Films and Fiction

As Hollywood prepares for another year dominated by sequels, we’ve finally gotten a trailer for one of their big hopefuls, Jurassic World: Rebirth.

Even though the movie isn’t out until July, and this is the first trailer we’ve had, it’s a pretty full one, revealing most of the plot, characters and even the biggest dinosaurs.

Yet watching it gives a sense of deja vu, we’ve been here before, over twenty years ago, with Jurassic Park III.

The third sequel to Spielberg’s masterpiece looks and feels a lot like Rebirth. There’s a small team of researchers and mercenaries hired to go back to Isla Sorna, we have a lot of the same dinosaurs, like Spinosaurus and Pteradactyl, there seems to be a kid in there too.

It’s definitely a change from the last three JW movies, which got increasingly ridiculous, with more and more action scenes, bigger dinosaurs, and the whole ‘trained’ Raptors thing. There are none of the characters from those films here, and I’m not surprised, that trilogy ran its course pretty quick, and the last entry Dominion, was a nostalgia-heavy one, bringing back Grant, Sattler and Malcolm from Jurassic Park.

But this film isn’t really what I was hoping for. The talk that it was going ‘back to basics’ seems to have meant making it more into a generic action monster movie. Any chance that it would be a worthy successor to JP is lost now, between the boiler plate plot, and the lack of a really engaging story that looks at our relationship with science and nature, in the smart way that thr original did.

I’m a fan of Gareth Edwards’ work, with his Godzilla movie being a solid, and based entry in the Monsterverse. No doubt he’ll do a good job with this too, but as a simple dinosaur movie, not as a reflective, intelligent film that will get you thinking, as Jurassic Park did.

With this and the way it doesn’t look as expansive and loud as the other three World movies, it makes me wonder if it will make a billion now. I think I’ll have to revise my predictions that it would, and say it will probably be a big hit, just not that big, and maybe that won’t be a bad thing if it convinces them to finally let this poor franchise rest.

You can’t help thinking they are rather like the scientists in Jurassic World, taking something powerful, manipulating it, making strange hybrids, but never understanding the power of the original, and ultimately doomed to fail.

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