Summary
Big on spectacle but low on fresh ideas, Jurassic World Rebirth marks a technically solid but creatively tired return to the franchise’s dino-fuelled cycle of diminishing wonder.
If pop is going to eat itself anyway, the latest Jurassic World film takes a dino-sized bite out of the idea. The seventh entry in the Jurassic Park franchise is a soft reboot of the Jurassic World trilogy, which was itself a soft reboot of the original three films. How else could you explain humans making the same mistakes over and over?
JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH picks up five years after the events of Jurassic World: Dominion, which left dinosaurs and humans in uneasy coexistence alongside the combined casts of both trilogies. That peace didn’t last. The familiar faces have stepped aside, and Earth is now mostly uninhabitable for dinosaurs. The few remaining creatures have been reduced from wonders to nuisances.
Enter mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), leading a small team — including a boat captain (Mahershala Ali), a paleontologist (Jonathan Bailey), and a company man (Rupert Friend) — to an island in search of genetic samples. On the way, they encounter a shipwrecked father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his family, along with horribly mutated dinosaurs. Cue the oohs, the ahhs, and later, the running and the screaming.
In Gareth Edwards’s film, the world has lost its sense of wonder in dinosaurs, and it’s hard not to feel that he and returning screenwriter David Koepp are also talking about audiences themselves. There are few thematic or visual surprises left in this series, where the line between tech demo and roller coaster has always been blurry. Edwards is no stranger to revitalising familiar franchises, having left his mark on Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. To his credit, there’s minimal forced nostalgia here, but there is a heavy sense of history repeating.
Which makes it all the more perplexing how long the film, much like this review, takes to get where it’s going. Most of the first hour is spent simply reaching the island, including an overlong bit with Bailey chewing an Altoid. There are genuinely thrilling sequences of undersea monsters attacking boats, where Edwards channels the restrained style of Monsters, revealing the creatures sparingly until the moment lands hardest.
Once the crew reaches the island, an experimental facility reminiscent of Koepp’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the film settles into more familiar beats. There are solid setpieces, including a rampaging Rex on river rapids and an abseiling sequence that defies logic and gravity, but it rarely strays off the rails. Alexandre Desplat’s score leans heavily on John Williams in these moments, and there’s even a flare-distracting-a-titan scene that suggests a bit of nostalgia creeping in after all.
As JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH sails off into the sunset, there’s a frustrating sense of what could have been. A stacked cast and a reliable premise become just more grist for the franchise mill, an imitator of its own legacy. What was once an eyes-up, jaws-down thrill ride is now simply another monster flick. “It’s a sin to kill a dinosaur,” argues Bailey’s paleontologist early in the film. That might be true: but perhaps, at this point, we should let them rest for a while.
2025 | USA | DIRECTOR: Gareth Edwards | WRITERS: David Koepp | CAST: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Ed Skrein | DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures | RUNNING TIME: 133 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 2 July 2025 (USA), 3 July 2025 (Australia)