More than 30 years after the original Jurassic Park, an extinct sequence from Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel is resurrected in Jurassic World Rebirth. When the Delgados — patriarch Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) — are capsized by a Mosasaur and wash ashore on the island of Ile Saint-Hubert, the shipwrecked civilians must make the trek to a village complex to find help.
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While following geothermal piping leading to the village, the Delgados are forced to cross a river on an inflatable raft while pursued down the raging waters by a Tyrannosaurus rex. It’s a sequence pulled from the Jurassic Park novel, in which it’s paleontologist Alan Grant who must survive a T-rex in the rapids with Tim and Lex — who can’t swim, as it turns out — while their river raft precariously heads toward a waterfall.
The Steven Spielberg-directed 1993 movie planned to adapt the novel’s T.rex river raft scene in which Lex nearly drowns after narrowly escaping the jaws of the animal, her life vest dangling from its teeth as the trio escape downstream. But David Koepp, who wrote Jurassic Park and Jurassic World Rebirth, told Entertainment Weekly that the scene was cut due to limitations with the first film’s computer-generated and animatronic dinosaurs.
“It was 1992 and nobody knew if the CGI was going to work, much less be able to make a dinosaur swim,” Koepp explained. “It was already expensive enough and with unproven technology, so it didn’t work. Water was still, in ’92, a big challenge. As you can see, it’s not anymore.”
Even with three decades of advancements in VFX, the T.rex river scene was “especially complicated,” visual effects producer Carlos Ciudad says in special feature “Rex in the Rapids,” included on Jurassic World Rebirth‘s digital release. Because Rebirth filmed in Thailand, Malta, and the UK, “We had to shoot this sequence in three parts. Everything needed to look seamless.”
Since “Rexy” — the original T.rex who terrorized Alan Grant (Sam Neill), Lex (Ariana Richards), and Tim (Joseph Mazzello) in Jurassic Park before stomping into all three Jurassic World movies — retired to a sanctuary in 2022’s Dominion, the filmmakers redesigned the iconic dinosaur to match its grounds on Ile Saint-Hubert. ILM dubbed the grey and brown-skinned T.rex “Ember.”
Supervised by director Gareth Edwards, the visual effects team “tweaked” the design from the original Jurassic Park. “The flexibility we have here is that it’s not the T.rex that we’ve seen in all of the other Jurassic films,” says visual effects supervisor David Vickery. Adds Edwards, “Ours has got more of the eyebrows and the scales around the teeth, some of the shapes [are] just a bit more simplistic, a bit more classical, prior to Jurassic, how they thought dinosaurs looked.”
While the T.rex‘s look was altered, its deafening roar had to go unchanged. “The T.rex can’t sound entirely different,” notes supervising sound editor and sound designer Tim Nielsen. “It’s one of the most iconic dinosaur sounds ever created. I went back to some of the original source recordings [from Jurassic Park], but there’s an opportunity there to look for new material to make it work with the new actions that it’s going to perform.”
Actions like swimming, a feat that Rexy couldn’t quite perform in 1993’s Jurassic Park. “We’ve never done a swimming T.rex on Jurassic,” adds Vickery, who served as a VFX supervisor on Fallen Kingdom and Dominion. “That’s super exciting. There’s a lot of science through as to how it might have swam, the body position it’s going to be in, the mechanics of how that would work.”
CG supervisor Mark Pascoe paid attention to how the T.rex would interact in water after the rain-drenched Jeep sequence from the first movie. “When you’ve got something the size of a T.rex disturbing that water, you’ve really got to make sure that you get the subtle nuances of water to sell something of that size and that scale,” he explains. Vickery then pointed out that Rebirth‘s T.rex is “a sort of heavier, more masculine, bull-like T.rex,” not unlike the Bull T-Rex toy from 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
“It’s got more muscle, it’s got a little bit more fat on it as well,” Vickery says. “When you see this thing actually churning and plowing through the water, this idea of power and energy is really conveyed by the way the white water is being thrown up.”
Jurassic World Rebirth is now available to rent or own on digital.
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