Jurassic World Rebirth Goes for the Jugular: “There’s a Little Bit of Everything That’s Scary”
If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.” So raged the creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, but that line also now applies to one of the classical resurrection story’s modern descendants: Jurassic Park. In the latest film in the colossal blockbuster franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth, inhabitants of that world are not unlike moviegoers today: People have seen dinosaurs a lot over the years. They’ve seen them revived from extinction, they’ve seen them get loose and run amok, they’ve seen them so often that awe has been replaced by a shrug. Dinosaurs no longer inspire love.
So producer Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg, who astonished audiences with the groundbreaking visual effects of the 1993 original, felt that Rebirth should lean into causing fear. After completing two trilogies of films, which collectively generated billions of dollars at the global box office, they believed a seventh film would have to escalate the risk to new levels. “I’ve always said that visual effects are great, CGI is a great tool, but it makes you lazy because you know you can do anything,” Marshall tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive early look. “It’s got to be dangerous.”
That became the mission of Rebirth: “You're in a new place, you don’t know what’s around the corner. You’ve got a different jungle, you’ve got more water, you’ve got higher cliffs,” Marshall says. “There’s a little bit of everything that’s scary.” Add to that a new array of creatures literally engineered to trigger fight or flight.
The final ingredient for the new film's terror-factor, Edwards says, is supplied by the audience: the enduring instinctual fear of being chased and devoured. “There’s something very primal that’s buried deep inside everybody,” he says. “As mammals, we evolved [with] this fear of the bigger animal that’s going to come one day and maybe kill us or our family. The second we see it happening onscreen, you’re like, ‘I knew it…. We had it too good for too long.’”
About a month after that, Johansson had Koepp’s script and was proposing her own touches for the character. “I just wanted to understand what the stakes were for her, and that she wasn’t just driven by money or power. You wanted it to feel personal for her,” she says. “You have to love the characters and you want to root for them. The movie can’t just stand on the dinosaurs alone.”
Zora evolved to be less of a mercenary. “She’s someone who’s dedicated herself to saving other people, and I think she’s at a professional crossroads. I think she’s burnt out,” Johannson says. If all goes well, this can be the job that allows the character to retire from danger zones. “Of course everything goes wrong, but that’s the fun part,” she says.
As it charts a new course for the franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth also promises some other callbacks to the original Jurassic Park. Bailey hints that his paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis, has a history with Sam Neill’s intrepid character. “I’ve always wanted to make Dr. Alan Grant proud,” the actor says. “You’ll have to wait and see to see what sort of link there is between them.”
His professorial hero is a contrast to Bailey’s recent breakthrough role as Fiyero in Wicked, a less-than-intellectual character who scoffs at the library and kicks books aside in his signature song “Dancing Through Life.” Dr. Loomis would be aghast. Bailey says his Rebirth character “reinforces big, cerebral, and emotional arguments about the natural world and how we as humans live our lives.”
Unlike the others, he’s not combat-ready, however, which places him at extra risk on the Island of Misfit Dinosaurs. He may be a little too fascinated by them, and not guarded enough as he guides the team toward harvesting the dinosaurs’ genetic material. “His strengths are his compassion and enthusiasm and hunger for the natural world,” Bailey says. “That’s his brilliance and that’s also his downfall.”
Speaking of extracting DNA, the new film does this with Spielberg himself, who serves as an executive producer on Rebirth. “To me, it’s like a heist movie that meets all the films of Steven Spielberg I loved growing up,” Edwards says. “The three films we were orbiting were Jaws, Indiana Jones, and the awe and wonder of the original Jurassic.”
