Warning: This post contains spoilers for Jurassic World Rebirth.
Following a trilogy of Chris Pratt-led Jurassic World movies that all grossed over $1 billion at the box office despite experiencing a notable decline in critical reception, the franchise is back with a standalone sequel featuring a new island, new characters, and a whole new lineup of dinosaurs.
Directed by Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla) and written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, The Lost World), Jurassic World Rebirth, now in theaters, centers on a pharmaceutical company’s mission to obtain dinosaur DNA for a breakthrough drug that could cure heart disease. The only problem is the drug requires live samples from the three largest species of dinosaur (land, sea, and air) still in existence, and the only place in the world where these creatures have been able to survive is an island near the equator where infamous bioengineering company InGen performed some of their most risky dino gene meddling. Oh, and it’s also highly illegal to travel there.
Given these extenuating circumstances, pharma rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) recruits covert ops specialist Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and a handpicked selection of Zora’s most trusted colleagues to ensure the expedition’s success. En route to the island, the crew ends up rescuing a civilian family—Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono)—whose sailboat was capsized by a Mosasaurus in the midst of a recreational ocean crossing. Naturally, the situation only gets more dire from there for everyone involved.
As Jurassic World movies tend to do, Rebirth features callbacks to a number of films in the franchise. However, it pays particular homage to the original—and greatest dinosaur movie to ever do it—Jurassic Park. Here are six of the best nods to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic.
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The opening attack
Jurassic Park memorably opens with a sequence that masterfully sets the scene for what’s to come. As game warden Robert Muldoon (Bob Peck) and his team attempt to transfer a Velociraptor into its holding pen at the park, their quarry manages to outsmart them and get its claws on the worker in charge of opening the pen’s gate. The highly-intelligent carnivore then viciously drags its prey into its transport container and begins devouring him alive. This time around, a prologue set 17 years before the rest of the events of Rebirth shows how a hastily disposed of candy wrapper results in a gate system malfunction at the aforementioned InGen lab that allows a mutant Distortus Rex, or D-Rex, to get loose inside the research facility. What happens next isn’t pretty.
A T-Rex close call
Considering Jurassic Park‘s Tyrannosaurus Rex attack sequence is one of the most iconic scenes not only from the original film, but arguably in movie history, any attempt to replicate it seems doomed to fall short. Still, Jurassic World Rebirth makes a valiant effort to put its own terrifying spin on the source material. As the desperate Delgado family sails down a river on an inflatable raft, a T-Rex follows in hot pursuit, eventually flipping the raft just as its predecessor started flipping jeeps after escaping its enclosure in Jurassic Park. To make things worse, a young kid once again experiences the brunt of the trauma.
Dinosaur awe
When paleontologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) see a real-life Brachiosaurus for the first time upon arriving at Jurassic Park, their emotional reactions combined with John Williams’ soaring score make for a truly awe-inspiring movie moment. As the resident paleontologist in Rebirth, Jonathan Bailey’s Henry Loomis puts on a similarly earnest show when he catches sight of the new island’s pod of hybrid herbivore Titanosauruses—to nostalgic effect.
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Just enough romantic tension
Like Ellie and Alan in Jurassic Park, Zora and Henry are presented as a dynamic professional duo with inherent chemistry whose relationship never explicitly crosses over into romantic territory. This likely harkens back to Spielberg’s decision to cut a scene from the original movie that showed Ellie and Alan passionately embracing while working at the Velociraptor dig site at the start of the first film. Not to mention that an illegal dinosaur-hunting expedition-turned death trap doesn’t really seem like the right setting for a first kiss.
The Mutadons set a trap
As Jurassic World Rebirth barrels toward its final dino confrontation, a pack of Mutadons—a winged cross between Pteranodons and Velociraptors—arrive to take on the role the raptors fill in the first movie. But rather than cornering our protagonists in a visitor center kitchen, the Mutadons choose an abandoned convenience store as their point of attack. The whole sequence pretty blatantly draws from the original, with the Mutadons even taking chase through an underground tunnel system just as the raptors followed the Jurassic Park survivors through the vistor center air ducts.
Flare chase
When chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) uses a flare to draw a rampaging T-Rex away from attacking the Murphy kids in Jurassic Park, it’s a brave—if also a bit misguided—maneuver. Relying on the exact same move to give the Jurassic World Rebirth crew a chance to escape the island feels a bit on the nose, especially once it’s revealed Duncan (Mahershala Ali) survived the D-Rex’s pursuit. But we guess there are only so many ways to feasibly distract a man-eating dinosaur from its desired prey.
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