Jurassic World: Rebirth is the 7th in the franchise that began in 1993 when book and screenplay author Michael Crichton, a native of Roslyn, Long Island, had just turned 50. Having much earlier discarded his Harvard Med School degree for a burgeoning career of sound the techno-alarm entertainments, Crichton saw two more Jurassic sequels -- Lost World (in 1997) and Jurassic Park 3 four years later -- before he died at 66 of lymphoma in 2008. Almost all the Jurassics hinge on a truism of classic education: tampering with nature is hubris and will not end well. This one is brought to you by producer Frank Marshall in collaboration with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, plus the usual visual crew of thousands and with Alexander Desplat importing significant bars from John William’s horn-driven original soundtrack to make us feel right at home.
In Jurassic World: Rebirth, new archetypal characters from the dinosaur world Crichton left behind have been put to different use by Indiana Jones franchise writer David Koepp —whose last screenplay, Black Bag for Steven Soderberg, with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as married spies jetting about London, I reviewed here in March as all style and no substance. Koepp’s outing here for director Gareth Edwards, is nominally about the greed of Big Pharma but mostly about Scarlett Johansson showing no fear in the face of Dinosaurs.
Johansson plays Zora Bennett, a crack mercenary adventuress hired by Big Pharma Baddie Martin Krebs to go to an off-the-grid Caribbean Island where genetically engineered Dino-mutants from the previous installments of the series are waiting for their closeups. Scarlett’s mission is to extract live blood samples from the dinos to turn over to Big Pharma to develop a sure-fire cardio drug that will make the company trillions doing good for rich people doing bad. The target dinos include one mad raptor bird, one big ocean thing and a tyrannosaurus rex knockoff bigger than Macy’s. Zora, the team leader, will get a $10 million payday which screenwriter Koepp in a Hollywood writer fantasy leverages into $20 million gambit sequence to split with her trusty crew. Johansson plays Zora not quite in the weary aging gunfighter mold, but more as she is: a 40-year-old bred for a higher calling who went rogue to escape office drudgery. Scarlett seems to know the fantasy of one last job to exit the mercenary gig.
We spend the first couple beats of the 2:14 minute film with Scarlett/Zora assembling the team: Jonathan Bailey fresh from his Lord Anthony Bridgerton British TV gig, here as Loomis, the earnest paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History forced to close his department due to public boredom with dinosaurs. Also slumming from a high-profile British career, Rupert Friend plays Martin Krebs, the obligatory bad Big Pharma guy, given a pencil-thin mustache and almost a flashing neon banner rolling across his forehead that says WEASEL (all caps). And Mahershala Ali is Duncan Kincaid, a former mercenary pal of Scarlett, putting on a big happy face to hide a bad personal loss, now with a fishing boat living out Jimmy Buffet’s dream with a touch of boredom somewhere in the Caribbean.
The motley crew sets sail but enroute intersects with a divorced Mexican- American Dad, (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo from The Lincoln Lawyer) sailing the world with his two girls and one of their callow boyfriends, who’ve wandered into the forbidden Dino-zone. Their job in the script is to mirror the mallplex audience, which you can hear in the line Koepp gives one of the kids after their first Tyrannosaurus Rex encounter after their first Tyrannosaur R: “Mom won’t let you take us for a vacation again.”
Smart Scarlett plays Zora the bounding, leaping, shooting and always thinking “mission specialist,” as she calls herself unconvincingly, as if it’s been a while since she’s been in touch with anyone as nice as Paleontologist Loomis. He whispers the professionally unthinkable to her, checking her ethics and executing her mission, to turn the dino blood over to an open-source lab to make a cardio drug for the people.
One of my closest friends happens to be expert on the process of drugs making it through development, trials and FDA approval, and says it’s a minimum $100 million investment. Loomis either glosses over that detail to the mercenary Zora or has no clue. But no matter, Scarlett’s Zora is faced with the decision to stop doing bad crap for money and get clean. Perhaps that explains how Scarlett, who knows how to use her eyes, conveys the irony here. Big job like Jurassic World, set her up to direct her first film, Eleanor the Great, about a firecracker old Jewish lady that debuted in Cannes last month. Scarlett knows how to scrape the bark off a dinosaur.
You can read the whole of Jurassic World: Rebirth as a political action plan, if you like: well-educated Gen Y gets into a dog fight with Boomer dinosaurs, make of that what you will. The true dinosaur was pre-ordained in Koepp’s genre formula script as the American corporate male’s indefatigable hubris of messing around with Mother Nature for profit.
Audiences can tune out CNN for a couple hours to rehearse surviving 100-foot-high Boomer mutants that snatch helicopters out of the sky and eat ‘em. Which they do. Not to mention product placements for Snickers and one of the potato chip companies. Gotta hand it to Jeep, which inked a TV ad deal with the production to use a Jeep off-roading around the dinosaurs in the jungle. “Imagine what that will do for sales to our weekend warriors!,” you can hear them thinking in Toledo, Jeep HQ and my old hometown. Alas, the Jeep in the film appears to the Tyrannosaurus Rex cast in the film, after the usual intense round of auditions, as just another cocktail weenie in a bun. Crunch down on that one, too. This turn of the screw doesn’t seem like it’s the Jeep’s transmission so much as the usual driver error. You’d think the head guy at Jeep Toledo would have had the guy on retainer in Hollywood check out the script. He’ll no doubt be reassigned back to Toledo, after the film opens this July 4th weekend absolutely everywhere.
