Jurassic World’s listless rebirth

A reboot of the successful franchise and hopefully a standalone one, this film, as the title suggests, tries to rekindle the ‘Jurassic Park’ scares, albeit a rather peripatetic form. This is supposedly a new beginning for the franchise series.

A Pteranodon nesting atop a skyscraper is old hat. De-extinction has played its card and the creatures unable to thrive in our polluted atmosphere have literally gone to the farthest, tropical corners of the Earth.

Five years after Dominion, in a world indifferent toward dinosaurs, Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a court operative recruited by Parker Genix’s Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), Bobby Atwater (Ed Skrein), Nina (Philippine Velge), Leclerc (Bechir Sylvain) and Duncan Kincaid (Mehershala Ali) travel to Isle Saint-Hubert, where dinosaur experiments took place.

They are expected to retrieve blood samples from the remaining prehistoric species, a possible key to revolutionary medicine.

There’s a sailboat-wrecked family along for the ride too — led by the dad, Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters played by Luna Blaise (the oldest) and Audrina Miranda and one of the daughter’s boyfriend, played by David Iacono.

The film starts with a flashback to over a decade before the events of ‘Rebirth’. The opening scene sets a thrilling tone. The aquatic sequences that follow much later help solidify the action elements.

David Koepp, the writer of ‘Jurassic Park’ and ‘The Lost World’, returns to the ‘Jurassic’ series after 28 years. The script is lightweight, paper thin and has too many characters without well-developed back stories.

The focus is also quite wonky. It’s the dinosaurs who take centrestage here, with humans looking like extras. The dinosaurs terrorise humans, and it can be felt in fits and spurts. The scale of the dinosaurs can be seen and felt, with the humans looking pint-sized, especially when compared to the Brontosaurus.

There’s a lot of CGI work used here and it’s pretty well done. Rebirth’s dinosaurs, even in mutated form, look good.

Tyrannosaurus Rex is the rogue in ‘Rebirth’.

Johansson, Bailey and Ali have great screen presence, add charm to the stilted adventure but the characters they play fail to register because of poor writing. The visuals look good though.

‘Rebirth’ could have been a good old-fashioned summer blockbuster, but it fails to make the grade. The few heart-pounding sequences and the charming cast can only stir up a modicum of interest.

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