Jurassic World: Rebirth
The Oxford Dictionary defines the word simulation as "the imitation of a situation or process" or "the action of pretending; deception." When you watch a simulation, there’s a deep feeling inside of you that what you’re seeing isn’t real—not only is it unreal, but it’s trying to be something else, something authentic, something real. I’d classify simulation as the opposite of authenticity—it’s a replica of something deeply felt, something that can’t be faked. Jurassic World: Rebirth is a simulation of every movie that came before it. A movie pretending to be something real. A deception.
The first Jurassic Park, released in 1993, was directed by Steven Spielberg at the height of his powers, backed by his production company, Amblin Entertainment, that was responsible for so much of our childhood movie nostalgia. To call it a phenomenon would be an understatement—the movie changed cinema forever. And people have been chasing that high ever since. But what set the first film apart was something hard to replicate: sincerity. Yes, the movie was made to make money (let’s be real), but it was also made to spark wonder. Its impact on an entire generation of kids can’t be measured—the surge in dinosaur popularity, the rise in children wanting to become paleontologists, the widespread knowledge of prehistoric creatures—none of that would’ve happened without Jurassic Park. Before 1993, did anyone know the difference between a velociraptor and a brachiosaurus? We did NOT. There was magic in that film—a sense of hopefulness, excitement, and, most importantly, a sincere message: Man shouldn’t play God.
At the start of JW: Rebirth, text on-screen informs us that the dinosaurs have escaped their habitat and spread across the world. This global exposure has led to public "dinosaur fatigue." Everyone is sooo over dinosaurs. A ridiculous premise that’s impossible to buy from the jump. You’re telling me that in just 32 years, people would be tired of dinosaurs? We haven’t lost our fascination with their bones since the 1600s. Nicolas Cage went into debt just to own a few. The irony? The film suggests the public would grow bored of dinosaurs in 32 years… in a franchise that’s still milking a single dinosaur movie made 32 years ago. We’re not even tired of the movies about them. And so begins this film’s cynical tone—the pretense that no one cares anymore, so why bother trying?
We’re introduced to stock characters: Rich Guy (Rupert Friend), Science Guy (Jonathan Bailey), and Tough Girl (Scarlett Johansson)—whose names either go unmentioned or are so irrelevant to the plot they might as well not exist. They’re roles pulled from a hat: Tough Girl has a tragic backstory, Science Guy loves dinosaurs, and Rich Guy loves money. They’re as flat and lifeless as the script paper they were printed on. Then, of course, there’s a family sailing through dinosaur-infested waters (because this franchise loves putting kids in peril for cheap tension), despite knowing that the waters are infested with dinosaurs. The plot drags us back to the island because a pharmaceutical company believes dinosaur DNA holds the cure for heart disease—or some other nonsense—specifically in their BIG hearts. But guess what? The island is (shocker) full of dinosaurs! And now everyone has to escape alive.
One of the film’s most cynical choices is its lack of actual dinosaurs. The premise claims the world is bored of them, so the franchise replaces them with hybrid monstrosities. This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the public’s century-long obsession with dinosaurs—and the magic at the heart of the franchise. That magic was the belief that dinosaurs could be real, that we could share a world with them, that time might bend just enough to let us coexist. The original film even acknowledged the impossibility—our oxygen levels, climate, even vegetation are all wrong for dinosaurs. But we believed anyway. Goddammit, we believed! And why not introduce some of the new discoveries that have been made in palentology in the past 32 years? Where is the respect and reverence that original had for this science?
This movie believes in nothing. Its central moral? Money bad. Wow, thanks—we needed that. It reeks of market-tested faux anti-capitalism, a hollow imitation of what came before. The characters resemble familiar faces, the plot echoes past beats—if you squint, Jonathan Bailey might almost look like Jeff Goldblum under the right lighting. It simulates every expected Jurassic Park moment, just without the heart. The uncanny valley isn’t often applied to films, but it fits here. Something about this movie feels off—it moves strangely, sits wrong, like it’s reanimating the corpse of childhood nostalgia and wearing it like a skinsuit. It’s a trend plaguing Hollywood franchises today. My fear? That soon, the simulations will outnumber the real, and we won’t be able to tell the difference.
0.5/5 —Half a point for Jonathan Bailey’s slutty little glasses.
