Jurassic World Rebirth

The Weight of Extinction

A franchise can wear out in strange ways. In *Jurassic World Rebirth*, the hook is that humanity has more or less lost interest in dinosaurs. They’ve been pushed into an equatorial quarantine zone and treated like a headache instead of a miracle. It’s a smart premise, mostly because it mirrors what has happened to the movies themselves. Once wonder becomes routine, it starts to harden. Gareth Edwards clearly understands that fatigue. Shooting on 35mm, he keeps reaching for some leftover sense of awe and dread inside a setup that’s been strip-mined for decades. I remember standing in natural history museums as a kid half-convinced the skeletons might move if I looked long enough. This film keeps trying to reactivate that sensation. Sometimes it gets close. Just as often, it seems unsure what it actually wants beyond the image.



Edwards has always been good at making humans look tiny beside ancient or godlike things. You can see that in *Godzilla* and *The Creator*, and it serves him again here. When Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) leads her team into the forests of Ile Saint-Hubert, the jungle feels less like scenery than a swallowing force. Mist smothers the frame. Greens and browns turn bruised and murky. Leigh Singer at *Sight & Sound* was right to say the film is "self-consciously reaching for Spielberg's bygone sense of wonder." You can feel the effort in almost every shot. Sometimes Edwards gets there. Sometimes the beauty just throws the weakness of David Koepp’s script into harsher relief. Corporate scavengers hunting dinosaur DNA for heart-disease research, hidden labs full of mutants—it’s familiar material dressed in expensive weather.



Then there’s the Mosasaurus attack, which is the point where the movie briefly locks in. The Delgado family wanders into the story because their sailboat drifts into the wrong stretch of water, and Edwards wisely doesn’t rush the encounter. He keeps the camera low near the surface, letting the ocean bulge in unnervingly slow motion before the creature erupts. For a beat, the sound nearly vanishes except for the groan of the fiberglass hull giving way. It’s an obvious nod to *Jaws*, maybe too obvious, but it works anyway. Suddenly the movie stops being about conspiracy plotting and becomes a clean survival scene. Reuben Delgado trying to shield his daughters, shoulders crawling up toward his ears in panic, does more to ground the spectacle than pages of exposition ever could.



The cast can only do so much with the rest. Johansson plays Zora with a locked-down, practical stiffness that fits the mercenary role but leaves little space for texture. Mahershala Ali’s Duncan is the bigger frustration. Ali is one of those actors who can suggest an entire private life with a jaw clench, and the film mostly wastes that gift by making him explain things. Jonathan Bailey, as paleontologist Henry Loomis, comes off best simply because he seems to be the only one in the ensemble who still responds to the animals with curiosity instead of annoyance. He lowers his voice around them. He actually looks at them.

By the time the film unveils the "Distortus rex," a six-limbed lab-grown monstrosity, the whole thing tips back into noisy overkill. The *Los Angeles Times* said the movie "seems weary of our dominion," and that exhaustion might be its truest note. *Jurassic World Rebirth* feels like a handsome ruin: a blockbuster aware that the old spell has weakened, still trying to raise it one more time. It doesn’t fully bring the past back to life, but every so often it remembers what made people stare upward in the first place.