When we first hear John Williams’ Jurassic Park theme, Jurassic World Rebirth transports its audience back to the magic and awesome images of 1993.
Whatever composer Alexandre Desplat contributes becomes lost in mayhem; it doesn’t always work and certainly isn’t memorable as the iconic Williams score.
Executive Producer Steven Spielberg should have exercised his 1993 directorship in story development and creatures on offer.
Jurassic Park writer David Koepp could have developed characters more, made us like them and rally for them, as we had with the people in the1993 picture.
This is too much like a video game plot, a video game side-quest, as suggested in the trailers. It could, maybe, have been titled Jurassic World Afterbirth.
Cinematographer John Mathieson does the audience no favour shooting too many sequences at sunrise, sunset or nighttime.
Background glows while actors’ faces are almost unrecognisable.
Jurassic Park Rebirth is derivative of Koepp’s own Jurassic Park, including a mutant dinosaur threatening people in an enclosed space.
Remember the raptor in the kitchen? The pursuit of the Tyrannosaurus Rex after a jeep, the children gritting teeth in fear back in 1993?
There is a memorable Tyrannosaurus Rex sequence very different, yet just as thrilling, having appeared in the original Crichton novel.
It begins with the dinosaur asleep in the reeds alongside a river.
Still sleeping it rolls over.
Isabella Delgado (Audrina Miranda, child actor) struggles with an inflatable raft, instructions clearly stating ‘Do Not Inflate on Land.’
She ignores the rule or doesn’t see it.
All hell breaks loose when the terrifying beast awakens and attempts to pursue and eat the tiny girl, no more than a morsel for the gaping-mouthed knifelike-toothed predator.
How this child ends up on the island is a matter of her family’s pleasure boat sunk by prehistoric sea creatures.
Clinging to the remnant of the boat, they are rescued and have no choice landing on the Ile Saint-Hubert, a new site for dinosaur research and experimentation.
Martin Krebs, an industrialist (Rupert Friend), leads an expedition to isolated equatorial regions where rogue and mutant dinosaurs exist courtesy of the failed Jurassic World Theme Park.
People are no longer interested in seeing dinosaurs, not even fossil bone constructions in museums. Purpose is to extract DNA from three prehistoric creatures – one flying, one land-bound, one living in water – for a groundbreaking medical breakthrough.
Krebs thinks only of becoming a wealthy man.
Out for the good of mankind, not the money is Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) who’s aware that survival is a long shot.
Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is an adventuress, a character more at home in a Marvel Hero picture.
In charge of a boat is soft-spoken Duncan Kinkaid (Mahershala Ali, twice Oscar Winner for Supporting Actor).
Unfortunately, none are given the qualities needed for cheering them on in their DNA pursuits. Both seem to be picking up their easiest payday.
As mutants are mentioned in unnerving conversation, the only one that works is the Tyrannosaurus Rex, bigger and bulkier than any known fossil survivor.
Disappointing are the dinosaur mutations.
The raptor has wings, which fossils do reveal, but this Mutodon is a clumsy hybrid composed of a dromaeosaur, wolverine of the late Cretaceous, and a pterosaur, a sharp-toothed flying monster having mated with a sharper-toothed land dweller.
Greatest let-down is the final monstrous mutant Distortus Rex, an oversized jungle dwelling quadruped that seemed to have survived from one of those 1950s screen critters, the misshapen result of atomic testing.
The only reason to see Jurassic World Rebirth is for the ‘just in the nick of time’ actors pulling in their legs and hanging upside-down in the near chomp of a dinosaur.
Whether darkened because it’s night or in the bright sunshine of the day, these are the CGI sequences that appear credible and provide thrills.
