Review | JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH Gets Back to Basics

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Screenplay by David Koepp
Based on characters created by Michael Chricton
Produced by Frank Marshall, Patrick Crowley
PG-13, 2hr 14m

This month has three big-budget tentpole films coming out, and Rebirth is the first before Superman and Fantastic Four: First Steps. It may also be the safest bet out of the three, but being part of a pretty well-received franchise isn’t a guarantee of success.

Indeed, several commentators and pundits in my circles have come down on both sides of this one, with some saying it’s “OK” while others call it girlboss hot garbage, or something to that effect. Your mileage may vary, and a lot of it depends on you actually watching the movie.

I’m going to say right now that you should make up your own mind which way you’re going to go, but watching the movie will definitely help you decide whether you like it or not.

Now that we’ve gotten that aside, I’ll say I enjoyed it. Junior Boss James enjoyed it. And as I ruminated a bit on it afterward, I came away thinking that 1) it’s got the DNA of the first Jurassic Park in it; 2) it’s not too overly ambitious; and 3) it’s not full of ideological messaging. Those last two points are important, and I’ll circle back to give them each some attention momentarily.

The basics first: In/Gen, the original company that grew the dinosaurs in the first movie, has gone defunct. Another Big Pharma outfit has bought up all the assets and is now looking to develop a new heart wonder-drug using DNA from the three largest dinosaurs that currently still exist. Except the expedition to retrieve said DNA will have to be off the books, as the dinosaur zone near the equator is now forbidden territory. Turns out that now it’s about the only place on the planet that’s close enough to their original climate for them to survive. They’ve died off everywhere else due to temperature, oxygen levels, and disease.

This is where some are trying to say that there’s an environmentalist message there. Personally, I don’t see it, as the story is pretty consistent with scientific assumptions that the equatorial zone is actually for-real the closest thing to a dinosaur-friendly habitat we still have in modern day. At any rate, it’s a throw-away line that serves only to lampshade why the expedition has to go to a tropical island rather than just get some dino-DNA out of Central Park.

So Big Pharma exec Krebs (Rupert Grint) hires Zora (Scarlett Johannson) to lead the expedition, as she’s an ex spook of some sort. This is left vague enough that you don’t come away with a particular set of expectations, I guess? They head over to the museum to pick up Dr. Daniel Jackson Henry Loomis (named for Donald Pleasance’s character in the Halloween films), who’s studied dinosaurs all his life — even name-dropping Alan Grant as a teacher — but he’s never seen one up close and personal. Zora assembles the rest of the expedition crew, led by Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who’s an old friend of hers. And they’re off!

Meantime, Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) leads the family boating trip with his two girls, Teresa and Isabella (Luna Blaise, Audrina Miranda), along with Teresa’s stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono). Some may question his judgment, taking the family so close to a quarantined area, but I gathered from the dialogue that this was a semi-regular thing, so perhaps they didn’t expect the danger? Back to this shortly.

Those two threads are the setup for the third act, as we spend a lot of time (a lot of time) on the boats, establishing relationships, some character depth, etc. so people can get to know this brand new cast of characters, some of whom we know won’t be coming back.

The third act is, of course, dinosaurs and running and screaming and dying. Along the way, Daniel Jackson Loomis has questions as to the nature of the expedition. Why should just a small set of people benefit from the research? Thus introducing Zora’s moral quandary: take the Big Pharma money and retire from a job that just recently killed a colleague (lover? best friend?) or Do The Right Thing and deal with the consequences later.

If David Koepp’s scripts suffers from anything, it’s timidity. This story feels like they’re playing it safe with some Greatest Hits from the first movie. There are visual callbacks to several elements peppered throughout this one, and it almost feels like the production is trying to remind people where this whole thing started while at the same time trying to tell a somewhat new story. And it works, for the most part, although there are some quibbles.

What, exactly, was the nature of this facility on this other island? Because what’s inside the tin doesn’t quite match the label. And only a Dennis Nedry type could design a security and containment system that can be compromised by a simple Snickers bar wrapper (although those in aviation will point out that it doesn’t take much at all to screw up an engine; Foreign Object Damage can be tremendously costly) … And what about those ruins in the cliff where the flying dino makes her nest?

It’s by no means a perfect movie, and there are a couple of places where the CGI is less than fully cooked. But it’s not the disaster that some are making it out to be.

For one thing, Johannson is not Ms. Mary Sue Girlboss. She doesn’t run in heels. She doesn’t outshine her male counterparts. At no point does she snap her fingers and claim to need no mansplain’… In fact, if it wasn’t Scarlett Johannson’s name over the title, you could put pretty much any fit actress in the role. The fact that it’s Black Widow, I think, has some critics filtering their perception. Zora isn’t anything special. She doesn’t put Kincaid in his place. She doesn’t dress down Daniel Jackson Loomis for being a nerd. I do agree that the recent loss of her partner-in-crime should have played more in the third act, but there’s a lot going on in the third act — the aforementioned running and screaming and such.

Nor is Kincaid sidelined as the token Black Horror Sidekick. Mahershala Ali doesn’t get near enough to do, but what he does get puts him on equal footing with Zora. They’re both suffering losses, both looking to get out of the business and start over. And he gets to make his choices that aren’t driven by his skin color or his place on the call sheet.

Speaking of skin color… the Delgado family isn’t there to score diversity points. Nowhere in the story do they even mention their ethnicity. This is just a divorced dad with his two girls and the stoner boy on a boat in the middle of the ocean surrounded by big swimming orca-dinos. Remember what I said earlier about Jurassic Park‘s greatest hits. The Delgados are there to put kids in danger on the island. It raises the stakes, because maybe this time, one of them gets eaten. Hammond’s grandkids, Malcolm’s daughter, the Kirbys’ kid, Gray and Zach… it’s a Save the Cat scenario that gets the audience slightly more invested in who lives or dies. Surely, they won’t kill the kid? Or the dog?

(No, there’s no dog in this one…)

As an additional aside, I like the fact that Gareth Edwards and cinematographer John Mathieson shot this on film. There’s something about light hitting the various layers of emulsion that digital will never be able to fully replicate. Kudos to them. Film needs to make a comeback.

I will say, as a nod to those very vocal critics, that the plot is pretty thin, and it starts to show the cracks if you stare at it too hard for very long. But this isn’t an intellectual exercise. It doesn’t require Oppenheimer-level focus to all the details of the dialogue. Gareth Edwards has delivered a summer tentpole movie about dinosaurs with a little DNA from Jaws, Return of the Jedi, and Skull Island thrown in. Sit back and enjoy it with your two buckets of popcorn.