The Jurassic Park/World franchise has reached its seventh film. We are now into Episode VII, with four movies in just ten years. That’s a lot of them, but thankfully for Universal they have been successful. While critical reception has been mixed, fans were generally happy… until the last one, Jurassic World Dominion, which was too big, too long, too convoluted, had too many characters and subplots, tons of fan service and some crazy ideas, but failed terribly in its execution. Jurassic World Dominion stepped out of line a little, and burned away the trust in the series even for many diehard Jurassic Park fans. If Universal and Steven Spielberg were going to reboot it, it was clear that they needed to take a different approach, both in terms of story, style, and scale.

But after watching Jurassic World: Rebirth… I must say I may need to reconsider my stance towards Dominion. I miss Colin Trevorrow. Well, I miss JA Bayona most of all, his sensibilities and sense of wonder, but he was always going to be a guest director for the bridge movie in the Jurassic World trilogy. But Trevorrow and screenwriter Derek Connolly had something of a great concept: a clear, ambitious, and bold idea of where the series should go to offer something different than Spielberg’s masterpiece, probably worse, inevitably worse, but exciting and valuable on its own.

Jurassic World: Rebirth, which was fast-tracked in 18 months, has none of it. The script, written long before a director was found, was a request for David Koepp, a veteran and talented screenwriter, yes, but also an errand-runner for executives whose filmography includes modern classics like Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, and Panic Room, but also throwaway commercial films like Angels & Demons, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, and The Mummy from 2017. Or the last two Indiana Jones films… Not exactly someone expected to infuse the series with renewed energy or much passion (or any passion), but a competent and manageable writer that offers a prestigious credit title, but probably won’t be around for the sequel unless he’s asked again.

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In fact, it was widely reported that David Leitch had been approached to direct, but rejected it due to not having enough room for his creative input. Instead, Gareth Edwards was chosen, known for his skill shooting in real (and tropical) locations with a lot of digital effects, setting up really beautiful shots… and not much else.

Jurassic World retreats to old territory

The result is that Jurassic World: Rebirth feels a big step back to basics: a very simple story, set in the same location from beginning to end, one dinosaur chase after another with little or nothing interesting to tell in-between. Due to how the plot starts, it feels almost like a retelling of The Lost World: Jurassic Park, but without those great sequences that Spielberg crafted, it feels like going back into Jurassic Park 3 territory.

For many people, that will be a blessing. In fact, Jurassic Park 3, with its 90 minute runtime that was basically improvised as they were shooting, has had quite a reevaluation lately as the template of what a Jurassic Park movie should be: short, simple, with basic characters and a lot of dinosaurs.

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I don’t agree, but that’s my opinion, and I’m sure many people will find Jurassic World: Rebirth refreshing in that sense, specially because, as I myself can agree, Trevorrow let things get out of hand: the crazy subplots like Maisie Lockwood being a human clone in Fallen Kindgom (which later gets reworked in Dominion), the reintroduction of Lewis Dodgson from the Michael Crichton novel, and all those things with the locusts…

Taking the franchise back to square one was, on paper, the way to go: focus on the thrills, the scares and the chases with mostly new dinosaurs nobody has seen before mixed with old favourites so that fans still get that familiar feeling. It it’s nicely shot, for sure, although I still think it’s a many steps behind Bayona’s work with Fallen Kingdom, even if it looks more natural and less artificial than Jurassic World and Dominion.

But I simply cannot forgive how little effort they’ve put into this one, and how little they’ve cared with continuity, almost to the point of repeating the disrespect that JJ Abrams did with Star Wars Episode IX, completely erasing everything that Trevorrow, Connolly, and Emily Carmichael cooked in three films: that life found a way and dinosaurs and humans were about to coexist.

In this film, most dinosaurs have died, and they only remain in some Equatorial places… including a tropical island… which also happens to have yet another abandoned InGen laboratory nobody had heard about before. Sounds familiar? It’s like the franchise was retreating back to the original premise with its tail between its legs, as if originality was strictly forbidden for David Koepp. For the first time, I, a dino-nerd, am getting tired of the franchise: the Jurassic World trilogy, while being true to what the series is known for (dinosaurs chasing humans) always tried in every entry to offer something new. Here, it’s the same story all over again.

What Jurassic World: Rebirth gets wrong

But… I am aware that I am getting into a double contradictory. First, I sound like the bitter fan judging a movie because it didn’t match his expectations, for what it isn’t rather than by its own merits. And second, I already knew all of that before going into the movie: the rushed production, the creative differences, the premise of the movie… Yet, I still had hopes that, despite what I feel is taking the easiest and less interesting path, they would still be able to deliver a strong movie. The real problem, the reason why I think this movie fails, is that not only it’s unoriginal, it’s not exciting enough. There are, I feel, fewer dinosaurs than before, and almost none of them stay for more than a sequence, making them feel like bosses in a video game rather than actual characters you could actually care (even if only a little bit) about, which happened sometimes in the other movies.

The human characters are an improvement… partially. Scarlett Johansson gives the movie big star-power, and watching her, a confessed Jurassic Park fan, geek out about dinosaurs in interviews and marketing campaigns has been one of the better things I take from the whole movie. She plays an ex-military person tasked with leading an expedition into the dinosaur-filled island, bonding with Jonathan Bailey, a palaeontologist who loves dinosaurs and makes for an extremely likeable lead that sadly gets very little development. Mahershala Ali plays another military veteran friends with Johansson’s character… and that’s basically it for human leading characters.

Good on paper, but they get almost no development as they have to share screen-time with one of the less interesting families ever put to screen. A stranded family in the island that gets its own parallel adventure and it breaks up the pace completely. You end up feeling you haven’t spent enough time with the leading cast, that the movie has spoiled one of the few good things the script had because it was obligatory to have civilians to add more sense of danger, even though, with children involved, you know they will be okay. They add absolutely nothing.

And not every action set-piece hits the same.The Mosasaurus, which only got brief cameos in the World trilogy, finally gets a big action scene on its own, shared with Spinsaurus with a science-accurate design, but their appearance is very brief. The T-Rex is back with a sequence in a river brought back from the original Jurassic Park script, and it’s one of the best of the movie (yes, one of the best sequences of the movie is a recycled idea, too). But, after talking so much about rooting the film back in horror, I found a lack of tension, except for the finale. And that scence with the Titanosaurus, copying the music from the Brachiosaurus scene of the first Jurassic Park… another copy of what had done before, and with not very convincing CGI. They even have a baby dinosaur, because they had to, which they had already done in the Camp Cretaceous series. And, as far as I could tell, not a single animatronic was used or made it to the final cut, which is a shame as they are always fun to watch, even when drawing attention to themselves.

If I sound like a disappointed father it’s because I genuinely think they have tried very, very little with Jurassic World: Rebirth. I think the franchise has a lot of potential from a narrative point of view: with dinosaurs suposedly roaming free on Earth, you could tell all kinds of stories in all kinds of settings. Instead, Rebirth takes all of that potential, throws it in the bin and does the same movie all over again, but without the characters, the suspense, or the surprises that made the original so good.

For me, it is hugely disappointing, but given the critical reception the latest movies had, I can understand why they did it. If you want to spend two hours watching cool dinosaurs, exotic postcards, and listening to that iconic John Williams score without any of the original context, Rebirth will probably entertain you better than the latest movies. But it’s not evolution, it’s regression. And that eventually leads to extinction.