There’s a line in the first act of Jurassic World Rebirth that threatens to tank the whole exercise. Paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) is hosting mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and pharmaceutical businessman Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) at his shuttering dinosaur museum. Their mission? Go to an uninhabited island full of wild dinosaurs, extract blood from three of the biggest creatures, and bring it back so that Big Pharma can make cutting-edge, life-saving, incredibly profitable heart medicine. But Henry didn’t realize he’d be advising on the task in person, and refuses to set foot on the island. “Ever see a dinosaur in the wild?” asks Martin, which stops Henry in his tracks.
Martin has to qualify that he doesn’t mean dinosaurs at a zoo or in academia, because the past 10 years of Jurassic World have brought back dinosaurs in a fully-functioning amusement park, set them free from captivity, and let them roam undomesticated across the world. In terms of tempting wonder, it’s a massive compromise from the eye-popping, giddy, tearful reception the dinos received in 1993 (Alan Grant falls to the ground, for Christ’s sake!) and it reveals the core issue with Jurassic World Rebirth. Humans have meddled too much in the sandbox of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, and evoking the first film’s blend of earnestness and cynicism requires navigating all the interceding guff that has polluted its appeal.
Don’t worry about those, Jurassic World Rebirth says via Martin Krebs, this is the real deal. But despite being the most technically adept Jurassic film since 2001—delivering many dino skirmishes, a competent understanding of action editing and pacing, and no locusts to speak of—Rebirth never escapes its own production backstory: a swiftly assembled brand correction steered by competent hired hands. The Jurassic franchise has continued to harm its reputation with baffling choices and tired retreads, and the seventh entry gets a moderate stamp of approval only if one agrees that it’s the last one.
Rebirth begins well. Seventeen years ago, everything went awry on Ile Saint-Hubert, the island where the Jurassic World dinosaurs were genetically engineered. Director Gareth Edwards—the Rogue One and Godzilla filmmaker who knows how blockbusters should be lit and composed, if nothing else—gives audiences a scintillating kill to whet our appetite: A scientist clad in a crisp white Andromeda Strain-style suit is trapped behind a heavy blast door, which is the third time the director has pulled this trick in his five-film career, although it’s the first time the victim has died at the hands of a dinosaur.
After jumping to the present, Rebirth takes its time, assembling its team with an unwarranted patience that will have audiences wondering, “When are they going to get to the dinosaur island?” That Rebirth is the second-longest Jurassic film should raise some eyebrows; only once the characters wash ashore on Saint-Hubert, about an hour into the film, does the subsequent survival adventure enliven the story. The weak, obvious, and oversnarked characterization courtesy of screenwriter David Koepp (who previously wrote the first two Spielberg-directed films) sabotages several actors’ chances of giving a good performance—Jonathan Bailey and Rupert Friend just about clear this bar, but Scarlett Johansson is helpless as a smug and sarcastic antiheroine. Granted, the characters become far less grating in the face of immediate danger; the ensemble does a good job of channeling urgent, quick-thinking heroics in the face of dino-doom.
A twist in the tale is that Jurassic World Rebirth has two storylines. The A-list cast embarks on their fetch quest to sample blood from dinosaurs of sea, land, and air, while single dad Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) leads a yacht trip with his two daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), along with Teresa’s irksome, layabout boyfriend Xavier (David Iacano). They are rescued from capsizing by sea captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and inadvertently brought to Saint-Hubert’s shores. Even though the family drama suffers from the same repetitive, cloying simplicity as Zora and Henry’s predictable ethical conflict (are they okay with giving miracle medicine to greedy pharmaceutical conglomerates?), Rebirth alleviates some of its troubles by cutting between its two undercooked storylines.
Neither of these arcs are convincing on their own terms, but Rebirth‘s structure forces the film to highlight only the most watchable bits. The best stretches of Rebirth amount to back-to-back suspense and survival scenes from those alternatively seeking treasure and safety. The T-Rex—the alleged king of the dinosaurs whose dominance has been diminished since one ran amok through San Diego in the The Lost World—features in Rebirth‘s most exciting and well-designed action scene, where Reuben’s family tries to escape on an inflatable raft without arousing the attention of a sleeping Rex. It’s a moment lifted from Crichton’s original novel, and Edwards lends an edge-of-your-seat aggression to the creature’s animal instincts, playing precisely with perspective and geography and never letting the audience think they’re safe for longer than a moment. Paired with a raid on a Quetzalcoatlus nest in a cliffside temple, Rebirth proves it can deliver on pulse-quickening monster action in a classic adventure movie mold.
But 2025 may just be too late to inspire excitement for photorealistic, expertly animated monster carnage. In the past decade, how many fearsome creatures have been deployed by the Avatar movies, the MonsterVerse, and a whole trilogy of Jurassic World films? When Jurassic World Rebirth reveals the identity of the dangerous experimental dinosaur that triggered an island-wide evacuation, one’s first mental association is Alien: Resurrection—and therefore, last year’s brand-exploiting Alien: Romulus—the wonderment promised by the film’s throwback, legacy-honoring tone dwindles, and cynicism takes hold. Jurassic World Rebirth‘s attempt at rejuvenating its franchise mirrors the vitality of its once-extinct reptiles: This movie may have breathed life back where once it was thought lost, but this life is not pure or sustainable.
Director: Gareth Edwards
Writer: David Koepp
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ed Skrein
Release Date: July 2, 2025
