The latest trailer for Jurassic World: Rebirth was released on February 5th, and as someone who’s been a fan of the franchise for a long time, I need to break it down. In case you’re not locked in on this as much as I am, the general premise finds that covert operations expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) are tasked with traveling to an island called “Site C” to extract a specific dinosaur’s DNA to use as part of a life-saving cure. The trailer garnered conflicting reviews from fandom and critics, so why not join in and look at how I felt about the whole thing?
The Good
I LOVE that we’re going back to an island setting. Site C’s lush jungle featured in the trailer feels reminiscent of Isla Nublar (which exploded in Fallen Kingdom) and Isla Sorna (featured in Jurassic Park 3). Director Gareth Edwards has a good track record with making monster-related media, and based on the little bit featured in the trailer, I think we’re in for a truly scary-looking rejected mutant dinosaur. I also like the direction that Loomis’ character is taking. Loomis seems to be less of the cookie-cutter action hero that Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) was and instead seems to lean more towards the professor-forced-to-step-up energy that Alan Grant (Sam Neill) had.
The Bad
Some of the lines clipped for the trailer feel out of place or too corny for the darker tone that Edwards seems to have tried to channel. The conflicting energies of the horror-esque visuals and the typical wry-action movie dialogue sometimes make the trailer fall flat. My hope is that the clips have just been spliced together in an awkward way and will make more sense within the context of the entire movie.
The… Confusing?
The confusing parts of the trailer aren’t necessarily bad. Honestly, they make me want to actually watch the movie so I can figure out what’s going on. However, that doesn’t mean that they’re not still worth bringing up.
My main sense of confusion stems from the idea that they’re going somewhere that, according to Duncan (Mahershala Ali), “no one’s dumb enough to go”, but there’s a child on the ship in a few scenes. Whose child is that? The trailer doesn’t give any clues as to why he’s there and it doesn’t really make sense for him to be part of a highly skilled group trying to extract rare dinosaur DNA.
The trailer also establishes that dinosaurs couldn’t handle living in cold climates, so they all just lived near the equator. This doesn’t really make sense to me because, not only do we have canon evidence of some dinosaurs living in cold climates, it also doesn’t address the illegal global dinosaur trade plotline that was set up in Fallen Kingdom and Dominion. This could mean that within the five-year gap between Dominion and Rebirth, authorities somehow managed to stop an extensive and incredibly underground illegal market and have all of the dinosaurs move back to tropical areas, which feels unrealistic, even by movie standards.
What i hope we see
In addition to everything I’m excited about, my biggest hope for Rebirth is a return of the franchise’s core ethical dilemmas to come back to the front. It’s a hope I’m so invested in that 60% of the first draft of this article was an analysis of ethical discussion. To me, the draw of the Jurassic franchise isn’t all about the dinosaurs. The Jurassic World movies so far seem to have lost sight of the science fiction roots of the series when they decided to lean so heavily into the action parts. Science fiction has a tendency to go hand-in-hand with ethical dilemmas, and Jurassic Park’s can be encapsulated by “man playing god”. The fact that our heroes are traversing an island that used to be the original dinosaur development site and is now populated by rejected/failed clones and mutants should put them in the jaws (literally and figuratively) of how humans playing around with nature has consequences.
Despite its problems, I thought that the trailer was pretty good. I’m excited to see whether Rebirth will truly be a rebirth of the world I originally fell in love with.
Jurassic World: Rebirth releases in theaters on July 2.