Dino-sour Rebirth of franchise more like a retread By: Alison Gillmor Posted: 2:00 AM CDT Friday, Jul. 4, 2025 Last Modified: 8:36 AM CDT Friday, Jul. 4, 2025 Updates

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As the Jurassic Park franchise has devolved from awesome to awful, it’s often pointed out that the movies themselves seem to follow the doomed paths of their characters.

Like the scientists so preoccupied with what they can do they don’t stop to think if they should, the studio keeps creating unnecessary sequels to Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original.

Like the corporate owners of the dinosaur parks trying to lure back jaded audiences with larger, toothier, genetically engineered monsters, the writers and directors keep making the action pointlessly bigger and noisier.

Like the experts who ought to know better but return to the island because they can’t resist that InGen money, the stars keep reprising their roles purely for the paycheques.

With the word “rebirth” right there in the title, this seventh Jurassic movie feels like a conscious self-correction after some really dire entries. And, thankfully, the charisma-free pairing of Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard has disappeared and the convoluted dinosaurs-among-us plots have gone extinct.

Director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, the 2014 Godzilla) is new, and he’s a confident craftsman who knows how to execute big — like, really big — set pieces. The dinosaur sequences are always competent and occasionally thrilling.

Fans of the original novel will be happy to finally get a well-constructed T-Rex river-raft scene.

The human beings, unfortunately, fare less well.

Scripter David Koepp, who co-wrote the first film with author Michael Crichton, is back, but he’s not exactly on form, and the characters and their emotional backstories are flat, predictable and perfunctory.

By the end, Jurassic World Rebirth feels like a barely fleshed-out Universal theme-park ride — sort of fun and completely forgettable.

The story opens by making it clear that the dinosaurs that have made their way into our world are mostly dying out, unsuited to our 21st-century environmental conditions. Humans are now so blasé about the creatures that a sickly brachiosaurus that’s somehow got loose in downtown Manhattan is just another reason for New Yorkers to complain about the traffic.

Dinosaurs in the wild survive only in a band of islands around the equator where people are forbidden to travel. Pharmaceutical exec Martin Krebs (The Phoenician Scheme’s Rupert Friend) doesn’t care about the rules, though: he’s planning an illegal but lucrative expedition to Ile Saint-Hubert, home to the dinosaur mutations that were too hideous or dangerous to make it to the Isla Nublar park.

Krebs wants blood samples from a Titanosaurus, a Mosasaurus and a Quetzalcoatl (and, yes, as junior dinosaur scientists will point out, technically these last two are not dinosaurs but dino-adjacent prehistoric animals). Their genetic material will be used to make a drug that prevents heart disease.

Krebs hires Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson, also recently seen in The Phoenician Scheme), who is said to be “untroubled by legal or ethical complications.” Basically, she’s a mercenary, though she prefers the term “situational security reaction” specialist. Zora teams with an old colleague, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali of Moonlight).

Krebs also brings on a mission scientist, Dr. Henry Loomis (Wicked’s Jonathan Bailey), who’s running a dinosaur museum that has just been mothballed because of lack of public interest. He wears glasses and says things like “intelligence is overrated as an adaptive trait.”

Finally, there’s a separate group. Loving father Reuben Delgado (The Lincoln Lawyer’s Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is inexplicably taking daughters Teresa and Isabella (Luna Blaise and Audrina Miranda), along with Teresa’s slacker boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono), on a small boat through seas known to teem with Mosasaurs, just to fulfil the Jurassic franchise requirement for a child-in-jeopardy subplot.

They all end up on the island together and while these characters aren’t actively offputting, they don’t make much of an impression. This is a talented cast with nothing much to do except run and shout.

Zora is dealing with PTSD from a mission gone wrong and guilt about her mother, who died of heart disease. Duncan is haunted by a personal tragedy. The Delgado family is working through some stuff — dad needs to loosen up and Xavier needs to man up. These motivations are outlined in a box-ticking kind of way but barely followed through.

Meanwhile, there’s the assignment to collect samples from one flying, one swimming and one land-based creature, which gives a Pokémon-like simplicity to the action-adventure plot. After some needlessly complicated Jurassic storylines, this may be refreshing, but it rarely feels original.

Koepp makes an early reference to the “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear” joke from Jurassic Park, but ensuing echoes are not so much clever callbacks as tired retreads.

There are mutated dinos hunting humans in a big room with rows of metal shelving. There is a large scary dinosaur about to eat someone and then at the last moment being itself eaten by a larger, scarier dinosaur.

In Jurassic terms, Krebs has total “lawyer on the toilet” vibes. Henry, who has studied under the original movie’s Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), is given a moment of pure wonder at the sight of a dinosaur herd that is nicely acted but still feels like a pale reiteration of his mentor’s.

Jurassic World Rebirth isn’t egregiously awful, then, but it is creatively underwhelming.

It seems to be roaring at the box office, though, meaning that this instalment’s cautionary tale warning, which warns that people should matter more than profits, probably isn’t going to reach studio executives any more than the franchise’s earlier lessons.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca