Postmodern Realities Podcast Episode 453 A Review of ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’

This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with JOURNAL author Cole Burgett  about his article, “Man Creates Something Worse than Dinosaurs: A Review of Jurassic World Rebirth “.  https://www.equip.org/articles/man-creates-something-worse-than-dinosaurs-a-review-of-jurassic-world-rebirth/

This also part of Cole’s ongoing column, Cultural Apologetics. 

[Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers for Jurassic World Rebirth and other films in the franchise.]


Related articles and podcasts by this author:Episode 448: We Used Up All the Perfect: Andor and the Limits of Star WarsWe Used Up All the Perfect: Andor and the Limits of Star WarsEpisode 443: Blades, Spirits, and the Sacred: Encountering Shintoism in Assassin’s Creed ShadowsBlades, Spirits, and the Sacred: Encountering Shintoism in Assassin’s Creed ShadowsEpisode 437: What is Truth in ‘Dune: Prophecy’?What is Truth in ‘Dune: Prophecy’?Episode 430: Space Pirates and Treasure Planets: A Review of ‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’Space Pirates and Treasure Planets: A Review of ‘Star Wars: Skeleton Crew’Episode 425: Film Review: Netflix’s MaryEpisode 420: ‘Heretic’ The Gospel According to Mr. Reed‘Heretic’: The Gospel According to Mr. Reed

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
At Hi everyone, Thank you for tuning in to the

(00:22):
Postmodern Realities podcast, brought to you by the Christian Research
Institute and the Christian Research Journal. I'm Melanie Cogdill, Managing
editor of the Christian Research Journal. It's July twenty twenty five,
and you're listening to episode four hundred and fifty three,
which is a spoiler filled conversation about the film Jurassic

(00:44):
World Rebirth, now in theaters. Today's guest is Coolberghett. He
is a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and the Moody
Bible Institute. He teaches systematic theology and Bible Exposition classes
and writes extensively about theology and popular culture. Cole has

(01:05):
written a film review for the Christian Research Journal and
his review is called Man Creates Something Worse Than Dinosaurs,
a review of Jurassic World Rebirth, and you can read
it for free at equip dot org. That's equip dot org. Cole,

(01:26):
it's good to have you back on the broadcast.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Oh, it's good to be here. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Well. We're covering the first of the various different summer
blockbuster series in the movie theaters, and the first of
that is the Jurassic World movie, and it's called Jurassic
World Rebirth, and it's part of some of the series

(01:51):
that started way back when, I think, based on books
in the nineteen nineties. So we are thirty years into
this particular film franchise. So what is this Jurassic Park
franchise about? And as I said at the beginning of
this interview, but we'll reiterate again, this is going to
be very spoiler filed. So if you are having a

(02:13):
plans to see this film and don't want any spoilers,
then you might as well put this one on pause
and come back to it once you're done watching the film,
because we are going to talk a lot about it,
but give us the background on the entire Jurassic Park franchise.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
So the Jurassic Park series is at its core, this
story about the collision of let's say, human ambition in
the natural world. It's this cautionary tale, if you will,
that's dressed up in blockbuster spectacle that asks and plays

(02:52):
with the question what happens when humanity plays God? And
this central idea, which is drawn from Michael Crichton's nineteen
ninety novel, is sort of deceptively simple. It's very much
what you would call high concept, where scientists use genetic

(03:15):
engineering to bring dinosaurs back to life and then lose
control of them. Like it's a very simple setup. It's interesting,
but it's a simple setup. But thematically, the films explore,
you know, hubris, the illusion of control, morality, the unintended

(03:36):
consequences of scientific progress unchecked, that kind of a thing.
And the original film, Jurassic Park, released in ninety three,
directed by Steven Spielberg, it was really a landmark moment
for filmmaking as a whole. It was one of the
first major films to use what they call CGI or

(04:02):
computer generated imagery, in a way that was truly seamless.
It married animatronics that just a very old fashioned style
of movie making where everything is built. Think of them
as very very expensive puppets. So it married animatronics and

(04:23):
digital effects to create dinosaurs, recreations of dinosaurs that felt
very very real and not just you know, visually, but physically,
and the way that the actors interacted with them on screen,
and audiences really hadn't seen too much like that up

(04:44):
to that point, and it was you can sort of
think of that nineteen ninety three films as a bit
of a turning point for visual effects, and it set
a new standard for filmmaking that filmmakers are still chasing
even today. Beyond the tech, though, Jurassic Park was powerful

(05:06):
as far as its story goes because it was very mythic.
It wasn't just a creature feature. It was a sort
of modern fable. Characters like you know, doctor Ian Malcolm,
who so memorably played by Jeff Goldblum in the original,
and Richard Attenborough's John Hammond. They weren't plot devices, and

(05:30):
they weren't you know, stock types. Stock types aren't bad,
but they weren't just stock characters. They were stand ins
for competing worldviews, right caution versus optimism, ethics versus enterprise.
And the dinosaurs weren't the villains. They were just sort

(05:52):
of the thing that motivated the plot, the thing that
the story was revolving around. But the human characters and
their pride became the real villains of the series, and
that original trilogy continued with the Lost World in ninety

(06:12):
seven and Jurassic Park three in two thousand and one.
Spielberg had a hand in ninety seven's The Lost World,
directed that they brought back Ian Malcolm. Drassic Park three
was a little different. These and these sequels expanded the world.
They introduced new settings, They leaned into adventure survival, and
the philosophical edge softened somewhat, but the central tension of

(06:37):
can humans contain what they create? Remain The series was
dormant for a little over a decade. Finally, in twenty fifteen,
the franchise was revived with Draassic World, and I anticipate
that most listeners will be most familiar with this second
trilogy of films, Jurassic World, directed by Colin Trevarro, and

(07:01):
this new trilogy really leaned into the commercialization of science,
depicting a fully functioning dinosaur theme park, sort of the
ultimate realization of what the original movies set out to do,
complete with you know, these corporate sponsorships and engineered hybrids

(07:23):
like the infamous Indominus Rex from Jurassic World. The films
became much louder, more action oriented, more self aware, which
is a hallmark of storytelling in the twenty first century,
very self aware stories, and they sort of openly embraced
their role as blockbuster entertainment, but they still they continue

(07:46):
to gesture toward, you know, the ethical dilemmas at the
core of the franchise and the more interesting material. The
sequel to Jurassic World was Fallen Kingdom, which came out
in twenty eighteen, I think, and then the film of
that trilogy was subtitled Dominion. Both of those films escalated
those themes, and it all sort of culminated in a

(08:09):
world where dinosaurs now roamed freely alongside humanity. They were
brought back and reintroduced into the world's ecosystem, but with
each entry the series, well, it also reflected evolving cultural anxieties,
anxieties about corporate power, anxieties about ecological collapse, the ethics

(08:30):
of genetic manipulation. All of those ideas were sort of
front and center in the last trilogy, and that, you know,
brings us up to this year's Durassic World Rebirth, which
I would say in some ways acts as sort of
a thematic bookend to the original. It sort of strips
away some of the bomb bass that came in with

(08:53):
the last trilogy to return to some of those moral
questions that launched the franchise. What does it mean to
create life? What happens when that creation goes awry, how
do you live with the consequences? So, to answer plainly,
Jurassic Park is about, I guess you could say the
thrill of discovery and the terror that follows when we

(09:17):
refuse to recognize our limits. It's a story that keeps evolving,
but it always sort of comes back to the same
idea that nature in a sense is not humanity's to command,
and when humanity tries to do that, the results are

(09:37):
rarely what they expect and it often goes out of
their control. So that's just a look at what the
Jurassic Park series is about.

Speaker 1 (09:47):
Before I get into more questions about the series. In
this film, I'm sure a lot of our listeners are wondering.
You know, this has a PG. Thirteen writings, So can
Christians comfortably watch this film? And could they say take
their teenagers or middle school kids to see this?

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yeah? I mean, I think Christians can comfortably watch the
new film. But thoughtfully, you know, when I get back
to the school that I teach at during the school year,
of all the films that will come out this summer,
fantastic for a Superman, Jurassic World rebirth, this will be
the film the kids come in talking about so I

(10:29):
think it's we're talking you know, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth
grade students, high schoolers, so it's yeah, I think they
will be able to see it. There's no overt content
that I think would disqualify it in terms of language
or sexuality. It's violent, yes, but there's a context right
in a way that serves as a cautionary message. The

(10:51):
horror elements are real, and some of the imagery is unsettling,
which has been true of this entire series from nineteen
ninety three on. But the film never feels particularly gratuitous.
In fact, it's sort of morally serious in a way
that some blockbusters just aren't. So I would say for Christians,

(11:13):
they can comfortably watch the new film. It's an opportunity
to think about, you know, for the cultural apologists talk
about these different themes of creation, the dangers of technological pride.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
That's sort of a thing, and it seems to me
it would really appeal to I did see the film
in the theater and there are a lot of younger
kids middle school and high school there, so it seems,
you know, it's the summer, so they were there at
a matinee, but it seems to me that it would
appeal to kids, even despite the fact that it's not
like a high tech type of or superhero kind of film.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
So the plan is this summer, well, we'll look at
a few of these blockbusters, Superman, Fantastic For the other
biquities that are coming out, And my prediction right now,
I'm happy to be wrong about this, but my suspicion
is that Jurassic World is going to do far better
than anyone is anticipating, even with two major superhero films

(12:11):
coming out in the same month as the Jurassic World film.
For exactly the reason that you've said, dinosaurs sell. Dinosaurs
attract people for whatever reason, especially younger audiences, more so
than Superman, more so than Fantastic For this movie is
going to hold its own at the box office again,

(12:31):
even when faced with the Superman film, even when faced
with another major Marvel film. This movie will do just fine,
probably better than people are anticipating, because Dinosaur's appeal to children.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
So, just to talk a little bit more about the
franchise itself, it's one of the major franchises going on
right now, and our listeners will have heard our recap
of the mission impossible into that franchise, and so the
movie are pretty much, you know, really solid at the
box office in terms of what is expected. As a

(13:07):
matter of fact, I think that Jurassic World came in
quite a bit. I don't know what was higher than
they thought it was, but it's already as of our recording,
made more than three hundred million dollars at the worldwide
box office, and about one hundred and fifty million and
a half of that in the United States. So it
is something that is quite popular, I think in terms

(13:30):
of a box office hit when people are going to
the movies less and less, and you know, it's obviously
this is the seventh film, so it's not as many
as Marvel or the James Bond films going back many decades.
But what about this particular theme and this series do
you think endures that audiences are attracted to it?

Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah, I think the just talking numbers very quickly that
the new film, all of the projections I saw, everybody
expected to do pretty well, but it outperformed expectations by
about fifty million dollars just on opening weekend. So after
the first few days you started to see all of
the projection outlets adjusting their numbers to be higher, and

(14:13):
ultimately it did just across you know, Fourth of July weekend.
I think it was like the best the best Fourth
of July weekend run in five years or something like that.
At the box opposite it outperformed to the tune of
fifty million dollars, which is is nothing to laugh at.
The Jurassic Park series, it's you know, it's one of

(14:37):
those rare cinematic ecosystems that just keeps on thriving no
matter what critics say. The last film, Dominion is a
perfect example. We were sort of talking about this before
this this podcast. It was widely panned for its, you know,
this very bloated plot. It has a to of main characters,

(15:01):
something in the ballpark of I think six main characters
that the movie sort of has to follow and give
screen time to. It has incredibly uneven pacing, and yet
it pulled in a billion dollars globally. So when the
question is why do these films endure, it's it is
not that these movies just sort of, you know, come

(15:23):
lumbering back into theaters every few years and a few
people see them. It's sort of a cinematic oddity today
to have a film so widely panned, especially today where
critical reviews do in fact matter, maybe more so than
that even in the past, because of things like rotten tomatoes.

(15:46):
We've talked about this on this podcast before when I
have a very distinct memory of the day that I
was I think it was in a Walmart and I
saw on the cover of a DVD that that stupid
little tomato that said, you know, certified fresh, as if
it's like giving me permission to like this movie, to
buy this movie. And I remember seeing that and hating

(16:07):
the idea that, you know, we're we're really going to
use this image of a tomato to tell people, Okay,
it's okay to like this movie. The world has said
it's okay to like this movie. It's a good movie universally.
That kind of stuff. It's nonsense to me. These are
films that defy that. These are films that sometimes have

(16:33):
shockingly bad reviews that still make a billion dollars at
the box office. So the question is why, why why
do these films endure and why are they sometimes underestimated?
And I think, you know, beyond just the what we've
talked about the appeal of dinosaurs and that sort of thing,

(16:54):
which we can go into more later, but beyond that,
I think the core idea still works. The premise is
incredibly clean and universal. Humans bring back dinosaurs, and it
goes really really wrong. It's a concept that really doesn't
need much explaining, but it resonates across cultures, across generations

(17:17):
if the story changes. Even if the story changes, the
foundation holds, and that's one of the reasons it's so
critic proof. It delivers a on a primal level. And then,
as we said, dinosaurs themselves are a kind of cinematic
cheat code. They appeal to everyone, but especially to kids,

(17:38):
and there's this sort of built in sense of wonder
and terror that no amount of weak dialogue or convoluted
subplots can completely dilute. People don't really go to these
movies to watch a story, you know what I mean.
They go to see something massive and ancient come to

(18:00):
life with very good visual effects. And you know, regardless
of the narrative and the characters and all of that
kind of stuff, the franchise knows how to deliver those
visual moments in a way that sticks with people, and
it has done that pretty consistently since nineteen ninety three.

(18:21):
There's also, and it bears worth pointing out, a nostalgia
factor that shouldn't be underestimated. The original Jurassic Park, as
we said, is a cultural landmark for many people, especially
millennials gen xers. It was their first brush with movie
magic on a grand scale. So every new installment becomes
a kind of pilgrimage back to that experience. Maybe some

(18:44):
you know a lot of people feel like they owe
it to themselves to see the next Jurassic Park film.
And I think that's especially true because there was such
a dearth of these movies for about a ten to
fifteen year period in between Jurassic Park three and Drass World,
which was another movie that came out of nowhere and
absolutely you know, did fantastic at the box office. So

(19:07):
even when these films stumble creatively, the audience connection to
them remains very strong. And you know, I think the
reason these films are sometimes underestimated is because they walk
a line between serious themes and blockbuster spectacle. Critics are
an interesting bunch. Critics often look for innovation or subversion.

(19:29):
This is why you will see, you know, amazing critical
reviews for The Last Jedi and these horrendous audience scores.
I mean, I can I can safely say, despite the
fact that The Last Jedi receives, you know, such accolades
on a critical scale, there are very few people, I

(19:51):
mean can count them on one hand that I have
ever met and talked to who's like, oh, yeah, I
love the Last Jedi. I mean, I can safely say
most of the people that I have met hate that
film with a primal level of can't stand to watch
it again. We'll never watch it again. Ruin Star Wars
single handedly. That kind of stuff. So critics often look

(20:11):
for innovation or subversion with these big franchise movies, but
the Jurassic films tend to reassert familiar patterns. Nature bites back,
humans pay for their pride, the dinosaurs rule the screen.
That kind of thing. That repetition can feel safe or
formulate among critics, but to a global audience it comes

(20:36):
across as mythic, and that's part of the appeal. These
stories don't need to reinvent themselves every time. They just
need to be exactly what audiences want them to be.
They just need to remind people in very spectacular fashion
that they're not in charge, and to do that through dinosaurs.
So yeah, it's a franchise that might not always impress critics,

(21:00):
but it continues to draw massive crowds because it taps
into awe and fear and nostalgia and spectacle all at once,
and that's a winning combination that is really difficult to dismiss.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
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(21:35):
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(21:57):
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a tip. So we would be grateful for that. And
now back to my conversation about the Jurassic Park World

(23:07):
different films for the last thirty years with Colebrigett. So
we were at the beginning of the podcast, you're talking
just touching on some of the films the original film,
the first one and the book it was based on
in the early nineties, some of those themes, and you
mentioned that they were mythic. So because of that, do

(23:28):
you think that Christians can find a value in the
Jurassic Park series.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
Absolutely, and not just value, but relevance. This series is
a modern myth that really in some sense maps remarkably
well onto a biblical framework, especially when it comes to
the nature of creation, human limitation, moral responsibility, that sort

(23:56):
of a thing from a Christian perspective. The central conflict
in these films is theological before it's scientific. It's about
what happened, What happens when man rejects his role as
steward and instead reaches for the role of creator and genesis.

(24:20):
Humanity is charged with the stewardship of the garden, but
in Jurassic Park, that responsibility is thrown out the window.
Life becomes something to manipulate, to monetize, to control, and
that shift right from stewardship to domination is sort of

(24:46):
exactly what Paul describes in Roman's Chapter one when he's
talking about people exchanging the truth of God for a lie,
becoming futile dark vein in their thinking. The result is deformation,
not just moral confusion, but the unraveling of identity, the
unraveling of purpose. And you know, the dinosaurs in that

(25:11):
sense aren't just creatures, but their consequences. They represent what
happens when people tamper with boundaries they were never meant
to cross. It's that old idea that we've talked about
on this podcast before. In different capacities of forbidden knowledge,

(25:33):
there are certain things humanity is just not meant to know.
There are certain areas humanity is just not meant to
tap into. And it's the Promethean story all over again.
It's Frankenstein all over again. The destruction that then follows
isn't random. It is a kind of poetic justice nature

(25:57):
in the Jurassic Park films, It does not cooperate with
human hubris. Once the reach exceeds the grasp, there are consequences,
natural consequences. For Christians, this raises a very rich apologetic question.
You know, what is the source of moral limits? Why

(26:18):
do we instinctively feel that some lines shouldn't be crossed?
Why is it that when you know these characters in
this new film, are you know they're on this island
they're running from these dinosaurs, and then they find this
lab where these experiments are being carried out on these
different dinosaurs. And you're looking at these mutations, You're looking

(26:40):
at these monsters, these things that just look unnatural. You
know that something has gone awry, something has gone wrong.
What does it say about us that we are so
drawn to stories where humanity gets punished for overreaching? Why
do we keep telling the story of Prome Theis over

(27:00):
and over and over. Why do we keep telling the
story of Frankenstein over and over and over. What is
the connection between these stories and monsters, Whether those monsters
are the d RECs in this new film, this hybrid
genetic mutation gone awry, or whether it's just a good
old fashioned t Rex in the original Jurassic Park. What

(27:24):
is the connection there between the monstrous and these kinds
of stories. These are questions that naturally lead into conversations
about creation, fall, redemption, the biblical arc, not nos arc,
but the arc of the Biblical story. So, while Jurassic
Park may not be an overtly Christian story, it operates

(27:47):
within a moral framework that resonates with Christian theology. It's
just an example of a major franchise that entertains while
also inviting serious reflection about what it means to be
human in a world that we didn't make. And I
think that's also part of its appeal. To go back
to that question, part of the appeal is it's not

(28:10):
just mythic in terms of iconography, because you don't really
have a ton of archetypes in these movies. You can
argue that there are there's some sense of an archetype
that has been created for a Jurassic Park hero, but
by and large, the story itself is mythic. It is
not just you know, using familiar characters and icons. It

(28:33):
is in fact telling a story that reinforces mythic themes
that we have seen for thousands and thousands of years.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
So we talked a little bit earlier you thought that
this movie would be popular with kids, and I did say,
you know, we're briefly prepping before we started this podcast,
that I felt like this had some of the similar
beats as the very first film where children are in
danger from these monsters, these dinosaurs, and it is you know,

(29:03):
rated PG. Thirteen. There's like no nudity or anything like
that it has. It's kind of like the horror jump
scare moments. But is this okay? You thought it would
be okay for middle school and high schoolers to watch?
What should? Should there anything else that Christian's parents know
about this kind of a horror theme where they're confronted
with these very terrifying I think they were like hybrid dinosaurs.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
Yeah, I mean it depends on the child. The first
film in particular, is intense. I wouldn't say that it's
it's gory, but it is suspenseful and psychologically frightening at times,
and the imagery really really sticks with you. Children being hunted,

(29:50):
people being eaten, that kind of thing. In that respect,
While the series is rated PG thirteen, that rating really
does cover a lot of ground. I'd say it's not
appropriate for younger kids. Having said that, though, I do
have a very young niece and nephew, and the nephew
is all about Dino's right now. That's sort of his

(30:14):
his thing, and every chance he gets, if you know,
the YouTube is on the TV, if a clip from
Jurassic World Rebirth pops up, you know, he's all about that.
And he's three years old and he's just drawn to that.
So I'd say even though it's not appropriate for younger kids,

(30:37):
it certainly holds an appeal to that age group. So
parents need to watch the film's first and make a
judgment call based on their child's sensitivity to fear, not
just violence. So thematically, yeah, the movies raise valuable questions,
but they are wrapped in genuine peril, so discernment is

(30:59):
key watching these films.

Speaker 1 (31:02):
So I want to talk in particular about this new film,
the seventh film, which is Jurassic World Rebirth. How is
it different than the other stories all the six films
are for them, maybe some of the more recent ones.
And who are the major characters in this particular film.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Rebirth picks up about five years after the end of
the last film, which was called Dominion. At the end
of Dominion, we were left with this fairly large and
chaotic setup, dinosaurs roaming freely in the modern world and

(31:41):
humans trying to adapt to this new environment. But perhaps unexpectedly,
Rebirth doesn't really continue that global storyline. Instead, it pulls
the focus in tight again, back to an island, back
to a smaller group of characters, and back to a
more intimate, more suspense driven setting, and in a lot

(32:05):
of ways, I see a lot of stuff online calling
it a soft reboot or something like that. I think
it's worth pointing out that the writer of the film,
David Cohap, has made it a point to say that
this is not a reboot, that he doesn't really like reboots.
He doesn't like when films pretend as though that what

(32:29):
happened previously never happened. So you'll find in the first
thirty minutes of this movie a lot of it's very talky.
It's surprisingly talky, and it's very character heavy, which is
a bit of a departure from the last three movies.
But the first thirty minutes of this movie does a
lot of ground covering in terms of explaining why what

(32:52):
is happening is happening, and there's a lot of I
guess what you could say, science or pseudoscience. I'm not
an expert in these things. I don't know if it's accurate.
I'm assuming it's probably accurate enough to pass the stiff test,
but other than that, it's all just made up. But
the idea is that the climate of the world today

(33:14):
has changed so much since the time that dinosaurs were
around that the dinosaurs that are now in the world
are now dying off they cannot adapt to the climate,
and so in order to sort of save them, those
that can be rescued and have been rescued have been
taken to this island or chain of islands near the

(33:38):
equator because the climate there is very similar to what
it used to be. And the story proper centers on
this character, Zora Bennett, played by Scarlett Johansson, and she's
a covert op specialist who has been hired by a

(33:58):
biotech firm to retrieve genetic samples from the last surviving
specimens of three major dinosaur species. And again this is
where there's a lot of you know, technobabble thrown in there,
explaining that, you know, the larger these dinosaurs are something
about the the more intense they're, you know, they're they're

(34:21):
bigger samples for their their hearts. They're basically trying to
cure heart disease. They think that if you can, if
you can get some samples from these three huge dinosaurs,
because of their size, the way that their bodies regulate
their hearts or heart regulates their bodies, whatever, there's something
to that. There's something beneficial in the realm of medicine. There,
and so that she's basically this person who is hired

(34:42):
by this firm that's you know, got this idea of
trying to find a cure for heart disease to go
to this island and retrieve these samples from these dinosaurs.
So it's sort of a it's a bit of an
involved setup, if you will. Now, the island she's sent
to was once part of Engine's network of research facilities.
So if you remember the first films, the early films,

(35:04):
Engine was John Hammond's company that was responsible for the
first park, that was responsible for first bringing the dinosaurs
back by you know, using the DNA extracted from this
mosquito that was found encased in amber. And these labs
that they're finding on this island are these are kind
of like these off the book's labs that were supposedly

(35:27):
abandoned after the events of the earlier films. And what
they end up finding on this island isn't just surviving dinosaurs.
They also find the remnants of these past experiments, creatures
that aren't just clone dinosaurs, but twisted genetic hybrids that

(35:48):
had been left to evolve in isolation. So we're talking
about things like you know, the new face of this movie,
the distortus Rex. This what they call the d Rex,
this six limbed, highly unstable giant predator. And these you know,
winged creatures called mutodons. These aren't natural dinosaurs. They're the

(36:13):
results of forgotten, buried experiments and they've been adapting to
this climate that they're in. So there's also a human
element to the story besides, you know, the shady corporate
dinosaur drama. Zora's team ends up rescuing this family that

(36:35):
gets stranded near the island, adding this emotional through line
and a bit of ground intension. So the film becomes
this blend of survival, horror, ethical reckoning, and creature feature chaos,
but told on a smaller, more focused scale than the
last few installments. So well, it's it's technically part of

(36:57):
the the twenty fifteen you know, expanded updated continuity. Rebirth
feels a bit like a spiritual successor to Jurassic Park.
It's it's a bit of a return to the tone
of that original film, with maybe a bit more of
a horror rage, a bit more cynicism to it. So

(37:19):
that's what's going on in this new film.

Speaker 1 (37:22):
You said that it's not a throwback or it's not
like a reboot, But to me, Rebirth had this kind
of vibe of Indiana Jones a little bit. How does
this particular film balance, like, you know, the og that
you were talking about the first movie, the feel of that,

(37:44):
but maybe just something for more and modern audiences thirty
years down the line from when this story started.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
Yeah, it's not, like we said, not so much a
reboot as it is a a spiritual successor a kind
of throwback if you will, to the original. And it
really does walk a kind of tight rope between nostalgia
and then reinvention. It brings back the tone and structure

(38:20):
of the original Jurassic Park, this remote location, small group
of people, dinosaurs reasserting themselves, but it doesn't really rehash
what we've seen before so much as it uses the
original film's DNA and then you know, fittingly mutates it.
Given the subject matter. You noted that it sort of

(38:40):
almost has an Indiana Jones feel to it. I think
what this is actually something I commented to one of
my friends who saw the film. We were talking about
it after we both saw it, and I said, one
of the things I liked about it is that it
has this classic venture movie feel to it instead of

(39:03):
going bigger, like for example, with Dominion. I really that's
a very strange movie. It has almost like spy movie
elements in it, and it sort of is about a
lot of these characters just running around this corporate lab
with a lot of it's sort of almost like just

(39:24):
I go to the word corporate, but that's the idea.
It's sort of like this business tone to it. You've
got Goldblum and you know, Sam Neil and Laura Dern
and they're sort of engaged in this corporate cloak and
dagger type thing. It's it's sort of an odd movie.
And this film doesn't go in that direction. Rebirth goes

(39:45):
towards something more classic, towards something more adventuresome, and you
get a sense of Jaws, you get a sense of
the African Queen, you get a sense of these classic
jungle adventure movie And I for one like that because
I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. If you
if you show me a you know, give me a

(40:07):
bunch of people wandering around a jungle, and I'm there.
And this movie certainly has that. I think one of
the ways that Rebirth pulls off that balancing what we've
seen before and then doing something different. Is by scaling down.
You get this globe trotting chaos with Dominion and the

(40:27):
Jurassic World films. But this film feels very grounded. There's
no sprawling international storylines or you know, multiple six different
characters you're trying to keep up with at one point
in time. There's a very small core group of characters
who are mostly together. It's one island, it's one mission.

(40:49):
There's a b plot that follows a family, but that
they intersect pretty heavily with the first storyline, and it's
the slow build of tension, and that structure immediately recalls
spiels approach. Set up the environment, let the suspense grow,
and then let things spiral. At the same time, Rebirth

(41:09):
pushes the franchise's themes into a darker territory. I couldn't
help but thinking as I was sitting there watching this film,
and I think I note this maybe in the review
I wrote, But one of the things I kept coming
back to when watching it was there's a way in

(41:31):
which this movie pays dividends to some of the dialogue
that Ian Malcolm had in the first film. You know
Ian Malcolm, and I'm assuming most everyone's familiar with this.
Ian Malcolm, of course, is the character played by Jeff Goldblum,
very iconic in the first film, was the star of
the Lost World and came back in the Jurassic World,

(41:53):
the last trilogy. He is a character who is a
chaos theorist and he sort of brought in very early
on to give his thoughts on this this new venture
called Jurassic Park, and he's sort of the guy who
is very loudly against this because there's no way to

(42:18):
actually control the kind of stuff that the scientists are
tapping into. And he, you know, very famously has you know,
some classic lines from the first movie. He has a
tit for tat exchange with John Hammond, who's the guy
responsible for bringing the dinosaurs back. But one of the
things that Malcolm is adamant about is that once once

(42:40):
you let the genie out of the bottle, it's really
hard to put it back in again. And in Rebirth,
it's this movie is not just about dinosaurs. The first
one was. What Rebirth is about is what has gone
on in the shadows while the world was distracted by

(43:02):
the dinosaurs and it's very cynical in that way, but again,
I think it pays dividends on what Malcolm was warrying
about in that first film, where you know, of course,
of course there would be people who would come along
who would never be content with just having a dinosaur
or playing around with dinosaurs or something like that. And

(43:25):
you started to see seeds of this back in Drastic World,
right when they began doing like dinosaur hybrids for the
sake of, you know, trying to make more money. But
here in this one, what you see are these creatures
that aren't majestic. They're wrong, They're these failed experiments, which

(43:48):
means that the moral and philosophical weight of the story
is heavier than it's been In a hot minute. It's
no longer a question of should we bring dinosaurs back?
It's what have we made in the process and what
does that say about us? So we've sort of gone
beyond the idea of just fooling around with dinosaurs, even

(44:10):
though there are plenty of dinosaurs in this film and
they all have moments to shine. The third act of
this movie is really about what has gone on in
the background, What have these people been doing and trying
to screw around with dinosaur DNA to build something new
and it blowing up in their face, and them having
created monsters in the process. Visually and tonally, this film

(44:32):
leans into a more horror inflected style. One of the
most noticeable things about the Jurassic World films, and probably
what made them so much money at the box office,
is that they sort of went in the direction of louder,
more action horror. Of course, the suspenseful horror elements are

(44:53):
still there, but they were sort of loud, and the
heroes were true heroes, and their around and they're riding
motorcycles and all of that kind of stuff. This film
is not that it leans into a more Spielbergian style,
and this is all very intentional. Gareth Edwards has talked
at length about intentionally channeling Spielberg. But the lighting is moodier,

(45:17):
the pacing is slower at first. The score even pulls
from John Williams's original cues, so it sort of honors
the original film without mimicking it. There's no Alan Grant,
there's no Ellie Sadler, but there is a sense of
moral consequence that puts the franchise. I think what many

(45:39):
people would call back into its proper thematic lane. So
in a way, I would say Rebirth really succeeds because
it remembers what Jurassic Park is about, not just dinosaurs,
but limits. It brings back that fear of the unknown
and then updates it for a world where scientific sins

(45:59):
are no longer longer theoretical. They're embodied, They're monstrous, and
they're out there. And this film is interested in playing
in that territory.

Speaker 1 (46:08):
So are there any other themes that this particular film
Rebirth expands on that the original series started? Kind of
it to me, it got rid of a lot of
the plot points that seemed really convoluted about the different
corporations that we're trying to open the theme park, because

(46:31):
it's no longer about a theme park in this final film.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Yeah, it's I don't know, it's a final film.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
Let me just say right, new film.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Yeah, it's sort of a perfect jumping on point for
anybody who has, you know, missed the series or hasn't
really watched the series of that where you could watch
this movie and still get the themes of the original.
But if you are someone who has watched these movies
all the way through in a sense, I think, and
I may have said this at the beginning, it feels

(47:02):
a bit like a culmination. At least it did to me.
It felt a bit like a culmination rather than just
another entry in the series. Right in the original Jurassic Park,
at like we said, Malcolm functioned as this moral compass,
this profit in the wilderness if you will. He's the
one warning that life finds a way, you can't control nature,
and that just because you can do something doesn't mean
you should. And for the most part, the first film

(47:24):
validated that perspective. Things fall apart. We're left with the
impression that human arrogance had limits, and that those limits
would be enforced by reality itself. But the sequels didn't
always know what to do with that idea. They repeated
the pattern, more dinosaurs, more chaos, but the philosophical weight
got diluted under the spectacle. Then Rebirth comes along and says, Okay,
what if we took Malcolm seriously? What if we really

(47:46):
followed his warnings to the end. What if we saw
not just the collapse of a park, but the collapse
of the idea that humans could ever master what they
create at all. In Rebirth, we see that unchecked ambition
running quite literally, the creatures aren't just dinosaurs anymore. Like
we said, there are hybrids, evolutionary mistakes, designed and laps

(48:09):
abandoned when they prove too unstable or unprofitable. They're not
wonders of science. And that's sort of the theological turn
the film takes. It's not just about failure of control.
It's about the deformation the monsters that are created when
creation is severed from its purpose. In a sense, Malcolm's

(48:30):
warnings in that original film have metastasized. The moral decay
that began with cloning dinosaurs has deepened into something much darker,
tampering not just with life but with what life is. For.
In Rebirth, it's not just that man is playing God.
It's that man has forgotten what God even is, forgotten

(48:52):
the creator, and therefore lost the meaning of creation. So
when I say Rebirth is sort of a culmination of
these ideas, these you know, the series themes, I mean
it shows us what happens when a civilization keeps ignoring
the moral warnings and pushes forward anyway. The monsters in
the film are terrifying, not just because of their teeth,

(49:13):
but because they are reflections of human ambition, recklessness, the
refusal to submit to limits. In a sense, they're a
kind of physical embodiment of futile thinking. As Paul puts
it in Romans, they are what progress looks like when
it loses its moral anchor. And that's you know what

(49:35):
these Jurassic Park movies do so well is they sort
of say this is what comes next when you don't listen.
They're sort of a warning in that way. So you know,
I very comfortably would be fine with saying, you know,
the Jurassic Park series lasted for sixth films. The seventh
film is a little epilogue that shows us what happens

(49:56):
after the last movie, though, I think that the truth
is these movies make so much money there's not going
to be an end inside for a while, so we'll
just have to wait for the next one to see
where the story goes.

Speaker 1 (50:08):
Well. Finally, a fun question that I have for Cole is,
after this discussion about all the different Jurassic Park movies
from the last thirty years, this is the seventh one,
which is your favorite? If you had a favorite, or
you would have mind watching again, I guess I could.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Say, yeah, it's a toss up between the first one
and the Lost World. I really like that original Jurassic
Park and the Lost World. I like both of those.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
Well, thanks Cole for being a guest on the Postmodern
Realities podcast and we'll see you soon for the next blockbuster.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Always a pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
You've been listening to episode four hundred and fifty three
of the post Modern Realities podcast from the Christian Research Journal.
Today's guest was Cole Brigett. He has written a film
review for the Christian Research Journal and his review is
called Creates Something Worse Than Dinosaurs, a review of Jurassic

(51:04):
World Rebirth. You can read it for free at equipp
dot org. You won't want to miss out on subscribing
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(51:27):
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(51:48):
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(52:10):
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