Jurrassic World Rebirth
None of what you will watch is good.
I take it back. F1: The Movie isn’t the most insulting movie to anyone with a brain cell. That honour(?) has been forcibly wrestled away by Jurassic World Rebirth, almost certainly the most pointless and cynical movie to come out in 2025.
Moviegoing culture has hit a point where remakes and sequels are expected on a regular basis. The conversation has shifted from “what new movies are out” to the much more depressing “what are they changing for this version?”
Screenwriter David Koepp, who also wrote the first two Jurassic Park films, had originally declined to return to the series because he felt he didn’t have “enough fresh thinking” for another one. Turns out his thinking remains none the fresher because Jurassic World Rebirth is essentially a rehash of the original Jurassic Park trilogy mashed into one clumsy movie. I honestly think Koepp just copied and pasted 40 pages of each Jurassic Park trilogy script and called it a day, which must make this the easiest million-dollar writing job he’s ever been paid to do.
Zora Bennett (a game Scarlett Johansson who does something with nothing) is a covert ops expert who is hired by well-dressed and blatantly evil big pharma rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend, eating ham sandwiches from start to finish) to work with dinosaur-loving paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, who is at least enjoying himself) on a top-secret mission to retrieve blood samples from three rare prehistoric specimens. Why? Because the blood is the key to curing heart disease. Only catch is that these specimens are on some dangerous forbidden island near the equator that’s extremely dangerous, so Zora recruits an old buddy, Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali, who deserves to be in better movies) to get them there.
Running parallel to this storyline is Reuben Delgado, who is crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a boat with his kids in tow. Despite claiming that he’s done this trip many times, Reuben inexplicably gets too close to the dangerous forbidden dinosaur island and gets shipwrecked. Luckily they get saved by Zora’s crew and then they make it to the island for some dinosaur shenanigans.
Look, there’s no need to get into who these characters are and what their schtick is because it’s not worth our time. They’re there simply to push the story and action along. Sadly, I wish there was more of the latter than the former.
Having just one of the above storylines is already bad enough, but having both in one movie? That’s just a bad time for everyone because not enough time (or effort) is dedicated to making either one somewhat decent, so the final product is just a sweaty mess that plods along like the greatest hits of Jurassic Park/World.
Dinosaurs? Check, of course.
A science lab in the jungle on some remote island? Oh yes.
Children to garner audience sympathy? Yeah.
Thinly cobbled together characters? Yep.
A scientist type character who is hot and/or quirkly. Uh huh.
A mercenary type? Sadly yes.
Hamfisted exploration into “why capitalism is bad”. Hoo boy.
And yet, despite literally rehashing old ideas for this movie, Koepp and director Gareth Edwards completely miss the one thing that make Jurassic movies worth the price of admission: awe.
Steven Spielberg masterfully captured that palpable sense of your jaw dropping in Jurassic Park. The Lost World and 3 had some of it but was lacking, while the original Jurassic World trilogy inexplicably got rid of any semblence of excitement and awe by normalising dinosaurs like they’re every day pets. Rebirth tries oh so hard to recapture that feeling several times, but it’s impossible to put the mosquito back into the amber once it’s out and everything just comes off feeling utterly desperate.
As Zora and Henry’s eyes widen at upon seeing a herd of Titanosauruses they accidentally stumbled upon, John Williams’ iconic Jurassic Park theme starts playing and you can’t help but roll your eyes. I get what Edwards is trying to do… but Spielberg had already done a perfect version of that scene.
Edwards has a way with visual filmmaking that makes you wonder how does everything look so good. Despite all his technical prowess, he’s always working with sub-par to downright awful scripts and so the final product is nothing more than a polished turd. But with Jurassic World Rebirth, it’s made me rethink his whole career arc. Maybe it’s not just that the scripts were simply bad. Maybe it’s actually Edwards’ limited ability to improve or find anything interesting to say about the material he’s working with. Then again, when you’re working with a screenplay like Rebirth, not even Spielberg can polish that turd.
I just realised that I haven’t really discussed the actual dinosaurs very much. There’s actually a decent amount of prehistoric-monster action scattered across this way-too-long 133 minute movie. But like the aforementioned Titanosaurus herd scene, most of it is nothing we haven’t seen before. Sure there are new mutated specimens, but what little interest generated by their unique designs is spoiled upon the realisation that Rebirth is nothing more than scene recreations. If I wanted to watch the iconic kitchen scene from Jurassic Park, I’d just watch that instead of a cover band version that’s set in an abandoned fuel station.
To Edwards’ credit, he does manage to have two moments that come close to amusing. The first is Reuben and his family stumbling across a napping T-rex. I had never seen that before and it was fascinating watching it flop around on its back like a dog. The second is the, ahem, “D-rex”, which is a mutated T-rex born out of genetic engineering gone horribly wrong. It looks like a MUTO from Edwards’ Godzilla film and is legit quite disgusting in a good way. Unfortunately we barely see it, nor do we get a T-rex versus D-rex battle, so it was ultimately a wasted opportunity.
So the big question now is does Jurassic World Rebirth deliver on its bottom line? I have to sadly say no. Whereas Jurassic Park was fun and entertaining, this was… not. It very much had a vibe of “here are some dinosaurs, now shut up and eat your popcorn”, which isn’t exactly the kind of energy you want from a dumb and fun blockbuster.
When Zora says “give it to the people” in response to Loomis’ question of what to do with the unsubtle metaphor life-saving dinosaur blood just seconds before the credits roll, one imagines Koepp high-fiving himself after writing that line, pouring himself a glass of scotch, and then having a great ol’ wank. For the love of culture, cinema, our collective sanity, and whatever remains holy, please keep whatever it is you have frozen in amber next time because I neither want nor need it.