★★★★

The ingredients for a dynamite entry into the Jurassic Park canon are no great secret. They’ve been in the public domain since 1993, after all. Quite why it’s taken thirty years and six attempts to remix them into a genuinely thrilling, and legitimately original is less clear. To be clear, 2015’s Jurassic World was good fun but a legacy remake if ever one were. No matter. Not content with gifting LucasFilm the best Star Wars film of the twenty-first century, Gareth Edwards has done it again for the Steven Spielberg’s Franchisousaurus Rex. Putting a new tranche of stars through hell, Jurassic World: Rebirth is nothing short of a hoot.

Credit where due, Colin Trevorrow’s 2015–22 sequel trilogy, in which “Park” became “World,”must have been doing something right to keep the flame so well alight. Dominion was a dino-bore but still topped a billion at the post-Covid global box office. And yet, bar a retention of the   “World” moniker in its title, Rebirth bears far closer resemblance to Park era in scope and ambition. The notion that dinosaurs now rub shoulders with rush hour on the streets of New York, an inheritance of 2018’s Fallen Kingdom, remains a fun one but a return to the playpen of deadly jungle tropics is more fun still. In the thrash of leaves and rising mist, where your visibility is a pithy three metres ahead, anything could be – and absolutely is – hiding.

The influence of Spielberg himself is flush in Rebirth. It’s in the lightness of touch, the familial core, and the scene that finds a young girl trapped in an abandoned convenience store fridge, cuddling the dino-puppy hidden in her backpack, as a mutant raptor breathes on the all-too-thin glass between them. The script is that of David Koepp, coaxed into return to the series with a Spielberg treaty, having penned the original with the late Michael Crichton himself. It would be madness for any root-able character to head back into the fray six films in but capitalism throws the ball every time. This time around, it’s caught by big pharma.

Specifically, it’s Rupert Friend who dons the film’s serpentine skins as suitably slimy ParkerGenix representative Martin Krebs. It is he who dangles zeros before the jaded eyes of covert operative cum mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and the opportunity of a lifetime for doe-eyed palaeontologist De. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) – a student of Alan Grant no less. The pitch is as contrived as it is conveniently straightforward. Infiltrate the forbidden and foreboding Ile Saint-Hubert, locate the three largest remaining prehistoric species from land, sea, and air, collect their DNA and cash the cheque. 

To keep things playful, the Ile Saint-Hubert is home also to an array of grim, mutated and blood-thirsty dinosaur experiments, the failed remnants of InGen’s time on the island some seventeen years prior. These include winged raptors, ring-tailed diplodoci and a blob-headed, six-limbed and ruddy enormous Distortus rex for the grand finale. Each enjoys thunderously weighty realisation across the screen, bolstered by a pleasingly callous attitude to picking off the excesses of Koepp’s early character count, which depends initially on a certain economising of character. When the climax comes, the whittling process is sufficient to ensure you care for the final band…mostly.

A score by the mighty Alexandre Desplat finds fluidity enough in the original John Williams melodies to allow the necessary swells room to feel earned, without ever taking away from the urgency of his more dynamic additions. For his part, Edwards is in no rush to land his punches. Pitch perfect pacing blends breathing room with a half dozen breathtaking sequences, never losing sight of the tenderness required to make the latter count. An emotional encounter that places Loomis in the heart of the world he has so long studied from afar is gently done and all the stronger for it. 

While it is true that much of Rebirth does have a certain ring of familiarity, Edwards want is to find the future in the pre-history. A director well acquainted with maximising the limitations of his toolbox, he proves a smart pick, even with a much inflated budget on the likes of Monsters and The Creator. Of course, his characters lean heavily on those pre-established but it matters not a jot when those cast prove so well deployed. To similar ends, watch for the film’s mandatory T-Rex encounter. It’s blisteringly shot and edge-of-the-seat exciting. It can be done.

T.S.