Jurassic World: Rebirth Review
Dinosaurs refuse to go extinct. I’ve been watching these movies for 32 years now and didn’t walk out of Jurassic World: Rebirth thinking the franchise is on its last legs. In fact, neither did most of the audience members who rushed to the local cinema’s first screening on opening day in the middle of a heat wave. There was applause once the credits rolled, and kids came out whistling the Jurassic Park theme.
After a long 14-year gap between the somewhat fun but completely hollow Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World, Universal Pictures and Amblin found themselves firmly back in business with prehistoric beasts and freshly made hybrids a decade ago. The last Colin Trevorrow-led Jurassic World trilogy was then developed over seven years, with steady diminishing returns and lower critic and audience scores each time. The thing is… even 2022’s Dominion – an intriguing but ultimately misguided mess of a capper – grossed $1 billion worldwide.
This is why we find ourselves watching another soft-reboot (the continuity and world state are preserved intact, as if trapped in amber) only three years after Trevorrow was done saying what he had to say with the Jurassic series and walked off into the sunset with his collaborators.
In Jurassic World: Rebirth, penned by original Jurassic Park and The Lost World scribe David Koepp over what I can guess were a couple of chill weekends, we hit the ground running at some point in the 2000s in yet another island where scientists are playing God ahead of Jurassic World’s (the park that actually worked for a while) opening. Some terrible mutant creature dubbed D-Rex breaks containment, and the entire operation is shut down.
Fast-forward to 2025, and dinosaurs (and other prehistoric species) cloned and bred by several companies after Fallen Kingdom and Dominion’s events have started to literally go extinct a second time. As many audience members correctly pointed out in the past, today’s Earth is quite different from the planet these creatures inhabited more than 65 million years ago, so nature is, much like the franchise’s producers, course-correcting.
That said, tropical environments, which are mostly found around the equator, still suit them just fine. Enter yet another money-hungry company looking to profit off of these animals. No one really cares about them anymore, though. The goal? To extract blood samples from the three largest prehistoric beasts currently alive in (and around) Ile Saint-Hubert in order to create a life-saving treatment for human heart diseases.
It might sound far-fetched, but it’s a solid, simple hook to get a new adventure going. Jurassic World: Rebirth doesn’t alter the status of the world beyond declaring things have partially reset, but there are nice touches, especially early on, that paint a world that’s just gotten used to (and over) dinosaurs and other ancient species. We have, however, Jonathan Bailey’s Dr. Henry Loomis injecting some childlike wonder into the human-dino interactions we get as the ragtag team of freelancers (and Rupert Friend’s bullish executive) gets to the big island.
As for the mutant dinos left behind, they’re little more than video game-y foes to avoid, and while I found the winged Mutadons to be poor stand-ins for Velociraptors, the Distortus Rex is an unholy kaiju-like abomination that director Gareth Edwards (of Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story fame) put to good use alongside the real dinosaurs and marine and aerial reptiles chomping on dumb humans with targets on their backs. The man knows how to make gigantic digital animals feel menacing and tangible, which is the main thing you want out of a Jurassic filmmaker if we’re being honest.
As commendable as Dominion’s early efforts to present the dinosaurs in an almost documentary-like fashion were, it’s been a good while since a Jurassic movie made such an attempt to present them as living and breathing animals moving and behaving like modern predators and plant-eaters. This, alongside the gorgeous natural locations where the movie was shot on film, puts some gravity back into the thrills and fun action sequences, which don’t stop coming after the sluggish first 20 minutes.
There’s delight (and even some decent scares) to be had with almost every human-prehistoric beast interaction in Jurassic World: Rebirth, and the long-lost ‘raft sequence’ inspired by Michael Crichton’s original novel makes the best use of the Tyrannosaurs Rex since Spielberg’s two adaptations; it’s essentially a bear waking from a nap and trying to grab a snack as it lumbers towards the stranded family (played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, and Audrina Miranda) who’s having the worst two days ever after sailing into the gigantic Mosasaurus and the main team’s top-secret mission.
Though many comparisons will be made to the Park movies (Koepp’s script is more in tune with those for sure), the most reasonable parallel for Jurassic World: Rebirth is 2017’s Kong: Skull Island, another island-trekking ‘let’s get from point A to B to C’ prehistoric adventure that was light on plot and characterization but got by just fine due to the solid craft behind and in front of the camera.
Sure, having Scarlett Johansson (Zora Bennett) and Mahershala Ali (Duncan Kincaid) around completing the leading trio adds weight (and even a few solid emotional beats) to the package, but it’s Edwards and Koepp’s commitment to the old-school ‘survival flick’ approach that carries Jurassic World: Rebirth to the finish line. Also effective is the work done by Godzilla‘s Alexandre Desplat on the original music, which fills the gaps between John Williams’ eternal themes. It’s a less playful score than Michael Giacchino’s efforts for the three previous movies, but it fits the more classical feel well enough.
Seven movies in, and even as a diehard fan of this ‘okay’ franchise, it seems reasonable (and necessary) to ask for bolder swings if Jurassic World isn’t going anywhere (early box office numbers suggest dinos continue to sell tickets). All these prehistoric bones could stand to have more meat on them. As divisive as J.A. Bayona’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (also co-written by Trevorrow) was, it pushed in a new direction that I was fascinated by and dared to break from restricting iconography. Nonetheless, we saw how a wordier, plot-heavy Jurassic turned out without enough oversight and a clear sense of direction in Dominion, which is why I don’t mind a ‘back to basics’ entry that restores some of the edge and genuine wonder lost along the way.
Jurassic World: Rebirth is now screening in theatres.
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