‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ | Anatomy of a Scene
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How to Escape a T-Rex in ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’
The director Gareth Edwards narrates a harrowing sequence from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to escape by raft from an island riddled with dinosaurs and you manage to wake up a sleeping T-Rex in the process?That scenario becomes one of the signature moments in “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the latest in the long-running dino thriller franchise.In the scene, a family becomes trapped on an island where the setting is lush and the creature threats are plentiful. One family member, Teresa (Luna Blaise), finds a raft but also encounters a certain snoozing theropod nearby. The raft, per the instructions written on the side of it (seen in a close-up shot), must be opened on land.“This was something we added in the edit,” Edwards said, narrating the scene and discussing the close-up, “because we did a test screening and the audience was just like, why would you inflate it in front of a T-Rex?”Next, the filmmakers used the opportunity to make a dino disappear before the viewers’ eyes. The T-Rex is in the background of the shot, but then is hidden from view once the raft inflates on its side. When the raft gets turned flat in the water, the dinosaur has disappeared. “You sort of get this David Copperfield moment,” Edwards said.In discussing where the sequence was shot, Edwards said, “What you’re looking at is two main locations. One is in Thailand and it’s really actually a lake. We use it as a river, but it’s this big lake within a quarry. And then, once the rafting begins proper, it becomes this location in the U.K. called Lee Valley, which was essentially built for the London Olympics in 2012.”Only one of these locations was warm.“In London, in the rapid section,” Edwards said, “it’s freezing cold. And the actors, they were very tolerant, but we had to do take after take after take as you can imagine. And slowly through the day, I could see the look in their eyes. They wanted to kill me.”Read the “Jurassic World Rebirth” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More
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‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ Review: Wonder, Gone Extinct
With its seventh entry, the popular dinosaur franchise is starting to show signs of wear.In the 32 years since dinosaurs started roaming the earth again — that is, since “Jurassic Park” opened in theaters — a list of required ingredients for entries in the franchise has evolved. They always center on scientists and adventurers, usually bickering with one another. There’s always some shadowy billionaire, or billion-dollar corporation, lurking in the background. Kids are always in peril. And of course, there are always dinos.Save for the dinosaurs, this could describe pretty much any summer Hollywood blockbuster. But the “Jurassic” movies — of which the new film, “Jurassic World Rebirth,” is the seventh — have a particularly distinctive quality, something I rarely encounter in big-budget cinema. They’re action-packed and filled with peril, yes. But each movie also gives way, however briefly, to a sense of quiet awe.Cinema is well-suited to provoking wonder. In the art form’s early days, just seeing moving images left viewers astonished (and, in some cases, panicked). It has always felt a little like magic, the experience of watching another world emerge, drawn with lights, through a frame hung on a wall. Adding sound to the experience made it even more amazing, and most cinematic innovations over the past century — everything from Smell-o-Vision to 3-D to 4DX — try to wow the audience even more.Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in “Jurassic World Rebirth.”Jasin Boland/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentBut mainstream movies have often leaned more on spectacle (a shark chomping in the water, superheroes zooming through the air, Tom Cruise hanging off the side of a plane) than awe, which is a quieter thing. Awe makes us feel small, and it feels good. The first “Jurassic Park” movie introduces the dinosaurs in a way that makes the characters, and the audience, stop talking and thinking about anything else and just stare. These giant, stately creatures — the franchise is especially fond of the sort with long, curving necks — are tremendous to behold, and John Williams’s score swells to symphonic heights. Yeah, you know that’s not a real dinosaur. But who cares? You feel small and hushed in the presence of something great, and ancient, and achingly beautiful.Every “Jurassic” movie has repeated this moment, trying to re-evoke in the audience that feeling of awe, with somewhat diminishing returns. But sometimes they still manage it. For instance, the 2022 installment, “Jurassic World: Dominion,” is not a very good movie. But it succeeds on this one specific front by moving the big dinosaur moment to a wintry landscape. Two Brachiosauruses have wandered into a place where loggers are working. They’re being slowly led away from the spot, and the burly men are silently watching. These animals can’t move quickly, but they’re not in a hurry either. Their ancestors were here long before ours, and their bodies carry the memory of a land before time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More
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‘The Creator’ Review: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love A.I.
In this hectic, futuristic action film, John David Washington hunts down a threatening artificial intelligence with the baby face of a child.It’s been a tough year for artificial intelligence. First, industry leaders warn that A.I. poses an extinction-level threat to humanity. Then, screenwriters and actors warn roughly the same thing about artists losing their livelihoods (and art losing its soul). And let’s not forget predictions of vast unemployment and upheaval. What’s a superintelligent, terrifyingly autonomous technology got to do to get back on people’s good sides?One answer comes in the whirlwind form of “The Creator,” the latest film directed by Gareth Edwards (“Rogue One,” “Godzilla”). We’ve grown accustomed to A.I. playing the role of helper-turned-villain in movies, and here a rapid newsreel-style prologue sets a familiar stage: Robots were invented, did increasingly complex tasks, and then went nuclear (devastating, in this case, Los Angeles). Now the United States is bent on eliminating their threat, while in East Asian countries (dubbed “New Asia”), bots live at peace with humans. Humanlike robots with Roomba-like heads are police officers, workers, even (somewhat jarringly) saffron-robed monks.One thing stays the same in the future: The movies need a hero. John David Washington plays the reluctant man for the job, Joshua, an ex-undercover soldier who dropped out of sight after a messy raid separated him from his pregnant wife, Maya (Gemma Chan). He is recruited for a U.S. military mission, led by Allison Janney as a no-nonsense colonel, to neutralize a top-secret weapon in New Asia. After a macho fly-in that lightly evokes Vietnam War movies (but with a Radiohead soundtrack), he infiltrates an underground lab only to find a mysterious weapon: an A.I. with the human form of a fairly unflappable 6-year-old girl. Joshua decides to take her on the lam, naming her Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles).Unlike countless A.I. doomsday scenarios, Alphie is too cute and innocent for Joshua to treat as a military target. He’s drawn to protecting her, though unnerved by her near-telekinetic powers of jamming technology all around her. Her personhood is the sort of conundrum posed with daunting depth in, for example, Spielberg’s millennium masterpiece “A.I.” or more outré films like “Demon Seed.” But here Alphie’s significance functions like a warm-and-fuzzy halo above all the gunfire and explosions: What if A.I. isn’t out to get us? What if it just wants to live and let live?Posing these questions requires doing a little heavy lifting on behalf of the film, which is busy spurring on the hectic pursuit of Alphie and Joshua (by, among others, Ken Watanabe as a dogged A.I. “simulant”). Edwards (who wrote the screenplay with Chris Weitz) fluently integrates images and ideas from our established cinematic vocabulary for thinking about A.I. But despite the impressively sweeping C.G.I. running battles in Thai fields or seaside settlements, or the gritty “Blade Runner”-lite interludes in crowded metropolises, the story’s engine produces the straightforward momentum of your average action blockbuster — one thing happens, then the next thing, complete with punchy (sometimes tin-eared) one-liners.Still, tech eye candy can go a long way in science fiction. Humanlike robots like Alphie have elegant circular portals where their ears would be. Nomad, the massive spaceship that the United States uses to hunt down artificial intelligence, scans Earth with blue light, like a colossal photocopier. But Washington feels curiously disconnected from the visual set pieces that Edwards builds out, and his character’s increasingly fraught back story with Maya feels scattered across flashbacks. Above all, the film’s tone is uneven: Edwards pushes the relatable ordinariness of the androids and hybrid “simulants,” but the potential menace of A.I. inescapably looms.The film’s matter-of-fact acceptance of A.I. as an innocuous (or indifferent) force in the world is reminiscent of Edwards’s 2014 take on “Godzilla.” The monsters in that movie weren’t bad per se; they were just creatures independent of humans. This is more or less the case made for A.I. in “The Creator”: autonomy without tears (or bloodshed). It’s a provocative idea — all A.I. wants from humans is a little love — but that utopia doesn’t compute.The CreatorRated PG-13 for violent havoc. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes. In theaters. More
