Jurassic World Rebirth Chases Summer Movie Nostalgia (opinion)

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2 days ago

Before you ask, they keep making Jurassic Park movies because you keep paying to see them.
Maybe not you, specifically. But people, who drove the last three films in the franchise to billions in combined box office revenue. Dinosaurs, or at least dinosaur movies, are big business.
So the existence of Jurassic World Rebirth—or as I prefer to think of it, Jurassic Park: Another One, because that's all it really is—owes something to market forces. This is just supply responding to demand.
But what, exactly, is that demand for? At the most basic level, it's for big-budget cinematic events with dinosaurs created via movie magic, which these days mostly means computer-generated effects. Those dinosaurs should romp around creating general mayhem of some sort, as humans scream and scurry in terror. In genre terms, the Jurassic Park films are monster movies, designed to thrill and instill terror.
But I think the demand that props up this series is actually for something deeper, something more expansive. In part, it's for scientific awe—at dinosaurs themselves, at the idea of giant bird-lizards that actually roamed the earth, at the literal smallness of humanity in comparison.
But even more than that, it's for cinematic awe, for the sense that through the prestidigitation of Tinseltown, we can resurrect these ancient terrors and set them loose in our world. Science itself may not be able to bring dinosaurs back from extinction, at least not yet, but Industrial Light and Magic can.
Steven Spielberg's original wasn't just a tightly paced monster adventure—though it was—it was also a technical marvel, a movie that showed viewers things they'd never seen before. It relied on what were, at the time, advanced and novel computer effects to show dinosaurs running, leaping, and chasing.
But what people forget is that most of the dinosaur shots in the film were created using practical effects—a giant T-Rex puppet head, a life-sized animatronic stegosaurus, a poison-spitting menace with painted rubber skin. Jurassic Park arrived at exactly the moment when computer effects became good enough that they could do some things that practical effects couldn't, but when it still made sense to use real, physical effects where possible.
Spielberg had practically invented the idea of the summer movie two decades prior with Jaws. And Jurassic Park was in so many ways an evolution of the ideas, story structure, and techniques he pioneered in that film.
When the movie came out in the early 90s, he was at the peak of his Hollywood dominance; somehow he released Schindler's List later the same year.
The result was not just a nifty technical exercise, or even a superior blockbuster ride.
No, Jurassic Park was the best summer movie ever, the ideal of the form, the flawless diamond to which all other summer movies since have aspired. And it's never been surpassed.
There's a moment almost exactly one hour into the original Jurassic Park, when the Tyrannosaurus rex finally appears, roaring its signature Dolby roar, and begins terrorizing an unsuspecting group of park preview guests. What follows is the single greatest summer movie set piece of all time, as Spielberg sets his big bad dinosaur loose against a couple of kids in a jeep and their adult overseers.
I was 11 during the summer of 1993, and that probably explains some of my fondness for the film, but I cannot stress how effectively this scene played in movie theaters at the time, even weeks after opening weekend. People screamed and gasped, cackling with a mix of fear and surprise. It's a cliche to say that the tension was palpable, but it really was. You could feel it in the air.
Every movie makes a promise, some bigger than others. And Jurassic Park had been hyped, advertised, and marketed as a cultural mega-event. Its promises were extravagantly impossible.
But here, finally, in the summer of 1993, was a movie that fully delivered on every single one of its enormous promises, a spectacle that actually lived up to the hype. It was awesome.
That's what every Jurassic Park movie since has been chasing—that joyous, rapturous, almost silly sense of terror and wonder at some totally imaginary event projected in light on a screen.
And that's why every movie since has recycled and remixed bits from the original, with winks and callbacks and nostalgia-tinged 'member berries for all those who remember, or heard the legend, of the one summer movie against which all others are measured.
Jurassic Park: Another One—sorry, Jurassic World: Rebirth—goes through the motions, checking off the franchise's boxes while nodding to some of the original's most memorable moments. But it doesn't measure up.
At times it even seems to know it. As with 2015's Jurassic World, which pitted genetically engineered super dinosaurs against the old school dinos of the original, nodding to the expansionary demand for bigger and more terrifying beasts, it sometimes acts as a commentary on its own dismal existence.
The movie's non-dinosaur villain is a pharma company moneyman who seeks to make trillions off a drug that might mitigate cardiovascular disease, giving people decades of extra life. The heroes reject his grubby profit-seeking, preferring an open-source solution in which no one owns the cure.
Setting aside the stupidity of the premise—pharmaceuticals are among the most effective and cost-efficient ways to save and extend lives—it is funny, as always, that this series pretends to hate rank capitalism, even as the endless chain of sequels is a direct product of it. And even this is just a dutiful nod to the original, a parable about the dangers of arrogant science and unchecked technology that was, itself, an exemplar of the benefits of boundary-pushing technological innovation. In this painfully mediocre Jurassic Park franchise placeholder, even the hypocrisy is nostalgic.
Rebirth is set in a world in which dinosaurs are commonplace, and most people have become bored with them. As the inevitable snarky but charming scientist character laments early in the film, "Nobody cares about these animals anymore. They deserve better." They surely do.
Sadly, in Jurassic Park: Another One, they don't get it. I doubt they will in the next one either.
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