Jurassic World Rebirth promises to be another fresh start for the franchise, with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Godzilla director Gareth Edwards taking a new team of adventurers to an island overrun by dinosaurs.
Like many filmmakers, Edwards is a fan of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park and, according to Rebirth star Jonathan Bailey, this is "a love letter" to that classic. He tells Empire Online (via SFFGazette.com), "It really does feel that it’s welcoming people to really celebrate the original film. It has that wonder and awe, while not being scared to re-inject the thrill and the fear."
Scarlett Johansson agrees. "It hearkens back to the first one," she promises. "It has a lot of good jump-scares, and the stakes are high."
David Koepp, who wrote Jurassic Park and The Lost World, returned to pen Rebirth's screenplay and pointed to this movie embracing what worked so well about those early instalments. "We wanted to recapture the idea that we are in the dinosaurs’ environment. The last few movies were exploring the idea of, 'Hey, what would it be like if they were in our environment?'"
"They did that very well, and now we wanted to explore how it felt to go back to theirs," the writer concluded.
The previous Jurassic World trilogy set the stage for dinosaurs to once again roam the Earth, leading to speculation that future instalments might head down the post-apocalyptic route. Instead, a back-to-basics approach might be what serves this franchise best.
We also have some new stills from Jurassic World Rebirth and two Empire Magazine covers, one of which puts the spotlight on the mysterious Distortus Rex, the movie's Rancor-like hybrid dinosaur.
Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures across land, sea and air within that tropical biosphere hold, in their DNA, the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.
Academy Award nominee Johansson plays skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett, contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission to secure the genetic material.
When Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos, they all find themselves stranded on a forbidden island that had once housed an undisclosed research facility for Jurassic Park. There, in a terrain populated by dinosaurs of vastly different species, they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that has been hidden from the world for decades.
Anchored by iconic action superstar Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) as Zora Bennett, Jonathan Bailey and two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, this action-packed new chapter sees an extraction team race to the most dangerous place on Earth, an island research facility for the original Jurassic Park, inhabited by the worst of the worst that were left behind.
Ali (Moonlight) is Duncan Kincaid, Zora’s most trusted team member; Bailey (Wicked) plays palaeontologist Dr. Henry Loomis, Rupert Friend (Obi-Wan Kenobi) appears as Big Pharma representative Martin Krebs, and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer) plays Reuben Delgado, the father of the shipwrecked civilian family.
The supporting cast includes Luna Blaise (Manifest), David Iacono (The Summer I Turned Pretty) and Audrina Miranda (Lopez vs. Lopez) as Reuben's family. The film also features, as members of Zora and Krebs’ crews, Philippine Velge (Station Eleven), Bechir Sylvain (BMF) and Ed Skrein (Deadpool).
Jurassic World Rebirth arrives in theaters on July 2.