Film reviews: Jurassic World Rebirth | Pavements

Pavements (N/A) ★★★★☆

Living up to the promise of its title, Jurassic World Rebirth recaptures some of the vitality of Steven Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park after a raft of lacklustre sequels and reboots bogged the dino series down with increasingly silly plot twists, dumb characters and groaning fan-service. Now in the capable hands of Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla), the British director brings some of the maverick indie spirit of his own breakthrough movie Monsters to bear on the franchise, not least in the way society has become indifferent to the idea of dinosaurs out in the wild.

Set a few years on from the convoluted nonsense of 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion, the dinosaurs in the new film are once again on the verge of extinction, unable to survive in a world with a vastly different climate from their own time. The only place they’re able to thrive uninhibited is in a few areas near the equator, now a designated restricted zone that humans are banned from entering.

But of course it wouldn’t be a Jurassic movie without some nefarious tech entrepreneur intent on exploiting dino DNA for supposedly humanitarian purposes. In Rebirth he comes in the form of Rupert Friend’s Martin Krebs, a deep-pocketed Big Pharma exec who wants to synthesise a cure for heart disease from the blood of three of the biggest, most robust species of dinosaur, all of whom are to be found on a small tropical island formerly used for genetic dinosaur experimentation.

The good news for the film – and us – is that Scarlett Johansson is also on board as a covert ops specialist called Zora Bennett. She’s a modern day mercenary, but has a conscience too, as well as a no-nonsense attitude to surviving dangerous situations. She certainly proves thrilling to watch when things inevitably go wrong and she’s backed up by wonderful Mahershala Ali as Zora’s old friend and cohort Duncan Kincaid, and Bridgerton star Jonathan Bailey as a dreamy palaeontologist who’s never seen a dinosaur in the wild.

Working from a script by original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, Edwards structures the film like a heist movie, using the team’s mission to extract dino blood as a way to introduce us to a raft of magnificent new (or newish) creatures via land, sea and air. But he also reintroduces us old favourites in unexpected ways, even managing to reinvigorate the requisite T-Rex attack.

For a series that has long seemed intent on bringing about its own extinction, Edwards’ smart direction and Johansson’s megawatt charisma ensure that life has finally found a way back in.

Music docs and biopics rarely approach their subjects with the same artistry that made their subjects compelling in the first place. With Pavements, however, cult American filmmaker Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up, Philip) has made a film about the ultimate 90s slacker rock band Pavement that feels very apropos for a group seemingly impervious to hype, success and their own cooler-than-thou legacy. Formed in Stockton, California by frontman Stephen Malkmus, Pavement arrived on the alt-rock scene just as Nirvana inadvertently took it mainstream and, for a certain type of music fan (the kind mocked years later by Greta Gerwig in Barbie), the band's failure to similarly break through epitomised a virtuous refusal to sell out.

Pavement, though, are too self-aware to mythologise this as part of some grand masterplan. Instead, as they head out on a reunion tour after imploding with a shrug of indifference more than two decades earlier, they leave it to Perry to start spinning fantasies about what it all means, blurring the line between documentary and mockumentary to skewer the whole notion that straight docs and biopics offer anything other than half-truths in their desire to shape everything into a neat, sellable package.

Perry starts layering in obfuscations from the off, capturing the essence of the band by documenting not just the very real reunion tour, but also the opening of a museum exhibit filled with Pavement ephemera of dubious provenance, as well as the making of both an off-Broadway show inspired by the band’s music and an impending biopic starring a slew of Hollywood up-and-comers, among them Stranger Things star Joe Keery as Malkmus.

The last of these is the most blatant ruse within the movie, becoming more of a piss-take of the film industry and its cynical hunt for awards bait. But while it’s fun to watch Keery – who looks like a more glamorous Malkmus – deadpan his way through multiple scenes of method acting madness, Perry also makes sly use of split screens to juxtapose archival footage of the flashpoint moments in the band's career with their dramatised equivalents to reinforce the often corny manipulation at work in any movie about artistic endeavour.

The end result is pleasingly slippery and allows this most enigmatic of bands to come through it all with their integrity, inevitably, intact.

Jurassic World is in cinemas now. Pavements streams exclusively on Mubi from 11 July.