Anti-Capitalist Plot Drowns Jurassic World: Rebirth

Sometimes, a popcorn action movie can lose its luster simply because the filmmakers failed to go the extra mile to give the story depth. Such is the case with Jurassic World: Rebirth, the newest installment in the pioneering franchise which began as a Steven Spielberg directed action film in 1993. 

Rebirth has many good elements. The action is well paced and keeps the story moving forward. The movie’s graphics and actors recapture some of the wonder of the original movies. Viewers get a sense of the breadth and scope of the wonder someone seeing these creatures for the first time could experience.

But the plot in Rebirth is thin, and the characters caricatured, reducing the movie to B-level action movie. 

Caricatured Villains and Heroes Subvert Plot

This time around, the islands where the dinosaurs were created have been abandoned. It is officially off limits to humans, according to a directive from some pan-global agreement or world governing organization. 

Off these islands, located in a band along the equator, the dinosaurs are dying out. They are poorly suited to the climate on most of the Earth, and they are dying from fatal diseases. 

Now, a pharmaceutical company—real-life caricatured villains (along with health insurance companies and Wall Street investors)—needs the dino DNA to develop new drugs that could prevent coronary heart disease and other ailments related to aging. Certainly, this would seem like a noble cause. But the methods are nefarious. Securing blood samples from three hybrid dinosaurs, one each from the water, earth, and sea, is illegal and secret. The company recruits a group of greedy mercenaries to carry out the mission. 

Enter Scarlett Johansson as covert operations specialist Zora Bennett. She is recovering from the loss of one of her best friends in a previous operation. This emotional vulnerability, however, seems more like a plot device than a meaningful influence on her emotional state. 

When the pharmaceutical company representative (Rupert Friend, Homeland, Asteroid City) dangles $10 million in front of her, she dutifully recruits the rest of the team. These supporting players include Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, Green Book) as her co-leader. Along the way, they pick up paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, Bridgerton, Fellow Travelers) to provide expertise and the requisite reminder that manipulating the natural environment by humans is doomed to failure. 

Greed Subverts Action

Of course, the pharmaceutical companies will make a lot of money if they secure the dinosaur blood, the standard motivation for getting an edge over their competitors by breaking the rules. To the story’s detriment, the plot quickly centers on greed as the motivating factor, rather than creating cures to diseases that afflict virtually everyone on the planet. Rather than let pharmaceutical companies get rich, wouldn’t it be better, paleontologist Loomis asks mercenary Zora, to release the blood samples and DNA to the world so that “everyone” has access to it? 

Those who understand markets, innovation, technological diffusion, and the source of value creation know the answer: No. Greed, of course, does motivate some actors, but pharmaceutical companies don’t make money killing customers; they make money creating new health-care solutions and getting them to as many customers as possible. Chemotherapy, the most widely applied treatment for cancer, wouldn’t be used on the scale it is now if pharmaceutical companies were not motivated to cure the more than 200 types of this disease for as many people as possible. 

Capitalist Economies Drive Drug Innovation

According to the Rand Corporation, the country with the most capitalistic system—the United States—purchases 74% of all new drugs developed. More than half of the new drugs are sold first in the U.S. “The likelihood of the launch of new drugs was considerably higher in the United States than in other countries,” the study notes. 

But no thought is given to how the technology will be developed, let alone distributed, and to whom, and what incentives exist to make sure “everyone” gets access to it. 

Jurassic World: Rebirth’s plot hinges on a naive fairy tale about how health-care markets work. The scientist has drawn vials of blood from three species. The blood is not an infinite reservoir. Somehow it will be rationed. The filmmakers don’t bother dwelling on this. Rather than elevate Rebirth, the anti-capitalist trope drowns the plot and story in the shallow end of the ocean. 

This is all quite surprising in one sense: David Koepp, the screenwriter, is one of the best paid and most successful screenwriters of all time. Without saving a human life at all, he has amassed a net worth of $35 million by some accounts. 

Koepp’s wealth, of course, is well earned, as the return on his creative and business effort which produced Hollywood blockbusters like the original Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull among many, many other hits. 

Koepp seems to have punted the storyline when it comes to Rebirth. This is a troubling trend in the franchise’s content (see here). This was not the case in the earlier films as I discuss in Contemporary Film and Economics as well as here.

Devolving into Popcorn Action

The plot suffers from other weaknesses, including the convenient (for the plot) arrival of a single father crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat as he tries to connect with his two young daughters (and the older one’s boyfriend). Why they would be traveling this particular route, this close to the dinosaur inhabited islands, is a mystery that is never resolved. (Their only purpose appears to be to humanize the film, which otherwise would be focused solely on greedy mercenaries and greedy pharmaceutical companies.)

Plot holes and simplistic characters aside, Jurassic World: Rebirth remains a solid action film. The movie follows the familiar tropes with actors good enough to make their reactions to green screen CGI dinosaurs plausible. Grabbing blood from animals that instinctively see humans as a threat, or food, creates a level of suspense that keeps audiences engaged and largely entertained. And, true to Jurassic Park franchise form, people die and get eaten. 

Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali do a fine job anchoring the movie. But without more complex and nuanced characters, Jurassic World: Rebirth is little more than summer popcorn movie fare. 

With seven films in the franchise, and Rebirth topping $800 million at the box office, let’s hope the eighth film doesn’t punt the plot.