I saw Jurassic World: Rebirth in the cinema a few days ago and this week it came out on digital streaming. Which is mental. It arrived in cinemas on July 2 and was available at home barely a month later.
But anyway, Rebirth isn’t just another entry in the franchise. It’s not just the seventh movie. It really is something of a rebirth – with echoes of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park through and through. Shot on film, it was directed by Rogue One’s Gareth Edwards on a budget of around $200 million – and has already made a whacking great profit as it races towards hitting a billion dollars at the box office.
So let’s put on some khaki shorts, grab some red flares and hold onto our cups of water as we fast forward to ask what happened in the latest Jurassic movie.
DON’T MISS: Jurassic Park (1993): 15 minutes of dinosaurs & CGI we actually like! (ONE HOUR RETROSPECTIVE)
Comic Book Chris is Gone
The OG Jurassic Park gave us awe-driven adventure – practical effects, wonder, ethics versus spectacle. Now fast-forward to Rebirth and it leans into that feeling again.
It ditches the over-the-top CGI of recent World films which kept pulling me out of the movie, embraces a grittier, scarier tone, and Johansson’s Zora is one of the strongest action leads yet. I love Chris Pratt, but his dino wrangler is made to look almost comic book by comparison.
We get a return of David Koepp to the writing – the guy who wrote the original screenplay for Jurassic Park with Michael Crichton – and a story idea that kickstarted the whole thing from one Steven Spielberg.
We start off with what feels like a David Attenborough documentary in the jungle, on a new island, looking at all sorts of animals, before we hear a rumbling in the distance. And maybe a little roar. Then, just as we think a big dino is going to appear, instead a helicopter flies past. And this sets the tone for the movie. This opening scene is set in an experimental, and ethically-questionable, laboratory a few years before the first Jurassic World movie, where a tiny human mistake with a Snickers bar sets the whole plot in motion. And it’s arguably one of the most distressing scenes we’ve had in a long, long time, with visuals briefly reminiscent of early Alien movies.
As we move to present day, it sets up a convincing world in which people have become bored of seeing dinosaurs everyday in the real world and we find they are mostly dying out. So Scar Jo helps recruit a team to go to the island to recover blood samples from three dinos that can help with a medical cure.
Shot on film but with a key difference
But let’s talk about the visuals. Rebirth was shot on 35 mm film using vintage Panavision lenses and Kodak stock – designed to replicate the old-school cinematic feel of the original. Cinematographer John Mathieson said there was initially resistance to shooting on film, mostly over fears it would be expensive. But he’s quite experienced in it and managed to convince them it would work.
The team took influence for the look of Rebirth from four films – Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park, Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark – and Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, which Mathieson himself shot.
And it really does look like a return to the visuals of the ’93 film. It feels a million miles away from the heavily CG Jurassic World films that came before. But then you realise that 2 out of 3 of those movies WERE shot on film too. So why the difference? Well, shooting on film is only part of the equation. That’s just the canvas that you start painting on. So much work happens after that and this is something that has driven me mad for years – just overcooking the digital post-production tweaking of colours and the look of the final print.
Mathieson said: “We also tried not to noodle too much with the pictures – no custom curves, no crushing of the blacks, no fiddling with windows or secondaries. We just let the film be what it is, with its color and grain. Gareth was really into this process and abided by the rules religiously in going for a filmic look. If anyone’s going to say this film looks different, or nostalgic, this was a big part of it.”
It goes back to what Dr Ian Malcolm says – just because you could play around with colour and make everything look different to how it was shot, doesn’t mean that you should. Every single tweak you make takes the audience one step further away from feeling its authenticity.
I’d also hazard a guess that Rebirth shot far more on real locations with less green screen.
Edwards and his Ensemble
Then there’s Gareth Edwards. The guy behind Rogue One and Godzilla is the perfect choice for this. There’s no director qualified to handle monsters and VFX more than him. But it almost wasn’t him. Originally they were going to use David Leitch, director of Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2 and The Fall Guy – who had worked on the second unit of the original Jurassic World movie in 2015. But that didn’t work out. And Gareth Edwards had decided to step away from big studio productions after making The Creator to work on his own smaller projects. But he’s a huge fan of the Spielberg original and couldn’t turn down the offer.
He brings that same combination of wonder, horror and warmth that Spielberg does. He creates some of the most cinematic dino entrances and moments the franchise has seen. And he gets fantastic performances from his cast.
Scarlett Johansson as Zora is a refreshing change over previous leads – a strong female leader that never has to deal with being a love interest nor a cliche of being an action barbie or an ice queen. And there’s no high heels in the jungle here.
But this is an ensemble cast. Everyone is great, from Jonathan Bailey’s charming, academic with wire-rimmed glasses; to Mahershala Ali’s strong, composed captain; and even Rupert Friend’s twist on the classic shady company man. And that’s only half the main cast, with the other half being a new family dynamic led by Manuel Garcia‑Rulfo.
The Dinosaurs – old and new
Right, the dinosaurs.
Because of this insane trend of studios setting release dates for movies before they have even finished scripts and chosen directors, the team on this had a really limited amount of pre-production. They couldn’t make any fancy animatronics like previous movies, but there were some heads, limbs and claws used on location mostly as guides for lighting and eye lines for the actors.
We get maybe a dozen or so main on-screen dinos, a mix of classics like the T Rex and some new mutated versions like the Mutatdon and the Distortus Rex.
The Mutadon is a raptor–pterosaur hybrid which answers the question of how can you make the 1993 velociraptors more dangerous. Make them be able to fly. Scarlett Johansson described it as a nightmare creature and it’s used well in the last third of the movie, in scenes reminiscent of the kitchen moment from the original.
The D Rex is a genetically modified version of the Tyrannosaur with six limbs that also bears a resemblance to the Rancor from Star Wars Return of the Jedi, a movie that Gareth Edwards is a fan of, remember.
All the dinosaurs looks great and more convincing than recent movies but what struck me is how they all feel more scary and threatening than the 3, or 4, previous outings.
The Good and the Bad
So here’s why Rebirth hits second place for me in the Jurassic franchise:
- It’s scarier and more believable than recent movies,
- The visual style takes me back to OG Jurassic Park,
- Johannson, Ali and Bailey are a great new trio,
- It also has a cute tiny dino buddy for one of the characters,
- The cinematography is excellent, there’s some fantastic use of smoke and colour to make things tense and terrifying,
- The music is great – the iconic John Williams theme is used several times to good effect, with some nice fitting additions by Alexandre Desplat. It’s not the first time Desplat and Edwards have worked together – they did Godzilla in 2014 and were meant to reconnect for Rogue One until scheduling conflicts meant Michael Giacchino took over.
- But Gareth Edwards’s biggest success was pulling me back into the world again and making it feel real.
What still holds it back?
- The family were a good part of the movie but felt like it was missing a bit of Spielberg warmth,
- We get a decent number of deaths but it felt like a couple more characters should’ve died.
But when it works – the horror-style opening scene, the set up of the world, the excellent use of the colour red and some great set pieces – it reminds us exactly why the original Jurassic Park hooked us. And for me, that’s enough to put it right behind Spielberg’s original masterpiece.
What others are saying about it
So how is it getting received?
Well, there’s a lot of positive, with some saying it’s a thrilling heist movie with monsters and others praising it for having the most tense set piece the series has seen in decades.
The Daily Telegraph gave Rebirth a perfect five stars, calling it the best-looking and best-sounding since the first film.
But others are less gushing, too. The Hollywood Reporter says Rebirth it’s “unlikely to top anyone’s ranked franchise list” while the Los Angeles Times calls it “a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige”.
It does seem to have divided people. But one thing is pretty common across the reviews, both negative and positive – that it feels like time for a break from the series, if not to make it permanently extinct. That won’t happen, of course, because there’s still too much profit in it. But it might be time, next time, for it to have a complete reboot and start fresh, somehow.
Anyway, join me and AJ next week for the main Rewind show as we’ll be going to 1990 to talk about a film where four dudes really love pizza
