(courtesy IMP Awards)
It will come as exactly no surprise to anyone that life is hard. Very hard, in fact.
Oh, we dress it up in all sorts of diversionary bells and whistles, and even manage to have some fun along the way but enjoyable though it is to be alive, and let’s face it, the alternative isn’t a lot of fun, it’s a hard slog.
Which is the cinematic gods created the blockbuster, a form of movie so preposterously over the top that belief is not just suspended but thrown way out into the chasm where large and mysterious beasts stomp on it until it shatters into barely-noticed smithereens.
They are meant to sail way over the top and keep on going, but that doesn’t they shouldn’t be good; even escapist entertainment should have a measure of quality to it and a sense that here’s something worth spending your precious spare time on.
Which brings us to Jurassic World: Rebirth, directed by Gareth Edwards to a script by David Koepp, a continuation of a prehistoric franchise, and honestly in actual human years it’s getting on a bit, which launched in 1993 with Steven Spielberg’s masterfully escapist Jurassic Park.
Now, granted, Jurassic World: Rebirth is not right up there with the prime progenitor of its line, but it’s not cataclysmically far off it either.
There seems to be a tendency these days to expect blockbusters to be not that far off Oscar-worthy greatness, and while, sure, you want them well made and convincingly immersively assembled, the idea that they will stride onto the stage and accept a statuette is not really why they’re in the game.
They are there, films like Jurassic World: Rebirth to fill our cinema days, existing purely to divert and entertain us, subsume us in so much escapist nonsense that we forget, for two hours and eighteen minutes at least, that the world out there is making things less than easy for us on a daily basis.
And really, when it comes down to it, that’s what Jurassic World: Rebirth does very well.
Yes, it’s a tad top heavy with exposition at the start and takes a little while to get going, but thanks particularly to spirited performances by Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, a covert operations specialist who’s not as cold-bloodedly mercenary as she first makes out, and Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist, Dr Henry Loomis, Jurassic World: Rebirth soon picks up speed and does what the Jurassic Park/World movies do best which is keep us on the edge of our seat, and dazzle us with big, scary, fun dinosaur shenanigans.
Set after the events of Jurassic World: Dominion, which somewhat squandered the exciting, if terrifying, of idea of dinosaurs walking among us, we are quickly taken into a world where the revived ancient creatures have not found current environments and climatic conditions entirely to their liking, retreating to the equatorial regions which are far more to their liking (this ignores the huge strides in research in recent decades which show that dinosaurs also thrived in snowy conditions but that doesn’t suit the narrative so is roundly ignored).
Concomitant with this, dinosaurs, which one dazzled and thrilled us with their exotic, ancient untouchability, have become just another gigantic in the endless procession of bugbears in modern life, and interest have subsequently waned, shutting exhibits at museums among other things which is how Dr Loomis comes to be in need of something to do.
That something, as it turns out, courtesy of Big Bad Pharma, represented by the smooth talking, dapper-dressing form of Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), who we know from the start is due to end up as dino chow by the end of the film – subtle Jurassic World: Rebirth is not, and if you pick out the survivors and those destined to be chomped on to an untimely end, you will most likely be right – is a trip to an island of the coast of South America where the very worst of the dinosaurs, those deemed to scary even for the various parks, reside in fearsome splendour.
The goal? To harvest blood or egg yolk from three creatures – the seagoing Mosasaur, earthbound plant eater Titanosaurus and pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus – which will be used to create vital heart medication for those who can afford to pay for it. (A desultory discussion about the evils of big pharma and the need for a more equitable distribution of medicines for all is about as deep and thoughtful as Jurassic World: Rebirth gets, with Bennett and Loomis the unlikely revolutionaries and potential lovebirds.)
Is it mad as hell narrative-wise? Yes. Do the bounds of credibility get stretched to breaking point, and way beyond, at regular intervals? Absolutely. And should yachting dad Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) have taken his two daughters, Luna (Teresa) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Luna’s loser boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono), who you know will step mightily and redemptively by story’s end, on a boating trip across the Atlantic when mosasaurs still roam the oceans? Likely not, but hey, more potential fodder for the dinosaurs and grist for the schlocky fun, storytelling mill.
Together with Loomis, Bennett and Bennett’s team which includes huge boat owner Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) which comes off second best with a mosasaur with attitude, these unlucky people will find themselves attacked and hunted by all kinds of dinos and pterosaurs, who unaccountably but perfectly for an escapist blockbuster like Jurassic World: Rebirth where peril is narrative gold, and picked off one by one until only the good and the worthy remain.
There is an element of justice-led storytelling in any blockbuster – the baddies die, the virtuous and good do not; good thing dinosaurs can tell the difference – and Jurassic World: Rebirth is no different offering a morality tale in bold, big, ancient revived animals doing their thing brushstrokes.
It is massively over the top, quite silly and fancifully ridiculous, teetering on wafer-thin science and shreds of emotional substance, but good lord Jurassic World: Rebirth is tons of escapist, diversionary fun, the kind of film where not only are the animals primal but so is our need for the bad guys to be seen off, the good guys to win and humanity to hopefully get another sage lesson in not playing god with things we still don’t fully understand and play at to our enduring, franchise-sustaining peril.