This time last year, I would’ve bet good money that this movie wasn’t coming out when it was promised.
Jurassic World: Rebirth was announced with a July 2025 release date, and it wasn’t announced until January 2024. That’s insanity. On paper, there’s no possible way a Jurassic Park movie — with the volume and quality of VFX worthy of the brand name — could be cranked out in a year and a half. Yet the release date was set (possibly to plug the gap left by the concluding Fast & Furious movie, which remains in extended and oft-delayed development as of this typing), so here we are.
(Side note: Jurassic World: Rebirth was first announced in January 2024 and made on a reported budget of $180 million. To compare with another movie out right now, F1 was first announced in December 2021 and made with a budget somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 million.)
But then a month after the first announcement, the producers went and did what might’ve been the smartest thing they’ve done with this franchise in the past twenty years: They hired Gareth Edwards.
Edwards is a highly accomplished sci-fi filmmaker, previously responsible for making the best Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi and managing the impossible task of an American Godzilla movie that doesn’t suck. More to the point, with The Creator, Edwards pioneered the concept of locking down the edit before starting work on VFX. This saved on so much time and money that might’ve otherwise gone to effects shots that got left on the cutting room floor. As an approach for coming in on time and under-budget under these outrageous circumstances, that’s pretty much the only way they could’ve gone.
Even better, Edwards gave this franchise something it desperately needed: A theme that makes sense.
At its heart and core, the Jurassic Park movies are all about how humanity shouldn’t meddle with nature and bring back dinosaurs. But the entire franchise is all about showing us dinosaurs. We the audience want to see the dinosaurs, the filmmakers clearly want us to see the dinosaurs, but the characters themselves keep talking about how bringing back dinosaurs is wrong. It doesn’t make sense.
More to the point, this whole franchise is about the greed and hubris of mankind. Every single film features some kind of four-color corporate asshole who’s proud and greedy and stupid enough to think that he can control the dinosaurs and make billions of dollars in the process, right up until the error of his ways gets him brutally slain for our enjoyment. At the same time, this very franchise is shepherded by producers and studio execs who keep rendering CGI dinos and cranking out movies so they can rake in more cash. Hell, Jurassic Park/World itself is clearly and repeatedly shown to be a fatally terrible idea for a theme park, yet the franchise has been adapted to real-world theme park attractions on a continuous basis for over three decades. The franchise actively subverts its own anti-capitalist themes with each new entry. It doesn’t make sense.
A cornerstone of the last trilogy was humankind’s apathy towards dinos. Familiarity breeds contempt, we’ve all seen the dinosaurs, and now we’re over them. That might’ve been a valid idea at the time of Jurassic World, when the series was coming off a 14-year hiatus and it was uncertain whether anyone would care anymore. But after another three films and another three billion-dollar grosses (even despite the critical lashings), it’s been thoroughly proven that people will likely never get tired of paying money to see dinosaurs. The fatigue the filmmakers are talking about simply doesn’t exist. It doesn’t make sense.
Oh, and let’s not forget Jurassic World: Dominion, which introduced the concept of dinosaurs as a metaphor for endangered species. Even though this whole damn franchise is built on the premise of reviving species that have been extinct for upwards of 65 million years, which means that endangered/extinct species shouldn’t be a thing in this setting. It doesn’t make sense.
Regrettably and unavoidably, all of the above themes are still factors in this latest movie. But there’s also something new: Dinosaurs as a metaphor for the raw power of nature. Remember, a whole ‘nother megafranchise was built on the concept of how small and ignorant humankind really is in the grand scheme of things, and that all started with Edwards and what he brought to Godzilla (2014). Taking a similar theme and swapping out one giant reptile for dozens of slightly smaller reptiles, swap out humanity’s military fixation with our corporate fixation, and putting it all in the context of a Jurassic Park movie, that makes a lot of sense.
Anyway, what’s the story? Well, it turns out that the premise of Jurassic World: Dominion was short-lived, as the planet’s ecosystem has changed too much in 65 million years to keep dinosaurs alive in large numbers and in the long term. As a direct result, the dinos have all pretty much gone re-extinct outside of some especially tropical pockets near the equator. And the nations of the world all came together and collectively agreed that no human being should ever set foot anywhere in these habitable zones.
Enter Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), our transparently evil corporate asshole for the movie. He’s on a mission to make trillions of dollars with a new heart disease medication, potentially solving the number one cause of human death. His proposed solution is to acquire and study the genetic material of the three largest dinosaurs (because they have the largest and most powerful hearts, you see) of land, sea, and air. Respectively, those would be the Titanosaurus, the Mosasaurus, and the Quetzalcoatlus. Thus we have a plot-driven solution for why our characters would deliberately put themselves on a collision course with the biggest and most dangerous animals the world has ever seen.
Incidentally, they’re headed to Ile Saint-Hubert, home of a laboratory where inGen kept their failed and rejected experiments in genetic mutation. Yes, we’ve got another abandoned laboratory retconned into the franchise, as if Isla Sorna wasn’t bad enough. The timeline is a bit unclear as to how long this particular laboratory was running, but we know it shut down a few years into the Jurassic World era, so at least it’s not a total retread of Site B from Jurassic Park II. But I digress.
Scarlett Johansson plays Zora Bennett, a military covert operative who agrees to lead the mission so she can make enough money to retire for good. However — because ScarJo is playing her and the character is visibly exhausted by her life as a mercenary — Zora doesn’t get to be the militaristic asshole who tries to solve everything by shooting at the dinosaurs (because of course there has to be one in a Jurassic Park movie). That job falls to Bobby Atwater, played with macho dickishness as only Ed Skrein could deliver.
Mahershala Ali is on hand to play Duncan Kincaid, an old war buddy of Zora’s. He’s now a smuggler who agrees to captain a boat that will get our team on and off the island. Duncan brings along three or four deckhands whom I won’t even list because they all quite obviously exist for the sole purpose of getting killed off so our leads are never in any real danger of dying.
And then we have Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), the resident paleontologist, formerly a student of Dr. Alan Grant himself. Here we have some bookish guy who runs a museum that’s getting shut down because people have lost interest in dinosaurs (see above for my earlier comment on that particular theme). Henry more or less serves as the moral voice of the film, advocating for nature and railing against corporate greed and so on.
(Side note: Bailey also played as a guest clarinetist on the score. He even got a sweet clarinet solo to accompany a pivotal moment for his character in the film.)
But wait! There’s more!
Because this is a Jurassic Park movie, we need one or two kids to get thrown into the mix. Enter Teresa and Isabella Delgado (respectively played by Luna Blaise and Audrina Miranda), two sisters on a boating trip with their father (Reuben, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and Teresa’s stoner comic relief boyfriend (Xavier, played by David Iacono). The four of them get shipwrecked by a Mosasaurus before getting rescued by our principal team, and then proceed to get terrorized by dinosaurs through the rest of the runtime.
Most notably, it’s the Delgado family who gets the obligatory action scene versus a T-Rex, and I must admit it was a rather clever chase scene in conception and execution. And I’d be remiss not to mention Delores, a cute little Aquilops that Isabella adopts for no other purpose than to be a merchandisable pet. I can appreciate this family unit granting some much-needed heart and comic relief to the film. Especially since Xavier actually gets a development arc and he doesn’t stay a totally worthless waste of space throughout the whole movie, that was nice.
It’s really quite impressive how much thought and care was put into the production design, especially considering how little time the filmmakers had to work with. But that Quetzalcoatlus sequence got stuck in my craw for one simple reason: It’s set in what’s clearly a temple. There are stone carvings everywhere. There are carved steps. This was clearly a man-made cave built halfway up into a sheer vertical cliff hundreds of feet above ground. And there’s no other sign of any other prehistoric human life on this island. I have so many questions, and the film explicitly denies any kind of answers.
Otherwise, Jurassic World: Rebirth is a Jurassic Park movie. The effects are phenomenal, the kills are bloodless, the bad guys die, the good guys survive, you know what you’re getting. Even with the additional “man versus nature” theme, this remains a work of braindead cinematic junk food, built for maximum flavor and ease of consumption. This is by no means a revolutionary masterpiece on par with the first movie (Then again, what is?), but I can appreciate a stripped-down movie with a straightforward island adventure, without bringing in the massive worldwide scope or sprawling lore of the previous five movies.
(Side note: I watched this movie with a crowd that made a point of audibly reacting to everything happening onscreen, pointing out where the dinosaurs were, who was going to get killed off, which characters couldn’t be trusted, and so on. Never underestimate how many simpletons are out there who talk and act and think as if they’ve never seen a movie before.)
Seriously, if this means retiring the Grady/Dearing pair and leaving the Grant/Sattler/Malcolm trinity to their happily ever afters, GOOD.
I like this direction for a second soft reboot, but none of this addresses the thematic hypocrisies that will continue to undercut this franchise for as long as the films continue. This is definitely a franchise that always made more sense as a collection of standalone films, rather than an ongoing series. As such, if you’re looking to have fun for a couple of forgettable hours, this is a good one to watch. See it as a double feature with F1 if you really want to turn your brain off and soak in the adrenaline for a day.