DINO – MIGHT
Main Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey
Director: Gareth Edwards
I owe all of my lovely fans out there a heartfelt apology for being absent so long from these pages. It’s not totally my fault. There I am back in Los Angeles, uncertain of what my next career move is to be when I am contacted by the highest levels of government asking me to form a task force to help make America healthy again through the thoroughly American art from of tap dance. I am whisked off to meetings in Washington DC and am rapidly put in charge of the Department Of Getting Everyone Tapping Together Eventually or DOGETTE with carte blanche to bring tap to the masses for its aerobic benefits to mind and body. Well, I immediately called Lulu Pigg, my tap therapist, and we met over several bottles of sangria in my home dance studio and began to work out a simple little routine that anyone can do once they master a triple time step.
We’re going to begin with some of the military employees that have been called to duty here in Los Angeles. I’m not quite sure what they’re doing here but they seem to be fairly fit young people and we’re going to have them all assemble in Pershing Square with me on an elevated stage hoisted up by construction crane so I’ll be fully visible and I’m going to teach them the combination and cameras will be there to stream everything live nationwide! We were going to install a large mirror wall along one side of the square to help people see their own body flight but our tests with a small mock-up showed that mixing mirrors and the LA afternoon sun in summer was not the best of ideas. The fires were soon put out but we were given a cease and desist order from the fire marshal. I hadn’t realized that retail establishments were quite so flammable.
Anyway, with me head bursting with ideas for DOGETTE to take the country by storm, I felt like I needed the cool of an air conditioned cineplex in order to calm my brain down so I hailed an Uber and headed off to the pictures to enjoy a popcorn film with a large bucket of popcorn mixed in with some peanut M&Ms. (I keep trying to get the Mars company to rebrand them as MNMs and offer myself to them as a celebrity spokesperson but they are very bad at returning my calls.) When I walked up to the ticket counter and surveyed the possible choices, I opted for Jurassic World: Rebirth. I am fond of disaster movies and ones with dinosaurs running around eating people get extra points in my book so I bought a ticket and hurried inside to take my seat.
After endless previews for films in which I have absolutely no interest, including one for a new film version of The Odyssey which isn’t slated for release until more than a year from now, the film finally started. Jurassic World: Rebirth is the seventh entry in the Jurassic Park franchise which has been continued intermittently over the last third of a century since Steven Spielberg’s brilliant original took the world by storm back in 1993. Spielberg is not back, having learned a thing or two about the difficulties of sequels with The Lost World: Jurassic Park back in 1997, one of the worst of the sequels over the last few decades. However, the producers did hire David Koepp, the original screenwriter, to come back and pen this one. Unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have gained a whole lot of new or original ideas over the intervening decades.
The film starts out promisingly enough with some cute callbacks to famous moments from earlier films. But then it becomes clear that the entire film is assembled from pieces done better in other films from the franchise, only repurposed and strung together like so many pop beads in a child’s necklace. And because we’ve seen every moment before, there are no true surprises or originality. We just wait for the familiar plot beats and move on to the next sequence. Director Gareth Edwards, who did make one of the better films from the Star Wars universe, Rogue One, a few years back, doesn’t help as his camera set ups often echo previous better sequences shot for shot. We’ve seen it all before. Only a few sequences, such as a pair of titanosauruses with necks intertwining, capture the awe and wonder of the original film.
Jurassic World: Rebirth begins with a prologue involving characters we never see again, some sort of mutant dinosaur we never get a good look at, and a Snickers wrapper that gets more screen time and has more charisma than any of the actors. I’m still not certain why it’s there. We then fast forward to the near future, where dinosaurs are blasé, dying out in more civilized parts of the world and exist only in a narrow band of jungle areas near the equator, off limits to humans. A farcically evil villain (Rupert Friend) needs dinosaur blood from three large species (one aquatic, one terrestrial, and one avian) in order to make lots of money for big pharma curing heart disease. (How dinosaur blood is supposed to do this is not explained.)
He engages soldier of fortune Scarlett Johansson, playing a variant on Rosa Klebb, and her buddies to help him with this mission. She recognizes that she’ll need an expert on dinosaurs so she persuades the curator of a dying dinosaur museum (Jonathan Bailey, playing a direct descendant of Cary Grant’s paleontologist from Bringing Up Baby) to come along. So this motley crew charters a boat from a soulful skipper (Mahershala Ali) and off they head to the forbidden dino island.
Meanwhile, in a second film grafted on to the first solely to provide the necessary children in danger subplot, a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat along with his two young daughters and the older one’s boyfriend (three young actors unlikely to be heard from again) when they are attacked by an errant mosasaur and their boat wrecked, leading them to be picked up by the mercenary troupe. The attempt to collect blood from the mosasaur goes spectacularly wrong. The family and the mercenaries are separated, and everyone ends up on dino island but not before a couple of lesser billed performers meet gruesome deaths. Will the villain who cares about nothing but money get his comeuppance? Will the noble heroic figure make a major sacrifice? Will our not quite romantic couple help each other to overcome impossible odds? Will the endangered children make it to the end of the film? Will our everyman fall five hundred feet from a cliff without losing his glasses? If you’ve seen the other films in the series, you won’t have too much trouble figuring it out.
The setting is lush and exotic. The CGI feels relatively real and is used mainly for the dinosaur effects. Some of the action sequences, especially the early ones involving boats and a pissed off mosasaur show some vestiges of original thinking and excitement but ultimately, as we grind on through over two hours of things we’ve seen before and done better, things wear thin. When we finally get to the big bad dinosaur at the end of the film, everything is shot in such dim light that we never get a really good look at it and it feels like we’re looking at discarded rushes from one of the Alien franchise. None of the actors gives a particularly good performance although both Jonathan Bailey and Mahershala Ali try to find some humanity inside their underwritten roles. I’m not sure what ScarJo was going for. She’s so out there in her attempts to be a female military action hero that she comes across as GI Jane Barbie. Rupert Friend is a walking bundle of capitalist villain cliches.
Jurassic World: Rebirth is entertaining. It’s just not good. If the day is hot and you have nothing better to do, by all means get a bucket of popcorn and enjoy.
Meaningful school name. Spinosaurus group. Gratuitous Altoids chewing. Inflatable raft launching. Geothermal pipes. Abandoned snack foods. Ridiculous cuddly dinosaur pet. Out of place Meso-American temple. Helicopter eating.
Originally from Seattle Washington, land of mist, coffee and flying salmon, Mrs. Norman Maine sprang to life, full grown like Athena, from Andy’s head during a difficult period of life shortly after his relocation to Alabama.
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