Jurassic World Rebirth

Find in Jurassic World Rebirth two competing plot lines. The first is premised on the kind of pitch-think that sees a real movie star, like Scarlett Johansson, hired to take up an enormous amount of one sheet real estate and play a mercenary hunting for blood samples on an island packed with tooth and claw. The second, and less obviously showy strand, concerns itself with an injured and extremely divorced father attempting to keep his tween and teen daughters, as well as a layabout boyfriend (and eventually a tag-along pet who's the spitting image of Cera from Don Bluth's The Land Before Time), alive after they are shipwrecked in the exact same neighbourhood. So while the more experienced players can set up rope harnesses to descend into Pterosaur lairs or blast hand-held shock guns at thrashing sea creatures, the civilians that are along for the ride, the Delgado family, are able to have separate (and far more entertaining) sequences built around a terrifying jungle expedition. 

Set an enough amount of time following Jurassic World Dominion that the new normal proposed by that fossilized stinker - that mankind must learn to co-exist alongside prehistoric beasts of every stripe - has been jettisoned in favour of an equatorial containment that has dinosaurs only able to thrive on the tropical islands where they were genetically engineered in the first place. Rebirth then, despite the more expansive language used in its title, is far more interested in following up concepts and ideas present in the Park-era, Michael Crichton-adapting instalments. Directed by Gareth Edwards with a returning David Koepp on screenwriting duties, Rebirth underlines this conceptual shift with an ailing Apatosaur being scraped up off the tarmac in New York while tardy commuters grumble. Unlike the more striking, camouflaged examples that appear later in Rebirth, this dinosaur has the flat, grey texture of a lower resolution ancestor and the drooping clumsiness of Winsor McCay's Gertie the Dinosaur. It is, as it dies, marked as both technologically primitive and archaeologically outmoded. 

Although not the totality of a piece that still clings to the misguided notion that audiences demand fresh, mutated creatures and expert contrivance to get themselves engaged (see also: Alien: Romulus) Rebirth is best when the audience are allowed to luxuriate in the company of dinosaurs who are behaving more like curious animals in search of their next meal. A first act sortie involving a massive and highly prized Mosasaurus apportions space to a pack of streaked Spinosaurs who swim in her wake, gobbling up leftovers. Despite Jurassic Park III's big bad being relegated to a scavenger picking up after the real apex predator, this more crocodilian take on Joe Johnston's featured theropod allows Edwards' film to not only correct now discredited takes on antiquated beasts but also to indulge himself in Spielbergian conceits that reach beyond that director's Jurassic predecessors. Briefly, we're in Jaws territory with hurried chatter about astronomical taxonomy and wincing inserts of human blood lapping at uncharted shorelines. Even better still is a creeping interlude in which the sodden Delgado family attempt to retrieve a raft from underneath a slumbering (but not sated) Tyrannosaur, a sequence dreamt up by Crichton for his 1990 hardback but left out of the original Jurassic Park feature.