By Jake Wilson and Karl Quinn
JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH
★★★
M, 133 mins
“How many times are we gonna do this?” an offscreen scientist murmurs at the outset of Jurassic World: Rebirth, scripted by David Koepp, who wrote the original 1993 Jurassic Park for Steven Spielberg, adapting Michael Crichton’s novel.
Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett in Jurassic World: Rebirth.Credit:
Putting a line like that into your flagging blockbuster franchise is a risky move. But Koepp and Spielberg, who returns here as a producer, have evidently decided it’s best to be upfront about the perils of dinosaur fatigue – not that they or director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One) strive for originality in this straightforward jungle adventure.
In fiction as in reality, decades have gone by since the entrepreneur John Hammond, played in 1993 by Richard Attenborough, had the foolhardy idea of opening a theme park where the public could witness the miracle of prehistoric species restored to life.
Since then, the novelty has worn off, with dinosaurs close to extinction once more. They can still be found in zoos, but the public couldn’t care less, and even when one of them escapes it’s little more than an excuse to complain about delays in traffic.
In the wild, they’re confined to a handful of islands near the equator, off-limits to humans. The prohibition is there for good reason, but that’s where the characters are headed, on a mission spearheaded by Big Pharma executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), who wants to harvest genetic material from the largest creatures on the planet.
Why he needs to be present for this in person is not absolutely clear, except that these movies require a hissable villain. Likewise, they need a geeky scientist to spout dinosaur lore, a role filled here by Jonathan Bailey from Wicked, not exactly a natural successor to Jeff Goldblum.
Rounding out the main cast are Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, the hyper-competent black-ops veteran recruited by Krebs for the mission, and Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid, the old comrade she recruits in turn.
None of these characters are exactly fully rounded, but Johansson is at least afforded star treatment as Zora’s hard-boiled exterior gradually softens, where Ali, despite being a two-time Oscar winner, is hardly given enough to do to justify his second billing.
Rupert Friend, Mahershala Ali and Bechir Sylvain in Jurassic World: Rebirth.Credit:
There’s also a shipwrecked family we follow through a mostly separate series of adventures on the island, alternately gaping in awe and gasping in terror at the dinosaurs, some of which are mutants that evoke the Alien films.
Along the way, Dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) has to come to terms with the slacker boyfriend (David Iacono) of his eldest daughter (Luna Blaise), while his younger daughter (Audrina Miranda) finds a miniature friend of her own. But all of this again is routine to the point of laziness, and doesn’t suggest that Koepp or anyone involved has had a great deal to do with young people lately.
Going by his whole career, Edwards’ strength is much more in special effects than in storytelling. But some of his strategies pay off, such as the use of 35mm film and natural light, shooting on location in Malta and Thailand: the jungle looks real, which makes it far easier to believe in the reality of the dinosaurs, brought to life using animatronics as well as digital effects.
There are moments when the envisaged sense of wonder does kick in, notably a mating dance between two titanosaurs in an open field, their long whiplike tails whirring around them.
But Jurassic World Rebirth can only be recommended for a specific age group, roughly between 10 and 14. Any younger, and the set pieces might be too intense; any older, and they’re likely to see this material as so familiar it hardly needs reviving.
Reviewed by Jake Wilson
M3GAN 2.0
★★★
M, 119 minutes
Conspiracy theorists might make something of the fact that M3GAN, a film about a sinister artificially intelligent talking doll, had its US premiere in December 2022, a week or so after ChatGPT was unleashed on the public.
Gemma (Allison Williams) and M3GAN in M3GAN 2.0Credit:
Since then, AI fatigue has set in to the point where the prudent choice for filmmakers would be to avoid the subject altogether, especially as M3GAN’s real-life equivalents don’t threaten to take over the world so much as drown us in a sea of cliches.
But a hit is a hit, and so Gerard Johnstone, the talented New Zealand director of the original, is back for another round with the clumsily titled M3GAN 2.0, this time working from his own script, even if this isn’t the version of Hollywood success he might have mapped out for himself in his dreams.
Voiced by YouTube personality Jenna Davis and embodied by the young dancer Amie Donald in an animatronic mask, M3GAN started out as a caramel-haired waif about the same size as her orphaned eight-year-old owner Cady (Violet McGraw), but with considerably more adult poise.
Since her body was destroyed at the end of the first film, for a while she’s reduced to a ghost in the machine, haunting Cady’s aunt Gemma (Allison Williams), the tightly-wound roboticist who came up with the idea for a high-tech doll in the first place.
Before long M3GAN is back on the earthly plane in a new form – but the changes aren’t just physical. In the first film, she was a classic case of good intentions gone wrong, programmed to keep Cady safe at all costs, and racking up a significant kill count in the process.
Somewhere along the line, though, Johnstone or his overseers have decided that a cool-eyed, stylish, outwardly demure killing machine prone to quips such as “Hang onto your vaginas” is simply too fabulous to be treated as a simple villain.
Where the first M3GAN was a campy horror movie, this one is more of a campy techno-thriller, with a dash of sub-Spielbergian fantasies of the 1980s such as Short Circuit (Johnstone, born in 1976, knows his vintage pop culture: the climax should gratify fans of B-grade 1990s action films).
Much as Terminator 2 made Arnold Schwarzenegger the good guy facing off against a liquid metal antagonist, here there’s a new killer robot on the scene, AMELIA (Ivanna Sakhno) – a military asset gone rogue, created using the same technology that brought M3GAN to life, but with bigger goals than being a blend of bodyguard and nanny.
M3GAN 2.0 is an oddity: overlong, not entirely suited to either children or adults, and probably too much of a departure from the original to satisfy whatever dedicated cult exists.
There aren’t even as many classic M3GAN moments as might be anticipated, despite one outlandish scene all too visibly designed for the Internet. But unlike much of what’s currently in multiplexes, it does feel like a film made by a human being, willing to go off-script as no AI ever would.
Reviewed by Jake Wilson
THE SHROUDS
★★★★
MA, 120 mins
Going by recent reports, The Shrouds may be the last film from 82-year-old David Cronenberg, Canada’s onetime king of “body horror”. If so, it’s an apt farewell – typically morbid, perverse and self-mocking, but also emotionally direct in the manner of some of his most durable classics, such as The Dead Zone and The Fly.
Vincent Cassel, who stars as an eccentric tech entrepreneur named Karsh, is a generation younger than Cronenberg but here bears an unmistakable resemblance to his director, with slicked-back white hair, a long bony face that lends itself to dramatic lighting, and the detached verve of a scientist who enjoys the process of dissection.
Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in The Shrouds.Credit: Sophie Giraud
He also recalls some of Cronenberg’s earlier eccentric leading men, such as Christopher Walken as a troubled psychic in The Dead Zone, especially when he’s flashing a disconcerting grin. Like Walken, Cassel has a knack for throwing us off-balance through his speech rhythms, though in Cassel’s case this is partly the consequence of being a native French speaker acting in English.
Karsh, like Cronenberg, has “made a career out of bodies,” in a very literal way. His ventures include a cemetery where the tombstones come equipped with screens, allowing you to log in and watch the corpse of your loved one rotting in real time. Naturally, there’s an app for this, known as GraveTech (there’s also a restaurant adjacent to the cemetery, encouraging visitors to make a day of it).
How many takers there would be for the scheme in real life is hard to say. But this is Cronenberg world, although we’re nominally in something resembling present-day Toronto. In any case Karsh is his own most enthusiastic client, maintaining an ongoing relationship with the body of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) years after her early death from cancer.
Understandably, his reluctance to let go is something of an obstacle to his parallel desire to find a new partner among the living. Still, there are several women in his life, among them the blind Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), who wants a plot in the cemetery for her dying husband, and Becca’s identical twin Terry (Kruger again) who works as a dog groomer.
Becca has yet another double in the form of a virtual assistant who pops up on Karsh’s phone, the creation of Terry’s perpetually unshaven ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), a “schmuck” whose jittery manner counterpoints Karsh’s suavity: both men are in seemingly permanent mourning, even if the woman Maury loves isn’t literally dead.
Diane Kruger doubles up as the dead wife and sister-in-law of Vincent Cassel’s Karsh in The Shrouds.
The Shrouds began as a TV show Cronenberg pitched unsuccessfully to Netflix, and the plot is superficially complex, involving sexual jealousy, activist groups who favour cremation over burial, and the possibility of Karsh’s high-tech tombs being hacked by foreign spies. But much of this happens offscreen, leaving room for doubt over whether it’s really happening at all (Terry, we learn, finds conspiracy theories a turn-on).
Again typically for Cronenberg, The Shrouds isn’t exactly a thriller, still less a horror film. In the tradition of Luis Bunuel, it’s a work of charged yet calm surrealism, contemplating the mysteries of life and death with open eyes – in particular, the mystery of what it means to connect with another person, whether physically or from a distance.
In a sense, The Shrouds contains nothing to interpret or decode. The bodies here are bodies, not metaphors for something else, whether they’re living or dead, real or virtual. Nonetheless, this is a film designed to sit in the mind and have its effect gradually: days or weeks later, you may find yourself realising that your own world is nearer to Cronenberg’s than you’d guessed.
Reviewed by Jake Wilson
THE WOLVES ALWAYS COME AT NIGHT
★★★
PG, 97 mins
While Berlin-based Australian filmmaker Gabrielle Brady is currently developing her first fully fictional feature, The Wolves Always Come At Night marks her second foray into what she calls “docu-feature”, a hybrid storytelling form that merges observational documentary with elements of fiction, driven by the subjects of the film.
Her first was Island of the Hungry Ghosts, which was set on Christmas Island and used the visually arresting annual migration of land crabs as a metaphor for the journeys of asylum seekers across the world. A counsellor called Poh Lin Lee served as a kind of focal point in that movie, helping give individual human shape to stories of mass movement.
Otgonzaya Dashzeveg (Zaya) and Davaasuren Dagvasuren (Davaa) are the stars, subjects, and co-writers of the film. Credit: Madman
Lee is involved in the new film too, credited as “narrative therapy consultant”. Also returning is Aaron Cupples, whose work on the ethereal land- and windscape-inspired score is just as impressive as it was on the earlier film, and cinematographer Michael Latham, whose images are once again stunning.
Set in Mongolia, The Wolves… focuses on the hard-scrabble existence of goat herder Davaa (Davaasuren Dagvasuren) and his wife Zaya (Otgonzaya Dashzeveg). They are raising four young kids in their ger (circular tent), surrounded by animals and occasionally interacting with neighbours in a far-off community hall, where the conversation revolves around the weather and the birthing of livestock. “How has your spring been?” “Good.” That sort of thing.
The first shot of Davaa is on horseback, riding hard across the Gobi desert on his stocky pony. The film ends with him and his horse together again. But in between, it’s all about the forces that are moving man and beast apart – motorisation, urbanisation, exploitation of the land for minerals, and above all, climate change.
Michael Latham’s cinematography is superb.Credit: Madman
Davaa and Zaya are stoic presences, not given to great slabs of articulation, and not especially expressive. Dagvasuren and Dashzeveg are credited as co-writers here, but I hope they weren’t paid by the word.
To be frank, not a lot happens in The Wolves… If you were feeling mean-spirited, you might say it is exactly the sort of film Marg Downey so brilliantly sent up on Fast Forward 30-plus years ago as “the SBS woman”.
An example, from 1991: “Ahead in the orgy of superior entertainment on SBS tonight we present the next in our series of films by Turkish director Yilmaz Hobeglu. Kemal and the Weevil tells the heartbreaking story of a boy who befriends an orphaned weevil only to have it cruelly snatched from him by the secret police.”
The Wolves… has grander aspirations than that, to be sure. It follows Davaa as he watches over his goats, helps them give birth to their kids, loads their corpses into his flat-bed truck after a sandstorm wipes out half the flock, sells his beloved stallion to help make ends meet, moves the family to the city, and takes a job as an excavator driver at a quarry. They are monumental shifts in a life, but the hands-off approach to scripting means their dramatic import isn’t always conveyed as fully as it might have been.
Brady lived in Mongolia years ago, and her embrace of this form of hybrid storytelling is clearly designed to afford agency to its subjects, for whom she has palpable empathy. It makes for some beautiful images, some subtly moving moments, and a patina of truth.
That’s all to be applauded. I just wish there was a little more connective tissue on those narrative bones.
Reviewed by Karl Quinn
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