Rebirth has been no problem for the blockbuster franchise that Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park launched in 1993. The first two sequels may have had diminishing returns, but genetically engineered dinosaurs rampaged again with a vengeance in 2015’s Jurassic World, set 22 years after the original.
Follow-up Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom left the theme park setting for gothic mansion territory, while Jurassic World: Dominion explored what might happen if dinosaurs escaped containment and overran the Earth. The seventh installment, Jurassic World: Rebirth, brings on board director Gareth Edwards, who helmed the 2014 Godzilla reboot. It earned $147.3 million over the holiday week, according to Variety, so don’t expect dino thrillers to go extinct anytime soon.
The deal
Luckily for humanity, the Anthropocene climate turned out to be unfriendly to the revived dinosaurs. Most of them have retreated to a belt around the equator, which we’ve graciously abandoned to them. For Homo sapiens, familiarity with prehistoric reptiles seems to have bred contempt; paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) laments the low attendance at his dinosaur exhibits.
But Big Pharma still has uses for dinosaurs. An executive (Rupert Friend) hopes to pillage them for samples that could unlock a revolutionary treatment for heart disease. He enlists Henry and mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) to accompany him to an island dino stronghold via a boat captained by Zora’s old friend (Mahershala Ali).
Before they even reach the island, the crew rescues a family fresh from a close call with an aquatic Mosasaurus. A divorced dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters (Audrina Miranda and Luna Blaise), and the older girl’s deadbeat stoner boyfriend (David Iacono) find themselves stranded on the island, too.
While the scientists and mercenaries race to gather samples, the regular folks just try to stay alive. Once used as a lab by InGen, the company that revived the dinosaurs, the island is home to giant mutants. And they’re hungry.
Will you like it?
Scripted by David Koepp, who wrote the original Jurassic Park, Jurassic World: Rebirth plays like a greatest hits reel. We’re back to the original formula, more or less: A motley group of people on an island, including a cherubic child, pits their wits and tech against prehistoric predators. There’s a benign, “feel the wonder” encounter with two herbivorous Titanosaurus and a terrifying open-air chase by a Tyrannosaurus rex. A tense stalking episode inside the ruined lab complex recalls the kitchen scene in the original film, with the fictional Mutadon standing in for Velociraptor.
Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcolm isn’t around to be the mouthpiece for the theme of human hubris, so Bailey takes over, monologizing about the folly of expecting our big brains to win the evolutionary race. This year it feels especially relevant, somehow, and Koepp injects a hint of climate consciousness.
That’s about as deep as things get, though. In old-school action-movie fashion, Koepp gives each major character a token backstory and arc, but there are so many characters that it’s hard to care. The two central plot threads — hard-edged mercenary redemption saga and heartwarming family adventure — never gel in any satisfying way.
Instead, the movie feels like a cynical effort to cater to multiple demographics. It lurches from bloodshed to aww-inducing scenes of the little girl bonding with a lapdog-like Aquilops, with the strongest thread of continuity being product placement. (Altoids star in two scenes, a Snickers bar in one.) But at least we can all join in cheering on the demise of Friend’s pharmaceutical exec, who telegraphs his evil nature with a gusto reminiscent of Paul Reiser in Aliens.
Who cares about characters, though? You want theme park-style thrills, and Edwards delivers fairly well on that promise. The T. rex chase is a nail-biter, as is a sequence in which the mercenaries rappel down a 500-foot cliff to steal a sample from the nest of a long-beaked Quetzalcoatlus. The tension is real, as long as you don’t mind that the creatures and many of the environments obviously aren’t.
The deep-down fear, though? The primal dread of becoming prey? That’s long gone. In the first Jurassic Park, Spielberg strategically rationed the dinosaurs’ screen time, and each footfall of the T. rex landed with an enormous thud we could feel in our bones. Edwards manages to create a sense of scale and scope in some scenes, but his T. rex looks and sounds like just another animation.
Each Jurassic World movie has striven to produce a scarier monster than the last one — in this case, the hideous mutant Distortus rex — while blaming the escalation on greedy corporations. But each mutant simply carries the franchise further from its roots, making it less distinguishable from other giant monster movies. The thrills are still there, but the wonder is waning.
If you like this, try…
Jurassic Park (1993; Peacock, rentable): Rebirth tries but fails to recapture the terror of Spielberg’s original, which holds up just fine after decades.
Jurassic World: Dominion (2022; Peacock, rentable): Former Vermont resident Colin Trevorrow directed the preceding entry. Like Jurassic World (also directed by Trevorrow) and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, it stars Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, with this episode reuniting Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Goldblum from the original cast.
Monsters (2010; Disney+, Hulu, rentable): Edwards started his career in the world of visual effects. Before getting the Godzilla gig, he proved his giant-monster bona fides by making this ingenious low-budget film about an alien incursion, which doubles as an all-too-timely immigration metaphor.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Jurassic World: Rebirth 2”
This article appears in The Cartoon Issue 2025.
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