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JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH Almost Had a Much Darker Ending — GeekTyrant
Big-budget blockbusters are often built on shifting sand. Scripts are tweaked on the fly, storylines morph during post, and entire endings get rewritten just before the final cut. Jurassic World Rebirth was no exception.
According to director Gareth Edwards, this dinosaur-packed chapter almost ended with a gut punch fans weren't expecting.
Spoiler warning if you haven't seen the film yet.
One of the most crowd-pleasing moments in Jurassic World: Rebirth is the surprise return of Mahershala Ali's Duncan Kincaid, the grizzled mercenary who buys time for a group of trapped kids by luring the terrifying new mutated dinosaur, Distortus Rex, away with a flare.
For a few tense minutes, it looks like that's the end of Kincaid, making a noble sacrifice to save others from being eaten. Then, just when you think he's being digested in the stomach of the monsterous dino, he stumbles back onto the scene alive. Cue applause.
But that wasn't always the plan. Edwards told /Film:
'I'll tell you, the bit we did shoot two versions of is Kincaid living and dying. Basically, the version where he dies, you just don't have the other bit [where he reappears]. But because that was how it was written to start with and we filmed it and did everything as if he was going to die, everything felt correct.
'As an audience you go, 'Oh my God, he's going to actually die, of course he is,' and then he does. Then when he's brought back, I think it is a surprise. Then I felt like, 'Oh no, what if the audience thinks we copped out?'
'I would remind myself of E.T. , which is the masterpiece version of this, where I never felt that at all in E.T. I felt really sad [laughs] that he had gone, and then euphoric when he was back. It was kind of like a little version of that, where you sort of pray: 'Is the audience going to ...?'
'And then watching it the other night [at the New York premiere], it got the best reaction in that moment and I was really like, 'Oh my God, thank God we shot that version where he lived because it could have been quite a downer [laughs].''
It's a rare case where a reshoot didn't just fix a problem, it elevated the entire ending. But that wasn't the only thing on the chopping block.
You know that moment in every Jurassic movie where the T-Rex swoops in like a prehistoric deus ex machina to save the day? Edwards nearly gave in to that tradition. But this time, cooler heads prevailed.
'I thought about — that came up. It didn't come up on the shoot, it came up in post-production where I just suddenly, I guess, I woke up in a cold sweat one night and was like, 'Should we, should we have the T-rex turn up?' [laughs] I went in the next day and brought this up with everybody and I expected everyone to go, 'Yeahhh' [enthusiastically], and it was just a reaction like, 'Really? But all the other ones did that.' It slightly kind of reassured me like, 'Okay, I think that we did the right thing.'
'But there's this storytelling thing called [deus] ex machina and it's like Latin, I think, for God basically coming and saving your characters at the end of a story. I think 'Jurassic' has this thing called 'Rex Machina,' where it's like the T-rex comes and saves everyone.
'I remember David Vickery, the visual effects supervisor, he was like, 'But that's one of the things I loved about this film, is that it didn't do what the other ones did,' and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, you do juggle these — there's like, what's the right thing here? You try and choose the right path.'
Instead of yet another dino-vs-dino finale, the Distortus Rex remains a looming threat, Kincaid survives, and we're left with the kind of open-ended finale leaving the door open for a sequel.
