July Movies Part 1: Jurassic World Rebirth & Superman

July means summer blockbusters and plenty of action. I checked out the two big franchise movies that have come out so far this month, and one of them was good and one of them was atrocious. Place your bets before you read any further!

Jurassic World Rebirth: I'll be honest, apart from the original Jurassic Park, I would be hard pressed to tell you anything about what happened in the subsequent sequels and reboots of this franchise. In this film, directed by Garthe Edwards and written by David Koepp, we have a greedy pharmaceutical rep (played to perfection by Rupert Friend), who needs the DNA from three different types of dinosaur species, to help him perfect a drug for heart disease that could potentially extend human lifespans by several decades. He hires Zora (a buff and action-ready Scarlett Johansson), a mercenary-for-hire as a bodyguard and general facilitator for an expedition to the Equator, where dinosaurs currently roam free in an area that is off-limits to humans. Henry (the delicious Jonathan Bailey), also joins the crew as the paleontologist who is needed for his dino knowledge, and Duncan (the always wonderful Mahershala Ali), a former colleague and friend of Zora's, steps in as their team lead and boat captain. There are other members of the crew, but the fact that they are not famous Oscar-winning actors should clue you in that maybe they're not going to last long on this expedition...spoilers!

The cast is excellent, but this script is an absolute dud, and it just keeps going and going. This is not a good movie, but I guess it's a good AC movie, i.e. it's worth it on a hot day when you really need to spend two hours indoors in an air-conditioned theater. I'd like to think that the actors had a fun time swashbuckling around the jungle, pretending to be awed by majestic dinosaurs, and collecting ridiculous paychecks, but otherwise, this is a very paint-by-the-numbers exercise where you can see every story beat coming from a mile away. There is an unusual twist involving some people they pick up on the way to their expedition, but it's really funny how some members of this team are so unlucky, while others seem to live a perfectly charmed life among these carnivorous dinosaurs. Go to this movie for a thoroughly mindless time, but please don't go into it with any expectations whatsoever.

Superman: If you're a Zack Snyder fanboy, this movie is emphatically not for you. But if, like me, you appreciate the humor that James Gunn brings to comic book movies and have a fondness for the original Guardians of the Galaxy, this movie will check a lot of your boxes. Written and directed by Gunn, this movie stars the very square-jawed and anodynely handsome David Corenswet as our titular hero, and Rachel Brosnahan as the intrepid Lois Lane, the journalist who works alongside his alter ego, Clark Kent, at the Daily Planet newspaper in Metropolis. This movie does a great job of not belaboring his origin story or their love story - the action picks up right in the middle of Superman suffering his first ever defeat at the hand of Lex Luthor (a brilliantly demented performance by Nicholas Hoult), and we then follow along to discover what's been going on in his life and fill in all the gaps in his biography along the way. It's a great "Show, not tell" script, and bypasses a lot of the tiresome tropes we can sometimes fall into when rebooting a superhero franchise for the umpteenth time.

There is a lot of plot, involving many cameos from weird fringes of the DC universe, so I won't get into all of that. The production design is beautiful and it genuinely is a very funny movie that has just the right amount of Superman earnestness that makes it feel wholesome without being impossibly corny. But like Guardians of the Galaxy, the lasting impact this movie will have on my memory involves the music. There is one action sequence set to a song I love that I would never have imagined would be in the background of a fight scene. And the end credits song is a perfect callback to a seemingly innocuous conversation between Superman and Lois halfway through the film, and makes me certain that Gunn first thinks about what songs he wants in a movie and then writes the entire script around how he's going to get those songs in. 

This movie is silly, fun, and perfectly captures the essence of Superman without being all gloom and doom about it. And while there has been a lot of talk about it being some sort of woke anti-Israel movie, I honestly felt like it was merely an anti-war movie that would apply to a war being fought in any era of modern history. If anything, this movie felt like more of a commentary on anti-immigration policies and ICE raids, with all the rhetoric of Superman being an alien who didn't deserve to be on our planet. So yeah, this movie can mean anything you want it to mean, but at the end of the day, it's simply a great comic book film that understood the assignment and fully delivered.