Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
Ever since Jurassic World decided that regular ol’ dinosaurs just weren’t good enough for its in-universe paying audience, and therefore not good enough for those continuing to pay to see these movies, the series’ mutant hybrid killing machines have straddled the line between being meta-critiques of the demands on the franchise and edgelord dino bullshit. The dinos, like all movie sequels, needed to get bigger, flashier, more badass. The results have only gotten goofier. The Indominus rex—with its villainous name, cuttlefish camouflage, and brand-friendly Velociraptor DNA—at least had some natural advantages to accompany its Powder-like visage. It led to the ridiculous Indoraptor, which acted like a dinosaur serial killer for reasons beyond comprehension. The less said about Dominion‘s locusts, the better. But in Jurassic World Rebirth, a film that has fully lost the plot of all things Jurassic, the kaiju serving as the big bad of Godzilla director Gareth Edwards’ film is just a mess. Its closest connection to the idea of dinosaurs is that it truly is a terrible lizard.
Before we get a nice clear look at the Fuckedupasaurus rex (actually called the Distortus rex, which is just the scientists being polite), Jurassic World Rebirth bows to franchise demands by iterating once again on the Velociraptors. This time the beasts are called Mutadons, which are kinda chubby raptors with wings. At the very least, we are spared one or more characters yelling, “They fly now?!”
But the Mutadons are simply a variation on a theme, coasting off the original film’s solidification of raptors in the cultural imagination. Distortus rex, the monster that’s been teased since the film’s Final Destination-style cold open, is AI slop given life—DNA run through an LLM, with a bulbous beluga noggin and an extra set of arms dangling under its body. All it needs are three or four sets of double-Ds, and it would fit right at home on your uncle’s Facebook feed.
“It’s kind of like if the T-Rex was designed by H.R. Giger, and then that whole thing had sex with a Rancor,” director Gareth Edwards told Empire. While Rebirth does get dangerously close to showing dinosaur sex (which was in the script at one point, according to returning screenwriter David Koepp), Edwards’ Hot Topic take on this beast lays bare its flaws. Rebirth is already a film focused on superlative dinos: The task force is on a fetch quest involving the biggest beasts on land, in the sea, and in the skies. Undermining these would-be wonders with the promise of an even more bloated and warped CGI creature—one less comprehensible as an animal whose movements and actions inspire a relatable natural terror in its audience—zips past the metacommentary of the previous films’ mutants and crashes headlong into irony.
“You know, in the first movie I was struck by the irony that I’m writing a movie about greedy theme park people for…Universal, a profitable theme park company,” Koepp told IndieWire. The irony now exists in making a movie about a company who has strayed so far from their original specialty in order to innovate that they now seem intent on self-destruction. InGen’s secret island lab, where bored scientists apparently tried to outdo each other by splicing critters who would make the least appealing toys, births not a particularly scary dinosaur, but a depressingly familiar movie monster.
What’s scary about a T. rex? Overwhelming size and a jaws-first attack that activates our animal instincts. Its foil, the raptors, with their speed and teamwork and oversized talons, trigger a sense of being hunted. The flying and swimming dinos (should) offer similar gut-based reactions; we know about predatory birds and sharks. But in this context, a beefy alien-monster mishmash that simply grabs you with its regular arms isn’t an escalation like it’s intended to be—it’s a reminder that what you’re looking at through the majority of the film, dinosaurs for Christ’s sake, are just an appetizer for a fast-food finale. That the climax of Jurassic World Rebirth is full of cop-outs and question marks makes this multi-legged Hell Knight from Doom even less effective.
Edwards is a monster-movie guy. His film before Godzilla was literally called Monsters. “When we first met, [Edwards] said, ‘If you come back to me with 10 different designs of a thing and at least six of them aren’t ridiculous, you haven’t gone far enough,'” said Rebirth visual effects supervisor David Vickery in the film’s production notes. If ridiculous is the goal, why are you making a Jurassic Park movie? Nobody’s complaint about the terrible Jurassic World trilogy was that the creatures didn’t have enough arms, or were too easy to look at. If dinosaurs aren’t good enough for your dinosaur movie, I have to question what we’re all doing here in the first place.
As now seems like tradition for the nearly self-aware sequels, always seeming like they’re so close to getting it, a line of dialogue aptly describes how bad things have gotten. “Nobody cares about these animals anymore,” says the film’s main dino scientist. “They deserve better.” Is he talking about audiences? Filmmakers? IP stakeholders? Maybe all of the above. If this current trend continues, the next Jurassic film will be a collaboration with SYFY. Sure, the dark and twisted Distortus rex was a bust, but wait until it meets the Whalewolf.
