Jurassic World Rebirth review - prehistoric franchise gets a new lease of life

The first Jurassic Park movie now seems virtually Jurassic itself, having been released in the sepia-tinged year of 1993. Directed with pizzazz by Steven Spielberg, it was ground-breaking (and indeed ground-shaking) enough to earn admission to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry on account of being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Six more Jurassic-themed movies followed in its wake (with Spielberg only directing 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park), but none of them managed to match the impact of the original. Indeed, most of them needn’t have bothered being made at all. But Jurassic World Rebirth has managed to throw off the heritage baggage and find a fresh, feisty and often funny perspective on the Jurassic canon (pictured below, Rupert Friend, Mahershala Ali and Bechir Sylvain).Scripted by David Koepp (who also wrote the debut JP movie) and directed by Nuneaton’s own Gareth Edwards, Rebirth keeps it taut and tight enough that its 134 minute run-time never drags. It also manages to nudge us into pondering over issues such as corporate greed and the ethics of trying to re-engineer Mother Nature without making the viewer feel as though they’ve been concussed by a baseball bat. There’s even a droll opening sequence which illustrates the disastrous potential of being too casual about where you drop litter.

The premise is that, several decades after dinosaurs have been miraculously restored to the earth, not only has the general public grown bored with the whole idea, but the remaining dinosaurs are now confined to an equatorial zone where climatic conditions (temperature, oxygen levels etc) permit them to survive. A pharmaceutical company called ParkerGenix, however, has worked out that it would be possible to create a miraculous drug that banishes heart disease in humans by using DNA samples from the surviving dinosaurs. This could save countless lives, but, better still, it could bring ParkerGenix a colossal landslide of dollars.

Thus, a team is assembled by cold-blooded company representative Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to journey into the dino-zone and acquire the samples in question from living animals. His first pick is Zora Bennett (an impressively authoritative Scarlett Johansson, pictured left with aerial predator), who’s some kind of covert security specialist who can’t resist Krebs’ offer of a paycheck running into millions, while paleontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) lends the project an air of humane academia. Since they’re heading for Ile St-Hubert (near French Guiana, allegedly), where in the past all kinds of grotesque experiments were carried out on the re-animated dinosaurs, they’re going to need a boat, which is where skipper Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) comes in.

However, life on the ocean wave can be unpredictable. Enter Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), who just happens to be taking his family from Barbados to Cape Town on board his sailing yacht (we even get a quick crash-course on how to tie a bowline) when his boat is tipped over by a vast aquatic dinosaur. Long story short, the Krebs team hear his SOS and rescue him (though the malevolent Krebs would have been happy to let them all drown). And of course they all end up on freaky monster-dinosaur-island, where they encounter everything from angry pterodactyls to benign and dream-like vegetarian dinosaurs and a truly horrifying creature which owes more to Ridley Scott’s Alien than to Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (pictured below, an incendiary Mahershala Ali).

Film and animation technology has now advanced to the point where the fictional beasts are just as convincing as footage of “real” animals, so the variety of creatures on display (from small, slithery underwater ones to colossal leviathans that make the earth move for miles around) can successfully instil terror, horror etc in any number of ways. In a crowd-pleasingly Spielbergian touch, Delgado’s young daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda) plays the wide-eyed, naive observer who can barely comprehend all the weirdness unfolding around her. She helps to give the action a human touch by adopting a cute baby dino she calls Delores, who fulfils the role of the family puppy.

Thrills, chills and fun for all the family? Well yes, actually. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but it's delivered with panache.

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