Jurassic Park: Rebirth, is satisfying enough as an action movie, though the lead female security mercenary Zora Bennett, with Scarlett Johansson’s BMI and center of gravity, requires a suspension of disbelief. The plot is that the neo-Jurassic era is over. The resurrected dinosaurs didn’t survive temperate zone temperatures and the modern world’s purportedly lower oxygen levels, except on islands along a narrow equatorial band (what’s happening in Brazil, Indonesia, or the Congo is left unexplored). But someone has discovered a possible cure for heart disease (other than diet and exercise) that requires the genes from the fresh hemoglobin of really big dinosaurs with really big hearts.
This plot point already is on the border of voodoo, sympathetic magic. I doubt Michael Crichton, whose books explained real science, would’ve approved. To make it worse, the blood needed follows the medieval recipes of alchemy or witchcraft: earth, air, fire and water. Blood must be acquired from a land-based herbivore, a flying pterodactyl, and a swimming reptilian shark. This medieval recipe makes for exciting subplots in a variety of terrains, with Zora Bennett’s crew spelunking, boating, hiking, and climbing cliffs.
Bennett’s well-equipped with a tight sleeveless top that shows off mammalian weapons the dinos have never seen, as well as a rifle that shoots a hypodermic needle and test tube which, when full of blood, ignites a rocket that propels the tube off the dinosaur and into the air, a parachute then opening to bring the whole thing down gently to Bennett’s team.
Bennett’s hired by a giant pharmaceutical company, whose slick representative Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend, also in theaters now in The Phoenician Scheme) goes along on the trip. We know Krebs is evil because he shares a last name with an early Bond villain.
It’s illegal to visit these dinosaur islands, so Big Pharma pays $20 million to Bennett and company to go, get the dino blood, get out, and never tell anyone. Krebs’ company is also bringing along Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Baily, seen in Wicked and as Matt Bomer’s boy toy in Fellow Travelers), a scientist whose dinosaur research they’ve funded and who they now need to make sure Bennett’s mercenaries are sampling the right dinos.
The targeted reptiles aren’t the only big-hearted creatures in the movie. Dr. Loomis’ real function in the story is to be Cindy Lou Who, and make the grinchy Zora Bennett consider whether the dino DNA shouldn’t be given to the world, rather than a for-profit pharmaceutical company. Though the World Health Organization wasn’t doing any research and the United Nations wasn’t formulating any plans that would lead them to do so. Perhaps the political economy of the movie is as medieval as its science. Or even Jurassic. I’m not sure average screenwriters understand how the regulatory compliance costs involved in getting a drug approved prevent competing drugs from coming on the market, once the first one insurance and Medicare are willing to pay for makes it to the consumer.
The cast is appropriately DEI. The crew’s led by a woman, Bennett, with a black captain, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali, from Spider-Man). The rest of the crew (who prove expendable and delicious) are a French woman, a blond Euro-Viking man, and an African. Before they get started Bennett has to rescue a Latino man (Lincoln Lawyer star Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his children, and his teen daughter’s boyfriend, who’ve been shipwrecked by the aquatic monster Bennett’s party is seeking. (Krebs and his company’s evil greed is highlighted as he argues against detouring to pick up the shipwrecked family; the rest of the group decide its best to pick them up and take them along to the dinosaur-filled island.)
Curiously, mainly the American characters live, and the characters with foreign accents die. So the screenwriter also practices some alchemy, one part DEI to one part MAGA. We never learn if Zora and Dr. Loomis find true love.