“I can guarantee your safety, more or less.”
Jurassic World Rebirth? More like Jurassic World Stillbirth. This is one of the worst major studio movies this reviewer has seen in a very long time. Rebirth feels like someone filmed a read-through of a first draft. Universal keeps making the same film over and over again. Steven Spielberg’s 1993 movie was magical; The picture quality is declining and diminishing with each worn out reproduction, like a copy of a faded photograph. Here, the jokes fall flat. The dialogue is horrid. There aren’t enough Redshirts along for the MacGuffin-expedition that the plot revolves around, so the film awkwardly shoehorns a family into the story. Can’t have a Jurassic movie without screaming children mere moments away from being dinosaur fodder. Side characters get (literally) chewed up in seconds (“Bobby, noooooo!”), but the principals are protected by plot armor that gets more preposterous the longer the picture runs. An absurd, silly farce. Director Gareth Edwards makes ScarJo, an award-winning actress, look like an amateur. This reviewer didn’t think that was possible. A third of the way in, instead of laughing along with the picture, the audience was laughing at the picture.
“She has a backup plan?”
“She doesn’t get out of bed without a backup plan.”
Jurassic World Rebirth is a 2025 Universal Pictures feature directed by Gareth Edwards from a story by David Koepp. It is a sequel to 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion. Scarlett Johansson leads an ensemble cast including Mahershala Ali, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Jonathan Bailey, Luna Blaise, Audrina Miranda, Rupert Friend, David Iacono, and Ed Skrein.
“Let’s stay alive and get rich this time!”
Thirty-two years after InGen loses control at the Jurassic Park, interest in their creations has waned. The de-extinct creatures have found that a narrow, O2-rich band around the equator is comfortable for them and flock there in large numbers. The world governments have made the region a No-Man’s Zone, where travel is forbidden.
Zora Bennett (Johansson) is a freelance Situational Security and Reaction agent who is recruited by Martin Krebs (Friend), a representative of ParkerGenix, a multinational pharmaceutical firm. She is to protect Dr. Henry Loomis (Bailey) as he travels to the restricted dinosaur zone to collect hemoglobin from three of the largest dinosaurs remaining. He must draw blood from the giant pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus, sauropod Titanosaurus and Mosasaurus, an immense, carnivorous, ocean-going organism, using a device of his own invention.
The biomatter Dr. Loomis requires is for a treatment that ParkerGenix is developing to extend functional human life twenty or thirty years, if a patient can afford the procedure.
They travel to the zone where Zora meets up with her associate, Duncan Kincaid (Ali), captain of a snazzy, sophisticated speedboat loaded with a surveillance suite and advanced sonar. His crew gets underway swiftly, heading out to sea.
Miles away, the Delgado family is making good time on a wooden sailboat on a course through thoroughly dinosaur-infested waters towards America. Reuben (Garcia-Rulfo) is an experienced sailor and has trained his children, Teresa (Blaise) and Isabella (Miranda) well. However, they are also traveling with Xavier (Iacono), Teresa’s lazy, teenage boyfriend, who is irritating Reuben in the worst way. Suddenly, there is an impact below; Teresa sees the sails of a pod of surly Spinosaurus as they attack. Something big bumps them and staves in the side of the ship. Taking on water, the vessel capsizes, and Reuben is forced to send a distress signal.
Over the objections of Krebs and one of Zora’s men, Bobby (Skrein), Kincaid heels the ship over as he changes course to intercept the sinking sailboat. When they are safely on-board, the Delgados and Xavier are horrified to learn that the team intends to land on an island that once held an InGen research lab where dinosaur chimeras were created to revive the public’s flagging interest in the creatures along with any remaining military applications.
In a stunning sequence, their ship chases down the massive Mosasaurus. Strapped to the bow, Zora prepares to take the shot. It gives them the stink-eye before they’re able to pull the fluids they need and then they piss it off. It begins to pursue them. As the Spinosaurs suddenly converge on their ship, the team realizes the creatures are working in concert. Kincaid has nowhere to go but steer into the shallows. Teresa falls overboard during the melee, and the Delgados jump ship after Xavier dives in to rescue her. Zora gathers supplies as her crew is being overwhelmed.
Can Kincaid get the ship to shore and continue the mission? Can Bennett sneak her people through an island teeming with dinosaurs? Can they link up with the Delgados and make it to the InGen facility safely, where escape from the island may be found? Please watch Jurassic Park Rebirth to find out.
“She’s hysterical!”
“I’m not hysterical, I’m homicidal!”
The tropical locations are exquisite. The scene where they draw blood from the Mosasaurus is engrossing. The script does have a few things going for it, but it really needs to be further rendered. There are the outlines of the bare bones of ideas that could work: The lawless archipelago Kinkaid berths his ship at could be a hub of countless tales. The relationship between Bennett and Kinkaid needed more meat. Their history, his boat, his crew, it’s all broad-brush strokes with no detail, nothing fleshing it out. These people are sketches barely roughed in.
Jurassic World Rebirth is a bad movie. The MacGuffin plot is mundane. The dialogue is forced. The music is derivative and would be nothing to write home about without the heavy reliance on John Williams’ original score, which they keep going back to.
Jurassic World Rebirth gives away the big bad on the movie poster and clumsily telegraphs the major new goon threat, an airborne, winged “Mutadon-Raptor”. When one initially appears, it makes swift work of a pack of the same type of velociraptors that proved so formidable in the earlier films. It’s an ungainly, symbolic moment attempting to pass the torch to the tougher, mutant enemy. They aren’t more fearsome, though, and seem much easier to fool in the climactic moments than the canny raptors in the earlier films. The gore resulting from their attacks is largely kept off-screen.
That threat of those hybrid, mutant dinosaurs lies largely on the wayside until what’s left of Bennett’s team and the Delgados converge at the InGen facility, hoping to use the helipad to effect an escape. Suddenly, Edwards transforms his movie into a pale pastiche of the 1986 James Cameron film, Aliens, including a near shot-for-shot recreation of the Marines’ escape through the air-vent system. Earlier in the film, Krebs is also put on the spot as a cowardly, corporate, Carter Burke-type when he doesn’t even try to save Teresa from sliding overboard.
Edwards works in the “baby dino-buddy” trope for the kid, like Isabella is in an eighties Saturday morning cartoon.
In a movie with dialogue that pokes so hard on-the-nose a viewer could leave bruised, several characters talk about how interest in the “engineered entertainment” of their dinosaurs (and Jurassic Park/World movies) has dwindled, with Rebirth an (unfortunate) attempt to rekindle interest in the genre.
Once beached, the remaining crew unloads all sorts of emergency equipment, but of course, like in every other film in the series, no large guns, no grenade launchers, no flamethrowers, no RPGs, no MANPADs, nothing one would expect to seriously ruin a dinosaurs’ day.
There are also not nearly enough dinosaurs in the movie. Like, a paucity of dinosaurs even, on an island the audience is told is teeming with them. Where one would expect to be beset by a plague of dinosaurs, and yet, once the crew reaches the island proper, nary but a few appear.
The obligatory Tyrannosaurus scene has been reduced to an overlong joke, which might be Edwards telling on himself. But other than that, once they’re on the island, only a few Velociraptors, three or four Mutadon-raptors, an Ankylosaurus, the Quetzalcoatlus, the herd of Titanosaurus and dropping in for the last reel, the (absurdly big) Big Bad they call a Distortus Rex are in the film. That’s not a whole hell of a lot for an island alleged to have dinosaurs running amok for over thirty years in one of the very few environments on the planet that they can thrive.
“Holy lack of quality-control, Batman!” Jurassic Park Rebirth is a flaming train wreck. See it if that sort of thing appeals to you, if you’re a masochist or a ScarJo super-fan, but otherwise save your money and seek out a new or more innovative franchise.
Jurassic Park Rebirth is in theatres 7/2/2025
Jurassic Park Rebirth is based on the works of Michael Crichton.
Anthony Andujar Jr.