Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) – Review

“JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH”

In what is inexplicably the seventh entry in this franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth comes to us from director Gareth Edwards, his previous credits including the 2014 Godzilla movie that kicked off that franchise, and of course Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

While this film is in continuity with the previous entries in the series, it seems to go out of it’s way to not be associated with them.

We are retconning the ending of Jurassic World Dominion to say that the dinosaurs now can’t survive all over the world because they can’t adapt to the climate and disease- it’s almost as if there was a reason that the original film was set in Costa Rica! Now the dinosaurs can only survive near the Equator. An evil billionaire from a pharmaceutical company hires a mercenary team led by Zora Bennett (played by Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) to go to the island along with a dinosaur expert Doctor Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to pick up blood samples from the three biggest dinosaurs from the island in order to create life saving drugs for people with heart disease- for the record, I have no idea how that works but the films tries to make out that it does make sense.

Meanwhile on route, they pick up a family who have been stranded at sea after a dinosaur attack on their boat- again, you’d have thought they’d thought ahead before sailing in waters that are known to have aquatic dinosaurs, but there you go.

So we basically have two plots. And if it sounds familiar, it’s because it’s basically a mashup between Jurassic Park 2 and 3, and that’s rather evident because if this film were to have a signature dinosaur it’s not on screen for very long. The Mosasaurs are on for one sequence, the Spinosaurus are brought back but they don’t do much, but when they are on screen it kicks ass so I’ll give the film some credit there. And of course, the film has talked a lot via marketing about the hybrids that they were working on in this particular island.

Let’s be honest, when the plot is this stagnant and kind of repetitive with stuff we’ve already seen, the dinosaurs are going to take front and centre, and I hope you don’t go to see this to see dinosaurs that we know the most from this franchise, because they don’t appear that much. The Velociraptors really don’t show in this film a lot and considering how much time they took up in the last franchise, I don’t’ mind their absence this tine. The T-rex is still here of course and I’m not complaining about that! The sequence that is on the poster and in all the trailers is, however, the only time that we see the T-rex in the movie, but it’s a fantastic sequence, It helps the fact that the writing had extra things to draw on since it’s basically a repurposed sequence that got cut from the original movie, which was also turned into one of the Jurassic Park rides at Universal Studios!

One thing I will say about the film is that it’s fine. There are some great sequences in the movie but the characters aren’t really there, they’re certainly more likable than from other movies- I’ll take them over most of the cast in Fallen Kingdom! But I also think that there were a couple of things left on the floor. The family subplot deals with a heart to heart between the father and the daughter’s boyfriend and one of the lines he gives is that he’s worried that his girlfriend is going to reject him because of some faults that he has, but it’s never really elaborated upon. They go back and forth on whether or not he’s an idiot or an actual good guy, so I spent half the film going ‘can we make up our mind on whether he’s a good guy or dinosaur chow?’.

I would probably say that my favourite character is the dinosaur expert, since Johnathan Bailey really can deliver the sense of real awe and enthusiasm that he feels for the dinosaurs, and if you recognise his voice, you’ve probably played a lot of Final Fantasy 14.

I will say that while I think that this movie is okay, there’s nothing incredibly exciting about it, I especially didn’t like the cynical lines at the beginning about how people don’t like dinosaurs anymore- a sort of backhanded comment about how audiences didn’t react well to the past few films; it’s not our fault those films were awful and bland!

I do think that one of my big issues is that they really hyped up the new mutated hybrid dinosaur the D-rex. They were smart not to show it off in the trailers too much, but when you actually get a look at this thing… I’m a little mixed on this design. On one hand, it’s clear that this was grown in a lab and not a part of nature, but on the other hand, it’s kind of clear they just mashed together the Xenomorph from Aliens and the monster from Cloverfield, and I know I’m not the first person to make those comparisons. For all the marketing about it, this dinosaur is barely in the movie! I think it takes about 15 minutes at most, and honestly, I don’t think I want to see this one make a return.