Movie Review: ‘Jurassic World Rebirth' puts a wobbly franchise back on track with superb installment
'Jurassic World Rebirth' captures the awe and majesty of the overgrown lizards that's been lacking for so many of the movies, which became just an endless cat-and-mouse in the dark between scared humans against T-Rexes or raptors. 'Jurassic World Rebirth' lets in the daylight.
Credit goes to screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the original 'Jurassic Park,' and director Gareth Edwards, who knows a thing or two about giant reptiles as director of 2014's 'Godzilla.' Together with director of photographer John Mathieson, they've returned the franchise to its winning roots.
'Jurassic World Rebirth' has nods to the past even as it cuts a new future with new characters. It's a sort of heist movie with monsters that's set on the original decaying island research facility for the original, abandoned Jurassic Park.
Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali — both very unshowy and suggesting a sort of sibling chemistry — play security and extraction specialists — OK, mercenaries — hired to get what everyone wants from dinosaurs in these movies: DNA. In return, there's $10 million.
The movie is set five years after 'Jurassic World Dominion' and some three decades after dinosaurs were reanimated. They've lost their public fascination — a subtle nod perhaps to the films in the franchise — and have struggled with the climate, gathering at the equator.
The Big Pharma company ParkerGenix has come up with a blockbuster idea: Take DNA from three colossal Cretaceous-period creatures — the flying Quetzalcoatlus, the aquatic Mosasaurus and the land-based Titanosaurus — to cure cardiac disease. Wait, how does that work? Don't ask us, something about hemoglobin.
The trick is this: The dinos have to be alive when the DNA is extracted. Why? Because then there'd be no movie, silly. It would be a 10-minute sequence of a guy in a white coat and a syringe. This way, we celebrate three kinds of dinosaurs in three separate chapters.
It may seem a little far-fetched, but may we remind you about the last movie, which involved a biogenetic granddaughter, a global pharma conspiracy, the cast members from both trilogies, a Giganotosaurus, giant locusts on fire and had the ludicrous decision to have Chris Pratt make a promise to bring home a baby dino — to its mother.
The three-part quest at the heart of 'Jurassic World Rebirth' is interrupted by a family — a dad, his two daughters and a sketchy boyfriend — in a 45-foot sailboat that is capsized and need rescuing. They bring a dose of not-always-working humor and humanity to the extraction team, which also includes a too-easily-telegraphing baddie played by Rupert Friend — 'I'm too smart to die' — and a museum-based paleontologist played by Jonathan Bailey.
The filmmakers include clever nods to other blockbusters — 'Indiana Jones,' 'Star Wars,' 'Jaws' and 'ET' — and thrillingly create a dinos-hunting-in-a-convenience-store sequence like a tribute to the original film's dinos-hunting-in-a-kitchen sequence. The shots overall are beautifully composed, from silhouettes on a boat in twilight to almost feeling the burn of the ropes as actors rappel down a 500-foot cliff face.
The creatures here are made glorious — from a dozing T-Rex along a river bed to the ones twisting in the sea, pure muscle and heft. A highlight is a pair of long-tailed Tyrannosauruses entwining their necks as John Williams' familiar score plays, two lovers with thick, knotted skin utterly oblivious to the pesky humans who want some DNA.
For some reason, candy is a touchstone throughout the movie, from the opening sequence in which a stray Snickers wrapper causes incalculable harm, to licorice fed to a baby dino and one character's fondness for crunching Altoids.
Edwards' pacing is perfect, allowing dread to build with just the rustling of trees, and letting characters deepen between breathless, excellently filmed action sequences. The gorgeous landscape — Thailand's waterfalls, grassy plains, shoreline caves and mangrove swamps — should be used for a tourist campaign, well, as long as they remove the rapacious dinos.
As if all this wasn't enough, there's a bonus bit at the end. The research facility that was abandoned years ago was cross-breeding dino species and making 'genetically altered freaks' that still roam around. Some look like a turkey-bat-raptor hybrid — gross and scary — and one is a 20,000-pound T-Rex with a misshapen head and a horrible roar. It's like getting a free monster movie.
In many ways, the folks behind 'Jurassic World Rebirth' are trying to do the same thing as their mercenaries: Going back to the source code to recapture the magic of Steven Spielberg's 1993 blockbuster original. They've thrillingly succeeded.
'Jurassic World Rebirth,' a Universal Pictures release that opens in theaters Wednesday, is rated PG-13 for 'intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language and a drug reference.' Running time: 133 minutes. Three and half stars out of four.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Movie Review: ‘Jurassic World Rebirth' puts a wobbly franchise back on track with superb installment
If you've lately been feeling that the 'Jurassic Park' franchise has jumped an even more ancient creature — the shark — hold off any thoughts of extinction. Judging from the latest entry, there's still life in this old dino series. 'Jurassic World Rebirth' captures the awe and majesty of the overgrown lizards that's been lacking for so many of the movies, which became just an endless cat-and-mouse in the dark between scared humans against T-Rexes or raptors. 'Jurassic World Rebirth' lets in the daylight. Credit goes to screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the original 'Jurassic Park,' and director Gareth Edwards, who knows a thing or two about giant reptiles as director of 2014's 'Godzilla.' Together with director of photographer John Mathieson, they've returned the franchise to its winning roots. 'Jurassic World Rebirth' has nods to the past even as it cuts a new future with new characters. It's a sort of heist movie with monsters that's set on the original decaying island research facility for the original, abandoned Jurassic Park. Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali — both very unshowy and suggesting a sort of sibling chemistry — play security and extraction specialists — OK, mercenaries — hired to get what everyone wants from dinosaurs in these movies: DNA. In return, there's $10 million. The movie is set five years after 'Jurassic World Dominion' and some three decades after dinosaurs were reanimated. They've lost their public fascination — a subtle nod perhaps to the films in the franchise — and have struggled with the climate, gathering at the equator. The Big Pharma company ParkerGenix has come up with a blockbuster idea: Take DNA from three colossal Cretaceous-period creatures — the flying Quetzalcoatlus, the aquatic Mosasaurus and the land-based Titanosaurus — to cure cardiac disease. Wait, how does that work? Don't ask us, something about hemoglobin. The trick is this: The dinos have to be alive when the DNA is extracted. Why? Because then there'd be no movie, silly. It would be a 10-minute sequence of a guy in a white coat and a syringe. This way, we celebrate three kinds of dinosaurs in three separate chapters. It may seem a little far-fetched, but may we remind you about the last movie, which involved a biogenetic granddaughter, a global pharma conspiracy, the cast members from both trilogies, a Giganotosaurus, giant locusts on fire and had the ludicrous decision to have Chris Pratt make a promise to bring home a baby dino — to its mother. The three-part quest at the heart of 'Jurassic World Rebirth' is interrupted by a family — a dad, his two daughters and a sketchy boyfriend — in a 45-foot sailboat that is capsized and need rescuing. They bring a dose of not-always-working humor and humanity to the extraction team, which also includes a too-easily-telegraphing baddie played by Rupert Friend — 'I'm too smart to die' — and a museum-based paleontologist played by Jonathan Bailey. The filmmakers include clever nods to other blockbusters — 'Indiana Jones,' 'Star Wars,' 'Jaws' and 'ET' — and thrillingly create a dinos-hunting-in-a-convenience-store sequence like a tribute to the original film's dinos-hunting-in-a-kitchen sequence. The shots overall are beautifully composed, from silhouettes on a boat in twilight to almost feeling the burn of the ropes as actors rappel down a 500-foot cliff face. The creatures here are made glorious — from a dozing T-Rex along a river bed to the ones twisting in the sea, pure muscle and heft. A highlight is a pair of long-tailed Tyrannosauruses entwining their necks as John Williams' familiar score plays, two lovers with thick, knotted skin utterly oblivious to the pesky humans who want some DNA. For some reason, candy is a touchstone throughout the movie, from the opening sequence in which a stray Snickers wrapper causes incalculable harm, to licorice fed to a baby dino and one character's fondness for crunching Altoids. Edwards' pacing is perfect, allowing dread to build with just the rustling of trees, and letting characters deepen between breathless, excellently filmed action sequences. The gorgeous landscape — Thailand's waterfalls, grassy plains, shoreline caves and mangrove swamps — should be used for a tourist campaign, well, as long as they remove the rapacious dinos. As if all this wasn't enough, there's a bonus bit at the end. The research facility that was abandoned years ago was cross-breeding dino species and making 'genetically altered freaks' that still roam around. Some look like a turkey-bat-raptor hybrid — gross and scary — and one is a 20,000-pound T-Rex with a misshapen head and a horrible roar. It's like getting a free monster movie. In many ways, the folks behind 'Jurassic World Rebirth' are trying to do the same thing as their mercenaries: Going back to the source code to recapture the magic of Steven Spielberg's 1993 blockbuster original. They've thrillingly succeeded. 'Jurassic World Rebirth,' a Universal Pictures release that opens in theaters Wednesday, is rated PG-13 for 'intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language and a drug reference.' Running time: 133 minutes. Three and half stars out of four.
Winnipeg Free Press
5 days ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
David Koepp is Hollywood's go-to scribe. He's back with a fresh start for ‘Jurassic World Rebirth'
NEW YORK (AP) — EXT JUNGLE NIGHT An eyeball, big, yellowish, distinctly inhuman, stares raptly between wooden slats, part of a large crate. The eye darts from side to side quickly, alert as hell. So begins David Koepp's script to 1993's 'Jurassic Park.' Like much of Koepp's writing, it's crisply terse and intensely visual. It doesn't tell the director (in this case Steven Spielberg ) where to put the camera, but it nearly does. 'I asked Steven before we started: What are the limitations about what I can write?' Koepp recalls. 'CGI hadn't really been invented yet. He said: 'Only your imagination.'' Yet in the 32 years since penning the adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel, Koepp has established himself as one of Hollywood's top screenwriters not through the boundlessness of his imagination but by his expertise in limiting it. Koepp is the master of the 'bottle' movie — films hemmed in by a single location or condensed timed frame. From David Fincher's 'Panic Room' (2002) to Steven Soderbergh's 'Presence' (2025), he excels at corralling stories into uncluttered, headlong movie narratives. Koepp can write anything — as long as there are parameters. 'The great film scholar and historian David Bordwell and I were talking about that concept once and he said, 'Because the world is too big?' I said, 'That's it, exactly,'' Koepp says. 'The world is too big. If I can put the camera anywhere I want, if anybody on the entire planet can appear in this film, if it can last 130 years, how do I even begin? It makes me want to take a nap. 'So I've always looked for bottles in which to put the delicious wine.' Reining in 'Jurassic World' By some measure, the world of 'Jurassic World' got too big. In the last entry, 2022's not particularly well received 'Jurassic World: Dominion,' the dinosaurs had spread across the planet. 'I don't know where else to go with that,' Koepp says. Koepp, a 62-year-old native of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, hadn't written a 'Jurassic' movie since the second one, 1997's 'The Lost World.' Back then, Brian De Palma, whom Koepp worked with on 'Carlito's Way' and 'Mission: Impossible,' took to calling him 'dinosaur boy.' Koepp soon after moved onto other challenges. But when Spielberg called him up a few years ago and asked, 'Do you have one more in you?' Koepp had one request: 'Can we start over?' 'Jurassic World Rebirth,' which opens in theaters July 2, is a fresh start for one of Hollywood's biggest multi-billion-dollar franchises. It's a new cast of characters (Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey co-star), a new director (Gareth Edwards) and a new storyline. But just as they were 32 years ago, the dinosaurs are again Koepp's to play with. 'The first page reassured me,' says Edwards. 'It said: 'Written by David Koepp.'' For many moviegoers, that opening credit has been a signal that what follows is likely to be smartly scripted, brightly paced and neatly situated. His script to Ron Howard's 1994 news drama 'The Paper' took place over 24 hours. 'Secret Window' (2004) was set in an upstate New York cabin. Even bigger scale films like 'War of the Worlds' favor the fate of one family over global calamity. 'I hear those ideas and I get excited. OK, now I'm constrained,' says Koepp. 'A structural or aesthetic constraint is like the Hayes Code. They had to come up with many other interesting ways to imply those people had sex, and that made for some really interesting storytelling.' The two Stevens Koepp's bottles can fit either summer spectacles or low-budget indies. 'Jurassic World Rebirth' is the third film penned by Koepp just this year, following a nifty pair of thrillers with Steven Soderbergh in 'Presence' and 'Black Bag.' 'Presence,' like 'Panic Room,' stays within a family home, and it's seen entirely from the perspective of a ghost. 'Black Bag' deliciously combines marital drama with spy movie, organized around a dinner party and a polygraph test. Those films completed a zippy trilogy with Soderbergh, beginning with 2022's blistering pandemic-set 'Kimi.' Much of Koepp's career, particularly recently, run through the two Stevens: Soderbergh and Spielberg. 'What they have in common is they both would have absolutely killed it in the 1940s,' Koepp says. 'In the studio system in the 1940s, if Jack Warner said 'I'm putting you on the Wally Beery wrestling picture.' Either one of them would have said, 'Great, here's what I'm going to do.' They both share that sensibility of: How do we get this done?' Spielberg and Koepp recently wrapped production on Spielberg's untitled new science fiction film, said to be especially meaningful to Spielberg. He gave a 50-page treatment to Koepp to turn into a script. 'It's even more focused than I've ever seen him on a movie,' says Koepp. 'There would be times — we'd be in different time zones – I'd wake up and there were 35 texts, and this went on for about a year. He's as locked in on that movie as I've ever seen him, and he's a guy who locks in.' 'Your own ChatGPT' For 'Jurassic World Rebirth,' Koepp wanted to reorder the franchise. Inspired by Chuck Jones' 'commandments' for the Road Runner cartoons (the Road Runner only says 'meep meep'; all products are from the ACME Corporation, etc.), Koepp put down nine governing principles for the 'Jurassic' franchise. They included things like 'humor is oxygen' and that the dinosaurs are animals, not monsters. A key to 'Rebirth' was geographically herding the dinosaurs. In the new movie, they've clustered around the equator, drawn to the tropical environment. Like 'Jurassic Park,' the action takes place primarily on an island. Going into the project, Edwards was warned about his screenwriter's convictions. 'At the end of my meeting with Spielberg, he just smiled and said, 'That's great. If you think we were difficult, wait until you meet David Koepp,'' says Edwards, laughing. But Edwards and Koepp quickly bonded over similar tastes in movies, like the original 'King Kong,' a poster of which hangs in Koepp's office. On set, Edwards would sometimes find the need for 30 seconds of new dialogue. 'Within like a minute, I'd get this perfectly written 30 second interaction that was on theme, funny, had a reversal in it — perfect,' says Edwards. 'It was like having your own ChatGPT but actually really good at writing.' 'Everyone's got a note' In the summer, especially, it's common to see a long list of names under the screenplay. Blockbuster-making is, increasingly, done by committee. The stakes are too high, the thinking goes, to leave it to one writer. But 'Jurassic World Rebirth' bears just Koepp's credit. 'There's an old saying: 'No one of us is as dumb as all of us,'' Koepp says. 'When you have eight or 10 people who have significant input into the script, the odds are stacked enormously against you. You're trying to please a lot of different people, and it often doesn't go well.' The only time that worked, in Koepp's experience, was Sam Raimi's 2002 'Spider-Man.' 'I was also hired and fired three times on that movie,' he says, 'so maybe they knew what they were doing.' Koepp, though, prefers to — after research and outlining — let a movie topple out of his mind as rapidly as possible. 'I like to gun it out and clean up the mess later,' he says. But the string of 'Presence,' 'Black Bag' and 'Jurassic World Rebirth' may have tested even Koepp's prodigious output. The intense period of writing, which fell before, during and after the writers strike, he says, meant five months without a day off. 'I might have broke something,' he says, shaking his head. Still, the three films also show a veteran screenwriter working in high gear, judiciously meting out details and keeping dinosaurs, ghosts and spies hurtling forward. Anything like a perfect script — for Koepp, that's 'Rosemary's Baby' or 'Jaws' — remains elusive. But even when you come close, there are always critics. 'After the first 'Jurassic' movie, a fifth-grade class all wrote letters to me, which was very nice,' Koepp recalls. 'Then they wrote, 'PS, when you do the next one, don't have it take so long to get to the island.' Everyone's got a note!''
Calgary Herald
18-06-2025
- Calgary Herald
From bannock to bao: 8 must-try food trucks in Vancouver
Article content Vancouver's food truck program began in earnest in 2010, when the city started issuing licenses to mobile kitchens. Today, more than 200 vendors are licensed to feed the Lower Mainland masses from their modified vehicles. Article content You can find food trucks everywhere from parks to craft breweries to street parties, while The Greater Vancouver Food Truck Festival hosts a number of events throughout the year, including Food Truck Wars, a three-day event at the Cloverdale Exhibition Grounds. Article content You can't go wrong with mac and cheese, and REEL serves it from three bright yellow movie-themed trucks. Variations include The Green Mile, topped with broccoli and crispy onions; Godzilla, topped with nori and Japanese mayo; and Some Like it Hot, with banana peppers and hot sauce. Article content Bao Buns Article content In addition to their stand at the Richmond Night Market, Yoseb and Francis, a.k.a. The Bao Boys, 'bring incredible energy to every event they attend making them a fun and interactive choice with a unique offering,' Rachel Keith, marketing director for GVFTF, says. Their steamed buns, topped with ice cream, icing sugar and condensed milk, earned them GVFTF's People's Choice AND Best Sweet Treat awards at Food Truck Wars 2025. Article content Article content One of a few vegan food trucks in the city, Chickpea offers a Mediterranean twist to plant-based platters, wraps, hotdogs and burgers. Vegans happily queue for the Chicksteak, consisting of vegan steak and sautéed onions; the crispy seitan (wheat gluten) chicken; and the shawarma, made with soy curls marinated in a blend of curry, sumac and coriander. In 2024, Chickpea's Main Street storefront made OpenTable's list of Top 100 restaurants with Healthy Bites in Canada. Article content Article content Big City Bannock Article content Article content One of the newest additions to YVR's food truck scene is the Indigenous-run Big City Bannock. Raymond and Hannah Yamelst saw a gap and are filling it with the fried flatbread that is a staple for Indigenous people across the country. The Yamelts use bannock in tacos, burgers, and twists. Deer stew, sockeye salmon chowder and huckleberry lemonade are also on the menu.
