Steven Spielberg Had A Simple But Important Note For Jurassic World Rebirth

As the seventh installment in a multi-billion-dollar dinosaur franchise created by Steven Spielberg and Michael Crichton, "Jurassic Park Rebirth" had its creative work cut out for it. On the plus side, there seemed to be little chance that director Gareth Edwards ("Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," "The Creator") and writer David Koepp (the scribe behind "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World: Jurassic Park") could do any worse than the dino-locust debacle of "Jurassic World Dominion," but, even though that film grossed over $1 billion like the two "Jurassic World" movies before it, there was a sense among critics and discerning fans that the property was becoming not just stale but even too ridiculous by its own dino-standards.

Bringing in Edwards seemed like a smart move, given his background in visual effects and gift for conjuring vast physical scale. However, the key to the new movie's creative success would lie in doing something completely different from the plodding, critically rejected "Dominion" (which holds the franchise's worst Rotten Tomatoes score at 29%). Obviously, there's no way any film could recapture the awe of "Jurassic Park" (now that we've had 32 years of computer-animated dinosaurs, mechas, kaiju, Kongs, and Godzillas), but there was one element that's been in short supply since Spielberg stopped directing these films that Edwards and Koepp could conceivably bring back to the table. And according to Koepp, this was the first thing on Spielberg's mind when he spoke with the screenwriter.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Koepp was asked what was most important to Spielberg when it came to crafting "Jurassic Park Rebirth." "That it should be scary," Koepp replied. "We should see some things that we've never seen before. Let's make the science as close to real as we can."

I'm the furthest thing from a scientist, so I can't speak to the realism of a heart disease miracle drug that might be developed from the blood of genetically created dinosaurs. Still, for a film that comes on as an elite-soldiers-on-a-mission flick, this is all plausible enough. All the movie has to do is get me gripping my armrest when the dinos start chompin', and, well, "Rebirth" does just well enough on that count to keep me from feeling ripped off.

A scene involving a Mosasaurus off the coast of the island Ile Saint-Hubert is a pulse-quickening hoot, while a rafting sequence featuring a T-rex (which was in Crichton's first "Jurassic Park" novel but got cut from Spielberg's film adaptation) is as terrifying as I've long imagined it would be. But this isn't so much "different" from Colin Trevorrow's previous "Jurassic World" movies as "more competently directed." ("Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom" doesn't count as that was helmed by J.A. Bayona.)

Oddly, Koepp also said that Spielberg was keen "to avoid anything that was a self reference." According to the screenwriter, "He does not like to quote himself. He's allergic to it. If you put something in that rings too familiar, he'll say, 'Didn't I already do that? Don't do that.'" I know that he's often given this note, but he's always seemed okay with doing the occasional nod. And I would say that the references are more than occasional in "Jurassic World Rebirth," which includes several "Jaws" nods (my favorite being when Mahershala Ali's mercenary Duncan Kincaid utters "My charter, my boat"), as well as tips of the cap to "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The best I can say is that these were integrated cleverly enough to make me smile.

That's basically the deal with "Jurassic World Rebirth" overall: It's just good enough.