Tag Archives: David Koepp

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Jurassic World: Rebirth

by Hope Madden

Every great creature feature from King Kong to Godzilla to Jaws to Jurassic Park and on and on understands one basic principle. The monster is not the problem. Human greed is the problem. Some monster movies are just better than others at telling that story.

It’s not a new notion to director Gareth Edwards, who riffed on it in Monsters (2010), Godzilla (2014), and The Creator (2023). For Jurassic World: Rebirth, he teams with writer David Koepp, who adapted Michael Crichton’s novel for Spielberg’s 1993 original. Given the sheer volume of callbacks in Rebirth, I’d say Koepp is pretty pleased with how that first one turned out.

Scarlett Johansson is an extraction specialist hired by Big Pharma in white linen, Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to gather DNA samples from three living dinosaurs: the biggest on the sea, land, and air. Mahershala Ali is the ship’s captain who’ll get crew and scientist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to the island no one is allowed to visit, they’ll gather some samples and get home. Zip in, zip out.

But wait! Naked alpha zombies!

Just kidding. But seriously, why can’t someone write a proper film for Mahershala Ali and Scarlett Johanssen? Because these are talented individuals (hell, one of them has two Oscars), and they are better than this retread.

To be fair, Edwards crafts some eyepopping set pieces early in the film as two different boats—Ali’s, and that of the cloying B-story family—run afoul of the swimming beasties. These action sequences set you up for thrills, but once both A and B story hit dry land, Gareth is more interested in recycled ideas and images, not just from this franchise but from the Alien series as well. Just get a look at the monster they kept hidden away on that island. I think I know what they were cross breeding that with.

The B-story about a shipwrecked family (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, and Audrina Miranda) is cliché straight from the family friendly action movie playbook, complete with a comically adorable (and tonally discordant) baby dinosaur stowing away in the littlest daughter’s backpack.

The presence of the family softens the best members of the elite team and amplifies the villainy in the worst. Of course it does because Jurassic World: Rebirth is nothing if not obvious. It obviously knows the story it’s supposed to tell, it just doesn’t tell it especially well.

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You Should Have Left

by Hope Madden

Most weeks there’s at least one streaming movie option that will cost you. These are ostensibly the films that were meant to be theatrical releases, as opposed to your garden variety direct-to-streaming options. The idea is that you’re paying a premium to get to see it now, rather than waiting for theaters to open up.

It’ll be interesting to see how long this tactic lasts, but one thing is for sure: You Should Have Left is not worth $20.

Always likeable, always reliable Kevin Bacon reteams with his Stir of Echoes writer/director David Koepp to bring Daniel Kehlmann’s novel to the screen.

Bacon plays Theo, a man with a past and a much younger wife (Amanda Seyfried), Susanna. She’s a sought after actress and he’s feeling a little neglected, so they decide to spend the three weeks between her shoots with their 6-year-old Ella (Avery Tiiu Essex) in a remote rental property one of them found online.

Which one found it, though?

From the early dream sequences to the small town shopkeep with an accent, an attitude and a secret to—well, hell, every single thing—You Should Have Left squeezes the life out of standard horror tropes.

Not that this is horror, really. It’s certainly not scary. I wouldn’t call it a thriller, either, assuming those have to thrill at some point. Nope, it’s just a boring, predictable waste of talent.

Seyfried, in particular, elevates her stale character, sharing a believably conflicted lived-in chemistry with Bacon. Uncharacteristically, it’s Bacon who struggles.

Theo’s internal conflict is weakly depicted, his arc equally anemic, and for that reason, his epiphany feels unearned. The actor does develop a lovely onscreen relationship with Essex, although she’s asked to do little more than look pensive.

Or maybe she was bored. Hard to blame her when Koepp works so hard to make the film tedious. Uninspired sound design and mediocre FX blend together with the filmmaker’s hum drum storytelling to betray a tiresome lack of imagination.

No way Universal believes they deserve your $20 for this.