Jurassic World Rebirth Teaser: Worthy Sequel or More Gimmicks?

Movies

This summer, dinosaurs return to cinemas with Universal’s Jurassic World: Rebirth, and a new teaser trailer has been released. The trailer teases new iterations of fan-favorite dinos and offers glimpses of a new, mutated dinosaur that is the focus of many online discussions amongst passionate Jurassic fans over whether this new “Dinosaur” will make or break the new movie.

The seventh installment in the Jurassic film franchise, Jurassic World: Rebirth opens July 2. The dinos will battle it out at the box office this July with DC’s new Superman film and Marvel Studios’ Fantastic Four: First Steps. Can Jurassic World: Rebirth outperform its competition? It may do so. The last three Jurassic World films made $1 billion+ each at the box office, even though they failed with fans and critics. The Jurassic name alone may guarantee financial success. But for how long, especially if the films become more stale and unimaginative over time? Jurassic World: Rebirth hopes to “reinvent” the franchise once again as a soft reboot and take us back to the basics of the original Jurassic Park in terms of style, tension, and a more adventure-centric story. But it adds a twist or two, in this case adding a new element with mutated dinosaurs. The past Jurassic Worlds dealt with hybrid dinosaurs – genetically modified dinos created with different animal DNA. In the case of Jurassic World: Rebirth, the new teaser and Variety’s new article tell us that this new mutant dinosaur was one of Ingen’s (the bioengineering company that cloned the dinosaurs) first cloned dinosaurs, but a failed clone with unstable mutations.

The teaser trailer sets up the new characters first. No returning cast members from the past Jurassic World and Park movies show up in this installment. Our three main leads are Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, a covert operations expert; Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Henry Loomis; and Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid, a black-ops logistics expert. The teaser shows the team traveling to a new island never before seen in the franchise, where Ingen did their first dinosaur cloning research. Originally, the first research was done on Isla Sorna, the island location in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs were cloned and bred. Isla Nublar was where Jurassic Park was located. So, Jurassic fans are now debating why there is a new island doing the same thing as one already established in the first Jurassic Park sequel. Some now argue that this could be THE “first location” for research and dinosaur clone testing, including failed clones, and that further cloning was later moved to Isla Sorna. Perhaps the film will address some of these issues because this does feel a bit inconsistent and trivial.

The Jurassic World Rebirth teaser then moves on to the adventure aspects of the film. The characters form a recovery team assigned to recover DNA samples of specific large dinosaurs located on this island. These dinosaur DNA samples will help humanity potentially cure heart disease. We see action sequences with a new T-rex sporting a new, more primal-looking design. This time, it looks like the humans are escaping the T-rex in a river sequence that is taken right out of the original novel but was never incorporated in the previous films.

We see the return of Spinosaurus, but not the same one from Jurassic Park III. In this case, a group of Spinos, more Paleo-accurate ones, join a Mosasourus in the waters as they hunt for our heroes. We also see glimpses of the new mutant dinosaur, which looks like the Rancor from Return of the Jedi with a head reminiscent of a Xenomorph from the Alien movies. Online discussions amongst fans have some worried this new Dino gimmick will take away interest from the regular dinos. Many fans want the new movie to return to the more grounded elements of the first three Jurassic Park movies and do away with the hybrids. I definitely would prefer that myself. Nevertheless, this is not a hybrid dinosaur but a failed clone, one of the first test clones that somehow survived on this island and is now the antagonist of the new movie.

Jurassic World Rebirth is directed by Gareth Edwards, who is known for 2014’s Godzilla and 2016’s Star Wars: Rogue One. He has a good visual eye for spectacle and otherworldly visuals, added with some primal elements. His first film was 2010’s Monsters, about alien titans invading Earth. Edwards’ sensibilities with the monster-alien-sci-fi genre are a good mix for a Jurassic World movie. What he has to offer in visual and spectacle he sometimes lacks in writing, but Steven Spielberg, executive producer of the film, and producer Frank Marshall hired David Koepp to write the screenplay in hopes of bringing back some gravitas to this new Jurassic film. Koepp originally wrote the screenplay adaptations for Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park from Michael Crichton’s novels. The goal is to bring back tension and the nearly-horror aspects of the first Jurassic Park – and, hopefully, also the cautionary tale aspects of that movie: questioning the motives of humans cloning dinosaurs and the natural dangers and responsibilities of that.

But the trailer didn’t do much of the above. Besides setting up plot details, there were too many MCU-esque one-liners; comic dialogue that are a bit too on-the-nose is added to what should be tense, dramatic sequences. And this adds concern to fans who are already worried about the mutant Dino. Hopefully, this is just what they chose to show, and the movie has more gravitas and grounded interactions. The danger these Jurassic films face at this time is going the route of current MCU, Disney Star Wars, Star Trek, and other franchises. With badly placed “comic relief,” uninspired action sequences, and worse: agenda-driven identity politics. By then, not even the name Jurassic will guarantee box office success. And like those other franchises, if the Jurassic IP doesn’t deliver better movies, it will go extinct.

Let us know what you thought of the Jurassic World Rebirth teaser in the comments!

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