Dino fatigue

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, July 4th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming up on The World and Everything in It. a summer blockbuster stomps back in theaters.

The Jurassic Park franchise roars to life again with a brand-new installment. WORLD arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino takes us to Jurassic World Rebirth.

COLLIN GARBARINO: Steven Spielberg invented the summer blockbuster 50 years ago with Jaws, but in 1993 he gave us what could be considered the quintessential summer blockbuster with Jurassic Park. The movie had everything. Plenty of action. Characters you cared about. And the kind of jaw-dropping special effects that audiences had never seen before.

Now we’re on the seventh Jurassic Park movie, and, more than three decades later, the franchise still can’t figure out how to recapture the magic of that first film.

Jurassic World Rebirth takes place 32 years after dinosaurs returned, and the planet is starting to find its new normal. The giant beasts have found the earth’s climate inhospitable, and they’ve started to die out again. Those that survive live in a narrow band in the tropics. Even more surprising, the public’s interest in dinosaurs is waning. Dinos aren’t cool any more. Perhaps it has something to do with their causing a string of disasters in the previous movies. The world’s governments have forbidden any contact between humans and the remaining dinosaurs. But one pharmaceutical company sees an opportunity in dinosaur DNA.

MARTIN: This would be a medical breakthrough that could save countless lives.

A drug manufacturer thinks it can cure heart disease by making medicine from dinosaur tissue because, you know… dinosaurs have big hearts. That’s a silly setup, but it gets even sillier because they need samples from three certain dinosaurs, the biggest land dinosaur, the biggest aquatic dinosaur, and the biggest flying dinosaur.

And what a surprise, all three can conveniently be found at the same island. So big pharma hires Scarlett Johansson’s Zora Bennett to infiltrate the forbidden island.

DR. LOOMIS: Survival is a longshot.

ZORA: That’s kind of our specialty.

Zora is a special ops veteran who now provides private security: that is, she’s a mercenary. Accompanying her on the mission will be a drug rep, a paleontologist, and a group of her mercenary friends. Don’t worry about learning their names, they’re mostly in the movie to give the dinosaurs something to chew on.

ZORA: Mr. Work here didn’t tell us everything that we need to know.

Complications arise when the team learns that the beasts on the island aren’t your garden variety t-rexes and raptors.

MARTIN: Look. This island was a laboratory of sorts. They conducted experimental work here.

DR. LOOMIS: What kind of experiments?

MARTIN: Cross breeding of species. “Engineered entertainments,” they called them.

It’s pretty challenging to make audiences care whether dinosaurs eat mercenaries. So the script throws a hapless family onto the island to give us someone more sympathetic to worry about.

TERESA: Dad! Where’s Xavier? What happened? Dad! Where is he?

The parallel stories of the family and the mercenaries require us to jump back and forth for most of the movie. And watching the family successfully navigate the jungle while the trained professionals get picked off one by one strains credulity. It’s not a good sign when your credulity gets strained in a movie with dinosaurs.

DR. LOOMIS: The titanosaur herd should be right across this valley.

ZORA: Well, they’re herbivores, right.

DR. LOOMIS: Yeah.

ZORA: That’s good.

DR. LOOMIS: But the things that hunt them aren’t.

Scarlett Johansson does what she can to save this film, but she doesn’t have much to work with. The script is a mess: The plot doesn’t make much sense and the dialogue is predictable. Then we have to suffer through mini lectures on contemporary social issues. There’s the PTSD awareness scene. The obligatory eco-babble in which we learn that the earth won’t put up with humanity’s bad behavior for much longer. And of course, pharmaceutical companies are painted as the epitome of evil. Also, the screenwriters don’t seem to understand how tax write-offs work.

MARTIN: The average cost of a created species is 72 million dollars. What would you do? Kill it and have to tell your bank, or just carry it forward under R&D?

DR. LOOMIS: What would I do with mutant dinosaurs from an accounting perspective? Is that really the question?

But the movie isn’t all bad. No homework required. You can understand what’s going on even if this is your first Jurassic Park movie. Also, the foul language is pretty mild for a PG-13 movie. And Jurassic World Rebirth has the same director as 2014’s Godzilla and Star Wars’ Rogue One. He manages to give the film an attractive visual style. But in the end, it’s all technique and no inspiration.

In Jurassic World Rebirth, the average person has become uninterested in dinosaurs. It’s an apt metaphor for the state of this venerable franchise. Over the last ten years, each installment has made less money than the one before it. That’s what happens when you repeatedly rely on spectacle while neglecting the story.

There’s still a certain pleasure in watching dinosaurs chase people through the jungle, but if that’s what you really want to see this weekend, you would do better to just queue up the original.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

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