[SPOILERS HEREIN] Jurassic World Rebirth is a competent diversion, but I was bored. No awe or shock left in this 32-year-old franchise. Same old chain-jerkings, reptilian jolts and snarls, CG crap. You can’t go home again.
Well, you can if your audience is young enough and gripped by primitive expectations. My three and a half year old granddaughter would be wowed by Rebirth.
The predicting game we all play is “which characters will be eaten?” It’s understood, of course, that the proverbial white yuppie hardhead (Rupert Friend) will be chomped. And don’t you dare call this a spoiler! Bottom-line shitheads always end up in dino stomachs.
We know that 40-year-old Scarlett Johansson (talented veteran, no longer young and peachy but in good shape, looks great in her tight T-shirts) will survive to the end. Ditto the kindly, saintly Mahershala Ali.
But we’ve all been trained by the woke playbook to expect that the other significant black dude, Bechir Sylvain (good looking, buff, smooth manner), will survive also because POCs don’t die in these films — only venal scumbag whiteys. So it’s quite a surprise when Sylvain is swallowed. HE to movie: “Wait, wait…did you just kill a handsome, muscle-bound black dude? That’s not right!”
We know the Mexican / LatinX family (dopey dad, two pretty daughters, dumb-as-a-rock boyfriend) won’t get eaten, even though it would be shocking (and therefore perversely satisfying) if one of the pretty daughters were to die howling and shrieking. Or at least the dumbshit boyfriend.
But no — despite this family’s rank stupidity they aren’t consumed. I really wanted the moronic dad to be ripped apart and chewed to death…(“die! Eat that stupid fucker!…die!!”)…but no.
Okay, there’s one quiet, pastoral scene in which the scientific explorers on the proverbial dino island (the natural settings are in Krabi, Thailand) stand next to and stare at a pair of towering, passive, cow-like brontos with absurdly long skinny tails — this is the only majesty-of-dinos scene that really grabs you.**
But they’ve simply gone to this well too many times.
The people in the theatre were “tee-hee”-ing, chuckling and “hoo-hoo”-ing like it was a comedy.
Sick to death of hearing John Williams’ “Jurassic Park” theme, which is dutifully adapted and recycled by Alexandre Desplat.
Excellent CG, but I didn’t believe a frame of any of it. Fake acting, the feigning of extreme fear, stupid or reckless behavior. Go fug yourselves.
A team of scientists (led by Johansson and Friend) are looking to extract blood vials from three species because their blood has properties that can combat or eradicate heart disease, blah blah.
** But director Gareth Edwards ruins this scene by craning upwards a couple of hundred feet to show that these two brontos are part of a huge grazing herd…dozens! HE to Edwards: Why not hundreds? More is better, right?