Jurassic World Rebirth
⭐+1/2
Expectation: 😐
Reality: 🫠
Where to begin… full discloser, I saw this movie because I love Jonathan Bailey (and he did not disappoint 👏🏽👏🏽). The star is for Johnny and the half star is for the demise of my least favorite character.
One of my friends saw it before me and said it wasn’t good, so I went in with low expectations. She typically rates lower than me and she gave it 2.5 so I was like cool, this will be a chill 3 star movie, won’t impress me but will entertain me for a couple of hours.
You guys, I checked my watch every 10 minutes and could not get out of the theater fast enough.
What is the tone of this movie supposed to be? What am I supposed to feel? Because I felt nothing. It’s classified as a sci-fi/thriller but I was not scared, anxious, or excited. I was not invested in any character or the story. The whole time I was just like “something interesting has to happen eventually, right?” Wrong.
Every character is a one dimensional bad guy (Rupert Friend’s Martin), good guy (Mahershala Ali’s Duncan), funny guy (David Iacono’s Xavier), nerd (Jonathan Bailey’s Henry), over-protective dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s Reuben), you get it. The layers of humanity are completely non-existent which makes it really hard to root for anyone. I absolutely would not have cared if no one had survived the ordeal (I almost didn’t make it myself).
Jurassic World Rebirth follows two groups of people. Group A: A research team on a mission to secure genetic material from the dinosaurs to get rich. Group B: A family on a father-daughter bonding boating trip crashed by the teen daughter’s idiot boyfriend.
The film spends so long introducing Group A that it’s super weird and jarring when it switches to Group B. The whole bit where Group A is being assembled seems like a sad attempt at humor. I think the actors did the best they could with the material but it was just a weird setup that fell flat. No one had strong or interesting motivation to go on this expedition. It felt like the writers were just like “we need to just get the team together and move on”—but they could’ve started the movie with all of Group A on the boat and then established how they knew one another and revealed why each person was there over time.
The two groups converge (for extra tension and drama, I guess?) only to split up again, because their stories do not need to intertwine. We really only needed one of them, having the two did nothing to move either storyline or elevate the film as a whole.
You know what might’ve worked? Get rid of Group A, add the bad guy from Group A as an uncle to Group B, combine the idiot boyfriend and the nerd into one person and now you have an interesting and compelling story to work with.
The characters and story are so bad, my jaw was on the floor the entire time as I thought “They cannot be serious.”
At one point, a guy hurts his leg. Pretty severely, like I was sure I heard and saw a crack or dislocation of sorts, but then he proceeds to run and swim without issue in future scenes. But then—surprise—he’s limping, badly! He can’t save his daughter, he has to stand there and do nothing because he’s in pain. Bro, did you hurt your leg or didn’t you? Filmmakers, did you forget, or was this supposed to be funny (it was not)?
Water dinos are out here capsizing boats and eating people but their teeth and claws can’t puncture a life raft? Seriously?
Oh, no, the sample is falling off the ledge, somebody catch it! Don’t worry, a human will fall many many feet trying to catch said sample, only for the human to live when they definitely should’ve died and the sample to float to the ground like a leaf on a crisp fall day. For humor? Nobody laughed.
The idiot boyfriend is quite funny, so props to David Iacono, but I can’t say the movie would’ve changed much without him.
Luna Blaise is awesome, and I want to give her her flowers for injecting some emotion into this film. But there were too many characters for her to get enough material to work with.
Every death is predictable. I clocked the survivors in the opening which made it a boring watch.
Just… why? (I know, I know, money). There are so many things they could’ve done with this, but they did… this. I just don’t understand.
The location is beautiful. Jonathan Bailey is beautiful. And that’s the most positive thing I can say 🤷🏽♀️
Others in my theater seemed to love it. One woman clapped, stood up and screamed “that was amazing!” so do with that what you will. She and I obviously look for different things in movies and have different definitions of amazing.
