When Jurassic World premiered in 2015, it had been 14 years since the release of the previous installment in the series, the very polarizing Jurassic Park III (2001). So it only made sense that we’d meet a whole new cast of characters. Today, only three years have passed since the last film, the infuriatingly bad Jurassic World Dominion. So a soft reboot, while certainly welcomed by diehard fans of the franchise, such as myself, felt a little premature.
That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy all 133 minutes of the new Jurassic World Rebirth, which is so tantalizingly close to just being named Jurassic Park: Reboot that one feels it is a missed opportunity. As for the content of the film itself, the news is good. Everyone will eventually agree that this is the third-best Jurassic film — Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) is the best, obviously, followed in a distant second by Jurassic World. Still, coming so close on the heels of the failures of the recent World entries, I just wasn’t quite emotionally ready to invest in a brand new storyline and characters.
Yet, emotional investment is what the filmmakers seemingly want from us this time. Or, rather, require from us. We need to really care about ex-military covert operative Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), whose mother died of heart disease and whose husband (or boyfriend, or maybe he was just a close friend) was recently killed by a car bomb in Yemen. We need to empathize with Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), whose marriage ended because he and his wife could no longer look at each other without seeing their dead son. And our feelings must be tied up with Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the single father struggling to raise his two daughters. And don’t forget about poor Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), the paleontologist who just lost his dream job. By the end of the film, we’re even supposed to care about the mutant dinosaur’s feelings. It’s all just way too much, especially for the audience of a summer blockbuster. That’s not what we signed up for, damn it. We came here to watch dinosaurs eat people.
