It should be impossible—water-from-a-stone impossible, faster-than-light-travel impossible—to make a bad movie about scary dinosaurs. And yet, according to reviews for Jurassic World Rebirth, out this week, they have done just that for the fourth time in a row.
Something is amiss here. These are dinosaurs: the biggest, meanest fuckers to ever walk the Earth—the demons and dragons of nightmare and legend, surely the source of some deep mammalian atavistic fear in the basest parts of our brainstem. If filmmakers can't squeeze two hours of excitement out of being chased by these horrors of tooth and nail, filmmakers need to look at themselves in the mirror and ask, How am I failing the dinos? The answer is that they are not respecting them properly, and trying to invent, new, bigger, smarter, scarier versions of dinosaurs. This is pathetic. Stick to saurians!
Dinosaurs are enough. They were enough for the original Jurassic Park, one of the greatest films qua films of all time. It remains the only movie I have ever watched more than once in theaters (four times, including once for the 2013 re-release), and I remember walking out after the first time, my legs quite literally shaking. Then a 9-year-old boy and as obsessed with dinosaurs as any kid, I had seen the face of god. I had seen the brachiosaur striding the savannah, the T-rex stalking through the jungle, the raptors being clever girls.
They were enough for The Lost World, which was a disappointment at the time given what it had to follow, but is in retrospect a mean-spirited, nasty little creature feature, in a good way. They were almost enough for III, which resorted to pterosaurs—not dinosaurs, but acceptable—for some of its more memorable scenes. That was a serviceable movie, but returns were diminishing fast. Filmmakers were deciding that tyrannosaurs and raptors were not enough, not for audiences used to seeing everything in sequels be bigger, better, more superlative. So when the series rebooted with Jurassic World, they just had to invent something entirely new. This was a fatal error.
Enter Indominus rex, a genetically engineered hybrid. She is a T-rex but bigger, with the claws and intelligence of a raptor, and can camouflage her skin like a cuttlefish, and can see in infrared like a snake, and can change her heat signature like a tree frog(?). Jurassic World was whatever. Fallen Kingdom gave us Indoraptors, basically Indominus but smaller, faster and social. By then, we'd fully lost the plot; that movie was garbaggio. I didn't watch Dominion.
I had some hopes for Rebirth. Gareth Edwards knows how to do a monster movie. Surely they could go back to basics. And then I learned about Distortus rex. I've cued up its scene here:
Distortus rex! The six-limbed, oversized, mutant dinosaur with a stupid name and perfectly round noggin is apparently the big bad of this film. Did George Lucas name it? Look at this Marc Andreessen–ass freak.
Get this non-dinosaur out of my dinosaur movie! Is the majesty of the noble sauropod not enough for our jaded society? Would it not be frightening enough to be hunted by a pack of man-sized, stone-cold killer dromaeosaurs? Could you not be just as cleanly bisected by the 35,000 newtons of bite force of a boring old T-rex? When Alfred Hitchcock made the first modern dinosaur horror film, he didn't need to give a goose a gun to make it scary.
Animals—regular animals—are scary. They can be vicious and unknowable, and we humans have spent billions of years evolving specifically to become their predator instead of their prey. The brilliance of Jurassic Park was the turning of the tables. We have no recourse against these actual animals that used to exist, and now they exist again, and we're trapped on an island with them. Perfect plot. They don't need to be any more fearsome than they already were. Hell, the nastiest, most traumatizing death of the whole series comes from the Michael Crichton book, when one character is slowly nibbled to death by chicken-sized dinos. Bigger is not always better. Get Distortus rex and his beluga head out of my face.
In taking lessons from the first Jurassic Park, producers apparently believed that the moral of the story was not to play God with science. No! It was that dinosaurs are scary. It shouldn't be as difficult to make a decent dinosaur movie as they've made it look. But Hollywood, uh, finds a way.
