by Narayan Saimbi
“Welcome to Jurassic Park”
Those iconic words from the first film in the franchise took my breath away the first time I heard them. A new beginning, a resurrection of earth’s oldest entities. The fossils of old with new life breathed into them.
But as we know, things go terrifyingly wrong terrifyingly quickly. It’s during this movie that we are introduced to the lightning fast velociraptors and the T-Rex- the dinosaur that the franchise is most known for. Later iterations of the original series gave us the “Compies” and of course, Jurassic Park III’s iconic Spinosaurus.
However, when we reached the revival of the franchise in 2015, the dinosaurs seemed less like the stars of the show and more like the side characters in a Chris Pratt Marvel movie. Sure, there was the Indominus Rex and the Indoraptor. But they pale in comparison to the first time we saw the T-Rex or the Spinosaurus in my opinion.
The image of the Indominus and Indoraptor seem to be more chilling, being stark white and jet black respectively. But both Jurassic World and Fallen Kingdom don’t have any other truly terrifying monsters in their films. The bloodthirsty creatures of old had all of their personality removed from them, just so Chris Pratt and his merry men can crack a few one-liners. And these original dinosaur species no longer have that same fear and aura attached to them as they once did.
Enter Rebirth. The “villain” dinosaur here may be the poorly named “D-Rex”, but the original dinosaurs are now the stars of the show (with the addition of the Mosasaur- one of the good things that the World movies gave to the franchise).
Rebirth follows a group of mercenaries tasked with taking samples from huge dinosaurs on an island by a pharmaceutical company, with the company aiming to heavily profit from the samples collected. During the group’s time on the island, a family is there, trying their best to escape the island and the dinosaurs that are hunting them down.
Whilst the dialogue is clunky, and the plot is admittedly weak, this movie clearly aims to achieve one thing. This movie is about dinosaurs, first and foremost. Rebirth is all too aware that’s what we’ve come to see. And it does not disappoint in that.
The Spinosaur is scary again, reimagined as a cold-blooded aquatic killer that hunts down its prey in packs. The T-Rex is once more this terrifying carnivore that commands attention and freezes blood. Even though velociraptors only got a brief cameo, they still had their moment as these lightning quick killers that silently stalk their prey. These iconic dinosaurs that have been relegated to the side characters sideline for the best part of a decade are finally getting their day in the sun once more.
The human characters are not serving to distract us from these behemoths, but rather enhance our experience with them. Dinosaurs were the apex predators of this planet, long before the humans came to town. And it really shows.
I think the Jurassic franchise got a bit swept up in the superhero movie mania in the late 2010s. Everything had to have snappy dialogue and one-liners. With a franchise like Jurassic Park, that’s not how it works. The T-Rex cannot give a witty retort to a raptor’s dig. The Mosasaur cannot call Chris Pratt a jackass. The dinosaurs need to be treated as what they are: dinosaurs. And a franchise that has built its back on the bones of these prehistoric fossils needs to recognise that.
However, as far as Rebirth is concerned, they absolutely knocked it out of the park with that one.
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