Jurassic Park: Rebirth is a Gloriously Christopher Pratt-free Return to Form

Pratt's not back, baby!

I promise that I will stop writing obsessively about my father’s recent death at 77 at some point. I tend to take things hard. I’m not resilient. When it comes to emotions, I shatter easily.

If I am still in active mourning in 2035, you have my permission to stop reading this newsletter obsessively and aggressively promoting it to all your friends.

Talking about my father within the context of pop culture allows me to process my grief and continue writing new pieces for my website, Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place, and this newsletter.

That is particularly difficult now because my brain is in a fog of grief that can make it hard to focus on anything else.

I’ll be honest: I’ve let a lot of shit slide at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place. I’ve done a much better job with this newsletter because much of it involves going to the movies every weekend and writing about one or more new releases.

Since I was a child, movie theaters have been my happy place. They’ve been a venue for joy and edification in an unconscionably cruel universe.

I’m currently having trouble concentrating. That’s the genius of movies: in a world chockablock with distractions, movie theaters more or less force you to focus on what’s onscreen. Movies force you to live in the moment. You can always leave, of course, even if you are professionally obligated to cover new movies, as I am. You can also look at your phone, but why would you want to?

I am a creature of habit. I did not explicitly begin this newsletter as an excuse to force myself to go the movie theater every weekend, but that has been a wonderful side effect.

I’ll be brutally honest: at some point, I completely lost my passion for film. However, researching and writing The Fractured Mirror, my massive upcoming tome on American movies about filmmaking, and seeing new movies for this newsletter have resurrected my dormant love of film.

Movie theaters are sacred places for me, even when the movie being exhibited is the seventh entry in a deathless series of blockbusters about scientists who fuck unnecessarily with nature by playing God and bringing back dinosaurs as a tacky commercial attraction.

I bought a ticket to see Jurassic Park: Rebirth in 3D, but when I arrived, the ticket taker informed me that I’d procured a ticket for the wrong theater.

Like common scum, I was forced to watch Jurassic Park: Rebirth in two dimensions, like a goddamn animal. That sadly deprived me of the child-like joy of watching shiny shit flying at me.

Jurassic Park: Rebirth is the kind of spectacle that benefits from the cheesy grandeur of half-assed 3-D. I particularly enjoy watching shiny shit flying at me from the screen if it involves big-ass dinosaurs.

The seventh entry in the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World trilogy does a lot of things right. The filmmaker’s wise choices begin with not casting Christopher Pratt in a lead role.

More movies need to follow in Rebirth’s footsteps by not casting Pratt. It doesn’t even give him a cameo. Good job, Jurassic Park: Rebirth. Hopefully, this will spark an exciting new trend of Christopher Pratt not being in every movie.

Instead of the most overexposed actor in human history, Jurassic Park: Rebirth stars Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, a fearless international operative who is offered ten MILLION dollars to be part of an expedition that hopes to secure an exceptionally lucrative medical breakthrough by securing the DNA of freakishly large Dinos.

In Rebirth, an unfamiliar climate causes dinosaurs to die off at an alarming rate. Tourists don’t seem interested in them either.

The only place where dinosaurs continue to thrive is on a series of equatorial islands that are illegal to visit.

Zora joins forces with Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a scientific genius who suggests a nerdier Indiana Jones, adventurer and old friend Duncan Kinkaid (Mahershala Ali), and greedy sleazoid Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) in flaunting international law by traveling to a Dino-infested island to procure dinosaur DNA for a potentially life-saving and world-changing medical breakthrough.

Meanwhile, single father Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his older daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), his younger daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) encounter an aquatic dinosaur who destroys their boat.

The scrappy family joins forces with the adventurers in a quest to avoid becoming dinosaur food while securing genetic material that has the power to make them exceptionally rich and powerful.

Rebirth is a deliberate throwback in many ways. The island where most of the action takes place was an open-air research facility for the original park, which was abandoned due to an exceedingly predictable loss of life.

This means that the surviving dinosaurs are largely mutants who look like traditional dinosaurs but are much uglier.

In Rebirth, massive dinosaurs either come within a foot or so of vivisecting a terrified human being with a single bite, or they lose interest in their puny human prey and wander away in search of something more exciting, or at least filling.

Sometimes, the dinosaur comes within a foot or so of eating a cast member, only to lose interest almost immediately. The dinosaurs here are deadly but also pragmatic. Instead of feasting merrily on big stars like Ali and Johannson, they lustily devour minor characters played by less expensive actors.

Garth Edwards takes over for The Book of Henry director Colin Trevorrow, who was actually imprisoned for making The Book of Henry. He became the first person in American history to be imprisoned and later executed for making a bad movie. Some feel that was harsh. I do not agree.

Edwards is best known for the massive blockbusters Rogue One and Godzilla. He specializes in gargantuan spectacles about different kinds of war. Star Wars has war in its title, yet Rogue One is the entry that feels most like a conventional war movie.

There are lovely little scenes scattered throughout Rebirth where the volume and intensity are dialed down so its characters can experience quiet moments of connection, many involving death.

Duncan is mourning the death of a child while Zora concedes that she was so busy gallivanting about the globe that she missed her mother’s funeral.

Martin Krebs makes for a generic bad guy whose villainy is broadcast from his first moment onscreen. There’s no way that he’s going to be anything but a heavy more than willing to put lives at stake for the sake of moolah.

Johannson, Ali, and Bailey share an easy chemistry and unforced charisma. Johansson’s role here is reminiscent of Black Widow, the iconic character that made her famous, but it has an element of humor that sets it apart. She’s a consummate survivor who has seen just about everything.

Rebirth’s tone predates Jurassic Park. It has the retro feel of a 1980s adventure movie. In that respect, it combines DNA from two of executive producer Steven Spielberg’s triumphs: Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones.

I remember almost nothing about Jurassic World beyond it being insultingly mercenary and unnecessary, but Rebirth gave me precisely what I wanted.

It may not reinvent monster movies or the franchise, but Rebirth is a rock-solid return to form for a series that had gotten way too big for its own good.

Three and a half stars out of five