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PLEASE, GO ON...
Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)
JULY 4, 2025
GENRE: MONSTER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (3D SCREENING)
Of all the random words they could use instead of a number for a sequel, I'm not sure why they went with "Rebirth", because Jurassic World Rebirth is actually coming along in less time than most of the gaps between entries (only the stretch from Jurassic World to Fallen Kingdom is shorter, by a week or so). And also, it's mostly the same old stuff, borrowing plot points from most of the previous entries (with Jurassic Park III being the surprise biggest influence) and adding almost nothing new to the proceedings. Rebirth of what? It's all the same and we haven't had time to miss this property! It's the first one to have a female lead, I guess.
Not that Scarlett Johansson's femininity has much to do with anything, as her character is the most generic one here. She's a mercenary/tracker/whatever for hire who is tasked by health tycoon Krebs (Rupert Friend) to get blood samples from the three biggest dinosaurs in order to make a new heart medication (because relatively few dinosaurs ever died of heart disease, so they figure there's something in there that will help humans - it's not a bad scientific mumbo jumbo plot for this particular franchise, in all honesty). And where do they get these samples? Yet another secret InGen island, of course! Granted I've never memorized any of the sequels, but I can't recall a single scene in any of them where we are shown a complete topical/aerial shot of the entire islands we've already seen, so why they couldn't just say "They had another lab on Isla (Whatever) that we didn't know about!" instead of expanding their global reach yet again is beyond me.
Anyway, she needs a weary tough guy named Duncan (Mahershala Ali) and his boat to get them to this island, and they also need a handsome dorky guy (Jonathan Bailey as Dr. Loomis, which delighted me) to collect the samples, and then there's a few other people on the boat who might as well be named Fodder 1, 2, and 3 (one of them is played by Ed Skrein, so I like that this movie gives us the replacement Transporter AND the replacement Hitman). This group is fine and even fun to watch, but as we know, if a Jurassic Park movie is made and doesn't feature a 11ish character, everyone who was involved in the making of the movie will be put to death, so out of nowhere we meet a family of a dad/widow, a little kid, an older teen, and her dummy boyfriend, who are sailing across this particular body of water. They run afoul of the Mosasaurus (who is the same one from the World movies, still out on the open water - he's the only returning character from any of the others) and are rescued by ScarJo and her team, as the Mosa is their first target.
Surprising no one on the planet, their boat ends up wrecked and they become stranded on the island they were going to anyway. A helicopter will arrive in 24 hours, so they just need to get their other two samples and fly home. To be fair, as far as stories go, it's one of the better ones a Jurassic sequel has offered, and the script (by returning vet David Koepp) at least gives us a few memorable characters in Duncan, Loomis, and Krebs, which is an upgrade from any of the other "World" entries. But Koepp also makes a fatal blunder when it comes to the two groups: he keeps them separate but intact once they get to the island! The family of four remains together on their own, and ScarJo's team sticks together elsewhere, carrying out the plot. Therefore, every time they cut to this group of four definitely safe characters, all of the narrative drive AND tension goes out the window, because they are only trying to accomplish surviving, and we know they will. All of the wild card characters are also the only ones with a reason to be there, so their scenes deliver - honestly, without the family this might easily have been the best sequel. The scene where they get the sample from the Mosasaurus, set on the open sea, is the best this series has offered since the trailer/cliff bit in Lost World, but (as with that movie, which at least still had "Whoa, dinosaurs!" novelty going for it) we spend the next hour and change on a series of less exiting setpieces, most of which we've seen in the others. There's a convenience store scene that apes the kitchen scene from the original, pteranodon attacks swiped from JP3, and the final battle is pretty close to the one in Dominion, with the newest big beast (a "D-Rex") attacking everyone as they wait for rescue from a helicopter.
(Though given how much it feels like JP3, the fact that it *has* a climax is an improvement, I guess.)
Speaking of that lesser third entry (skip this paragraph if you don't want some mild spoilers) they also needlessly chicken out on killing off a character without showing HOW they survived, just as they did in 2001 with Allesandro Nivola's Billy. I won't say which one, but at a certain point one of them sacrifices himself to save the others, luring the D-Rex away so the others can get into a boat and make their way down river - it's a great, earned scene! But then a few minutes later they see a flare and find that the character is magically alive, with no explanation as to why the D-Rex suddenly ignored them. I don't know why these movies can't ever seem to commit to making these animals as dangerous as we are supposed to believe they are, but it takes on extra silliness here because the whole movie hinges on the facility being abandoned for 15 years because the D-Rex got out and everyone was so frightened, and yet it only manages to kill one major character, who we knew was going to die anyway because he was the film's obligatory evil human.
As for the 3D, it's pointless and I forgot it was there half the time. I only splurged because I had to; the AMC app glitched after I bought my tickets for a 2D showing, and by the time I realized my transaction didn't actually go through, the seats I chose were gone and all that remained were front row. And it was on the 4th, so we had barbecues and pool parties to get to, so it was either see it over a week later (my wife and son are currently visiting family; I stayed behind to watch the cats) or see it in a half empty 3D theater. It baffles me that they still bother with this, over a decade past the 3D heyday, but whatever. My kid was delighted a few times, so it was worth my extra six bucks or whatever the difference was.
Other than that, it at least looks spectacular, as Gareth Edwards does a much better job of directing than Trevorrow or Johnston (JA Bayona remains the champ in the "Well if it can't be Spielberg..." department). Some of them have been spoiled in the marketing, but he has a knack for fun shots where a character is oblivious to the dino action occurring behind them, and even with the needless back and forth between the two groups, he at least is able to keep track of his damn story from scene to scene, unlike his immediate predecessor. The movie is far from sloppy, and the dinos look great, but there's only so much Edwards can do with a script that shoots itself in the foot by keeping the two groups apart for the majority of their time on the island. If Ali's character had been stuck with the family, and maybe one of the kids with ScarJo, then it would keep the two groups invested in reuniting with the other, but at a certain point I started wondering why any of them would even care if they found the other team as long as they found their rescue ship.
Six sequels, and none of them better than "it was fine." I don't know why it seems so hard for them to even come close to the original's highs, but I also know that the movies still make a ton of money every time, so there's really no incentive for Universal/Amblin to try. It's a shame that they were really close to having something here with the main plot, only to torpedo all of its momentum every time they cut back to the dumb family, but that seems to be the series' main calling card: screwing up a can't miss pitch ("What if the park actually opened?" "What if the dinos got the mainland?" "What if we brought back Sam Neill and got you in and out of there in 90 minutes?") and coasting on a handful of decent scenes and our (by now) Pavlovian response to the John Williams theme. See you again in 2028, I guess.
What say you?
PLEASE, GO ON...28 Years Later (2025)
JUNE 29, 2025
GENRE: ZOMBIE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)
For a while there, it seemed like the 28 (something) Later franchise was done; Alex Garland and Danny Boyle seemed less enthused as time went on, while also noting that there were some issues with the rights holders (independent of the fact that they were put out by Fox, who no longer exists). But for whatever reason, the stars aligned to give us 28 Years Later (from Sony), which is kicking off a new trilogy of films, with the second due next year. Why they skipped 28 *Months* Later is a mystery, however, because the movie could have taken place simultaneously with Days for all it mattered.
Despite including some footage from Years in a montage, the movie’s ending of the virus spreading to Paris (and thus, presumably all of Europe, at the very least) is ignored – it’s still confined to the UK and the survivors all live on an island. And no one that survived the previous entries shows up, though apparently Cillian Murphy (who is listed as an executive producer here) will be in the next one. Instead, we focus on a kid named Spike, whose dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is basically the leader of their small island community and is eager to take his son to the mainland to find supplies, which is of course a dangerous mission that will involve him killing his first "infected." Through this process he realizes his dad is kind of a tool, and doesn't even seem to really want to help his sick wife/Spike's mom (Jodie Comer), so Spike takes it upon himself to seek aid for her sickness. So it's kind of a coming of age movie woith zombies, which is admirable!
But... you know, I was kind of excited to see the series continue getting bigger, and if anything this feels smaller and more contained than the original. And while they are free to ignore as much of the existing canon as they please to ignore Weeks' implications of a. further spread and b. a possible cure, they can *not* get around the fact that 28 Days was a breath of fresh air at the time for a mostly forgotten sub-genre, but in the 20+ years since, we’ve been inundated with zombie stuff. (And don’t give me crap about the use of “zombie” – they even refer to the “infected” with the Z-word *in the film.* They are and always have been zombie movies, despite pedantric claims to the contrary.) And so while the movie is perfectly fine, even great for a stretch in its final act, it’s also… not particularly interesting?
I mean, maybe I’m putting too much stock into the fact that Boyle and Garland returned after mostly sitting Weeks out (Garland took a pass at the script and Boyle directed a few sequences), assuming that their expanded filmographies since would have them bringing those bigger ideas to their old playground. But instead it’s mostly kind of anonymous, with the first hour or so feeling much like any number of undead movies (or episodes of Walking Dead and its infinite spinoffs) we’ve seen in the past two decades. There’s the religious nut who sees the whole thing as some kind of rapture, the supply runs that turn deadly, the should-be nailbiting scene where someone has to convince the person on the other side of a locked door that they’re not infected… we’ve seen all this stuff over and over, and there’s nothing to really distinguish it apart from (waves a hand at the “zombie” section on Shudder).
That is, except for the film’s photography, which is mostly trash. They shot the whole thing on iPhones, and at times it manages to actually look worse than the first film did. When they're outside and it's well lit, it looks fine, with the occasional image even striking depending on what's in it (the pile of skulls you've see in the poster is even more alluring in context), but whenever it switches to nighttime it's downright horrible to look at. There’s a scene where our hero Spike is talking to a village elder type in their dark kitchen, and I swear it’s the ugliest looking thing I’ve ever seen on a big screen. For the first film they said it had to be digital because they needed to get in and out of some of the locations quickly (using film would slow things down), but as this entire story is set in the woods and other isolated locales, I’m not sure what the excuse was. Digital photography has certainly gotten a lot better over the years, but you’d barely ever be able to know that from the evidence here.
So it’s pretty ho-hum and not much to look at for a while (unless you like zombie dong - by law I am required to mention that yes, this film has zombie dongs), with the scattered action seeming more obligatory than organic (a mid-film scene with a soldier unit comes in so abruptly I momentarily wondered if I had blacked out), but then Ralph Fiennes finally enters the narrative and things turn around. Without spoiling the particulars, he’s also a bit of a stock character for these things (the guy who turned his back on the group and went off to be alone/maybe go crazy) but the details – and Fiennes' performance – elevate it to the point that I stopped minding how meh the journey was to get to his sequence. It’s like those TV shows that take a few episodes to get going; you just need to sit through some pretty average (at best) stuff to get to the good stuff.
Of course that sucks for a reviewer, because the only thing really worth talking about is the movie’s third act, which I naturally do not want to spoil. And if you’re in the theater you probably aren’t going to just get up and leave – it’s not BAD, just not very interesting or involving if you’ve even kept half an eye on the genre since 2003. But if you’re reading this while watching it on streaming: stay the course! It gets better! And also sets up the next film, for which the people who survived this one will be returning along with Jim (the kids who supposedly held the key to a vaccine or cure from Weeks will presumably not be showing up). That one’s directed by Nia DaCosta, but thanks to the returning cast there will be some story continuity for the first time in this series, which is enough reason to seek it out. That said, for my money, Weeks remains the series’ high point. You can call it heresy; I know I'm in the minority there. But the first film's first act was its best before it petered out, and this one took forever to get to the part that I found most interesting. Weeks may be a little more "generic", but at least its tense (and better looking) all the way through, and consistency is always better to me than a series of highs and lows.
What say you?
PLEASE, GO ON...
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