Do we really need another Jurassic Park movie?

Another summer comes and another Jurassic Park movie comes out. This installment, Jurassic World: Rebirth, follows Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) as she leads a covert team (Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali) to collect dinosaur blood for a new miracle drug.

But do we need another dinosaur summer blockbuster film? Today on Commotion, guest host Rad Simonpillai sits down with film critics Alison Willmore, Jackson Weaver and Rachel Ho to review Jurassic World: Rebirth. 

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion including reviews of Sorry, Baby and Heads of State, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Rad: Alison, this is the fourth in the Jurassic World series, and then, of course, the seventh in this franchise that began 32 years ago with Jurassic Park. Does this installment justify its existence?  

Alison: I feel like several of these Jurassic Worlds have had trouble justifying their existence, except that they've all made over a billion dollars, which I guess is the actual justification from a most basic standpoint. 

A constant drumbeat in Jurassic World is that people just get bored of dinosaurs easily. You know, they have to keep coming up with mutant dinosaurs to please these fickle audiences…. But it's funny that this movie actually, I think, achieves being boring. You've done it, you have finally fulfilled the prophecy. I'm such a sucker for dinosaur action. I'm, like, "Is it going to eat that guy? It ate that guy!" But in this movie, it just really struggles to come up with a reason why ScarJo and her team will have to go. It's like a video game quest, for "reasons" we need to sample blood from a big flying dinosaur and a swimming dinosaur and all. It feels like [the film] itself is frustrated with having to come up with new scenarios, while also hitting the beats we expect from a Jurassic movie. So I think it'll probably make a lot of money anyway because people are also suckers for dino action, like me. But it is the least motivated of all of these movies that I've seen so far.

Rad: Jackson, you have a cast here, Oscar winners, very celebrated actors. Do they elevate this from being the typical Hollywood sequel slot?

Jackson: They definitely elevate it. But they elevate it from garbage to garbage with a bow on it — really that's as best as I can say. Because we do have one of the best actors, I think, in this movie, or best characters in this movie, played by David Iacono. He plays Xavier, the lazy layabout, Pete Davidson-type character. The actor himself does such a good job of making him interesting to watch, but the writing fails him at every turn. And it fails all of the actors, because Mahershala Ali kind of does the same thing.

But when you get a formulaic movie, formulas work for a reason because they have a beginning, middle, end, an arc that makes you satisfied and interested. These character archetypes do not understand why they're character archetypes. Zora Bennett, the Scarlett Johansson character, is supposed to be an Indiana Jones clone, but there's no heart to her character, no reason to care what she's doing, so she's just gruff and mean to people for no reason. The doctor character played by Jonathan Bailey is basically just Milo from the Atlantis movies — except in those movies, he wanted to find Atlantis to prove his grandpa's legacy right and to change his connection to humanity in general and find out that these things are real living beings on the page. But this doctor just likes dinosaurs, sees a dinosaur, says, "Great, dinosaurs!" and the movie just goes forward. 

All of it is just pointless, bad writing. That great acting — I don't think Scarlett Johansson does great, but everyone else is really good — doesn't make the movie anything more than just: this is terribly written. 

Rad: The best gag in this movie — and I think Alison, you might have mentioned this in your review — is that Scarlett Johansson is playing a character who is very reluctantly signing on to this dino expedition because of how many zeros are in the cheque. 

Jackson: Art imitates life.

Rad: She was committed to the character in that sense.

Rachel, this is a movie that is clearly striking out with both Alison and Jackson. Are you going to find any redeeming quality about Jurassic World: Rebirth? 

Rachel: Yeah, I loved it. No, I'm kidding. It wasn't good. 

I will say: there's an incredible, impressively gratuitous use of John Williams's score in this, and it's one of the best scores that has ever been created for film, in my opinion. And every chance that they had to throw those notes in, they did it. And in a movie like this, I'll say that was probably the best part. I enjoyed listening to the score. It's a really beautiful score and I can listen to that over and over and over again. And that was probably the only thing that I went, "Oh that's really cool, I enjoyed listening to this." 

Other than that, though, I don't know why we're fighting heart disease in a Jurassic Park movie. I think that's very strange. The reasoning to go after the large dinosaurs? They go: "Because they have big hearts." And no one laughed in the theater. I thought that was really funny. But nobody laughed. 

At this point, it almost feels insulting. They're just actively trying to go on the offensive against the original movie. I don't know why Steven Spielberg's an executive producer on this one. But I fail to find enough good things to talk about it that would justify recommending it to anybody — unless you want to listen to the John Williams score again.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.