entertainment, the Steven Spielberg studio that has been making dinos roam the Earth since 1993.

What’s new we can do with all those (ahem) Cretaceous-era creatures this time?

Not much, as it turns out. You may recall (and I’ll forgive you if you don’t) that the movies have always flirted with the idea of these beasties escaping their island biomes and rampaging across the globe, Godzilla style. But as Jurassic World Rebirth explains with some egregiously hand-wavy science, they can’t survive outside the planet’s equatorial areas, thanks to that region’s warmth (um, what about climate change?) and abundant oxygen (patently made up).

And so, they’ve been left to thrive on a series of tropical islands, now declared off limits to humans. This is all explained in opening on-screen text, then again by Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a mercenary whose moral compass always points to top dollar.

She joins an ocean-going team led by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), on a mission to extract DNA from three different species of dinosaur — one at sea, one on land and one in the air — which he’s certain can be cooked up into a cure for heart disease that will make him very rich.

It’s a busy boat, skippered by Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and including a tasty crew that won’t all make it to the movie’s end. And things get even more crowded after a detour to pick up a family whose sailboat was just capsized by a giant mosasaur. They include Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as the dad, Luna Blaise and David Iacono as his teenaged daughter and her boyfriend, plus an even younger daughter — because it’s not a Jurassic movie without at least one child in peril.

Director Gareth Edwards is working from a screenplay by David Koepp, who wrote the original back in the day and adds a few things that didn’t make it into the final cut that time, like a river-raft T-Rex chase scene.

But there are only so many ways for dinosaurs to attack — basically tooth or claw. And so, this instalment mostly feels like new people in the same old situations. There are a few callbacks to the original, like a bus from “Crichton Middle School,” or a car mirror warning that objects are closer than they appear, its terror waned somewhat by the Manhattan setting.

The new dino on the block — because every chapter in the franchise needs one of those — is something called D-Rex, which a quick Google informed me was short for Distortus Rex. I had previously assumed Derivative Rex, since this mutant meat-eater seems to have more than little DNA from both the Alien and Star Wars series, and particularly the Rancor from Return of the Jedi.

But this is the problem with a movie series which wore out its welcome as far back as 2001’s Jurassic Park III. It’s not the hottest of takes to note that the hubris and greed that were the subject and moral of the very first movie have since become the defining ethos of the franchise.

So I will just add that, with seven films now out there, all of them similarly designed, we can declare with some certainty: They’re moving in herds.

Jurassic World Rebirth. Directed by Gareth Edwards. Starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Mahershala Ali. Opens July 2 in cinemas.