Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)  

Review: written July 2025

Life finds a way.. to disappoint.

Early in Gareth Edward’s new Jurassic World movie, one of the more scholarly characters laments, that “No-one cares about dinosaurs any more”. Indeed, he notes that although there used to be queues around the block to see his dinosaur museum exhibit, now he is lucky to get a few visits a day. Well, he might as well have been writing the start of this review, such is the difficulty in mustering a sense of fresh enthusiasm and awe at seeing dinosaurs on screen for the seventh outing in this franchise.

Set as a fresh start for the franchise set some time after the events of the last movie (Jurassic World: Dominion, if you are keeping count), dinosaurs are now old hat. They have failed to adapt and have been dying off, succumbing to disease and a climate ill-suited to them. Except that is, in a zone around the equator where they still thrive, and for obvious reasons visitors are banned. And so, for equally obvious reasons this movie contrives to compel a miscellany of folks to go there. It hardly matters why, save to say a big corporation (in the case big pharma) have found a reason they ‘need’ to get blood samples from the three biggest dinosaurs. Think of it as watching Jurassic World the not very good computer game with different levels of difficulty.

A company man accompanying adventurous mercenaries for hire, led by Scarlett Johanssen, isn’t quite enough to tick all the screenwriting 101 requirements, and so on the way they find a family on a cross-the-ocean sailing trip who strayed too close to the prohibited area and were shipwrecked. This completes an ensemble including the requisite mix one expects in a movie of this sort: dubious company man; likeable kid; loyal father; weary mercenary dealing with loss, scholar with a good heart and various others who have so little backstory you just know they are soon going to be dino-food.

And the rest plays out probably pretty much like you can now imagine in your head. Which is good and bad.. Good, in as much director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla, The Creator) knows what he is doing with developing edge of the seat action scenes in a visual effects -heavy movie. Bad, in as much as the script he is working from treads no new ground and feels an all too familiar re-hash. In the story, the island was a laboratory developing genetically mutated dinosaurs (including “Distortus-Rex”!!), presumably so there is an excuse to show something ‘new’ we haven’t seen before. In reality, knowing these creatures are entirely made up, we lack the awe in knowing we are looking at a best guess of what once roamed the Earth, taking away one of the fundamental elements that made the first movie so magical.

And it wasn’t just the dinosaurs that held our interest if you recall.. Michael Crichton as a writer loved to research and bring ideas that were scientifically plausible and linked to current research, even while being in the realms of science fiction – hence we got Jeff Goldblum’s quirky and amusing interjections on the notions of chaos theory. None of the wit, or the sparky dialogue, and very little intriguing characterisation has made its way into this movie alas. Seems it’s not just the dinosaurs that were being cloned, the story was too.

So look, it’s nonsense, and disappointing, but I’ll confess it still has some pretty exciting moments, looks good, and while the characters are poorly written, the cast do their best. It might be formula, but it’s a well tested formula, and I found myself enjoying it enough in the moment.

The effects of the dinosaurs are excellent, the hunting scenes (human hunting dinosaur, and later of course, dinosaur hunting human) are well executed, although the island they visit looks curiously artificial and unlikely, at times. I did hear some ‘wow’s and ‘aww’s in the screening I was in, so the movie works on some level. Just don’t expect the World from it.

I remember reading that the bigger the dino, the smaller the brain. I don’t know if that really was true then, but it seems to be the case now.