Review: Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

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Jurassic World: Rebirth is an enjoyable summer blockbuster and a satisfying entry in the dinosaur movie franchise that seemingly continues to defy extinction. In fact, it’s the best film in the series since 2015’s Jurassic World, with which it shares self-reflexive features and a mix of strengths and weaknesses. Even so, Jurassic World: Rebirth is much more balanced than 2018’s bizarre Jurassic World: Forbidden Kingdom, and it is far better than 2022’s bad (with some good bits) Jurassic World: Dominion. Whether the first Jurassic World or Rebirth is the next best after Spielberg’s two Jurassic Park movies from the 1990s is difficult to say. Jurassic World holds up better than my first impression would have it, remaining a solidly fun movie. However, there is a definite gap in proficiency between Spielberg’s dino movies and all their successors, including Joe Johnston’s Jurassic Park III (2001), a third entry that was already a sputtering vehicle of repetition. With the franchise now in its fourth decade of existence, Jurassic World: Rebirth succeeds not because it offers something original—it doesn’t—but because the filmmakers have recognized the core appeal and best aspects of previous Jurassic movies and have delivered on these in a capable manner, all the while avoiding the worst features of contemporary franchise extensions.

At the end of my 2015 review of Jurassic World, I lamented that Colin Trevorrow and his team didn’t take the title change from Park to World seriously enough by expanding the scope to examine “humanity grappling with a new Jurassic world,” instead offering “just another park disaster.” However, as Anders said in his keynote to our podcast from June 2022 (3 Brothers Filmcast, Episode 19), the two subsequent Jurassic World sequels seemed to take up my challenge by exploring new settings and expanding the scope, albeit in awkward ways. As I discussed in my 2018 essay, Forbidden Kingdom contracts from its initial island mission—a rescue-the-dinosaurs plot resembling that of The Lost World—to a strange Gothic haunted house/laboratory to examine the latent horror of a series all about genetic manipulation and cloning. The film’s genre blending didn’t quite work, but I give it some credit for trying something different. While Dominion opens with depictions of dinosaurs across North America, and features a strange, Jason Bourne-style detour to stop dino trafficking in Malta, the plot also ultimately retreats to yet another isolated domain in Italy’s Dolomites. In both Forbidden Kingdom and Dominion, attempts to do something different with the series are never complete and never fully work. Indeed, both films resemble the ugly gene-spliced dinosaurs depicted in them.

Given the previous two films’ wonky attempts at innovation, screenwriter David Koepp intelligently does not try to insert a strange new genre approach or setting into the series. Koepp originally adapted Michael Crichton’s novels, Jurassic Park (1990) and The Lost World (1995), for Spielberg in the 1990s. Koepp is a veteran writer known for robust adventures with juicy dialogue (see, for example, 2002’s Spider-Man), and his return to the franchise fortifies the written foundations of this film in a way totally missing from any of the pictures in the last trilogy. Most importantly, Koepp sharpens the expected genre outlines. In essence, Jurassic World: Rebirth is a heist, involving putting a team together to return to another InGen-controlled island to obtain samples from the three largest dinosaurs: one in the sea, one on land, and one in the air.

Director Gareth Edwards taking on the seventh entry in the Jurassic series is also a smart decision for the franchise. After rising to fame with his indie monster movie, Monsters (2010), Edwards fashioned his admirable yet stretched Godzilla reboot (which we discussed back in 2014) along the lines of Spielberg’s 1980s blockbusters, with the slow buildup of intrigue and anticipation before finally revealing the beast. Edwards understands that, as Spielberg demonstrated all the way back with the original summer blockbuster, Jaws (1975), taking your time to build characters, introduce a problem, and establish a narrative direction, while relying as much upon suspense as action, can engage a mass audience wonderfully. While I admit that the characters and narrative of Jurassic World: Rebirth remain fairly lean, they are still understandable and effective. Likewise, Edwards demonstrates a methodical procedure to the set-up and clear direction behind the rising action. In short, the film tells a good adventure story rather than just stringing together chunks of frenetic activity and destruction with jokes/drama.

In addition to Edwards’ astute understanding of blockbuster storytelling mechanics, he also has the finesse with visual effects to be a sturdy captain of this kind of movie. After all, he made his name showing how to use CGI on a low budget. While I don’t think the CGI effects in Jurassic World: Rebirth are miraculous by any measure, and while there’s nothing on screen that looks more realistic than the animatronic T-Rex attack in 1993’s Jurassic Park, I can at least applaud Edwards’ ambitions to place the film’s VFX creations in a range of lights and settings, from the noon-day sun of a meadow between the mountains to emergency lighting in an industrial setting at nighttime. Nothing looks cheap or fake. What is more, Edwards and his team craft some gorgeous landscapes (more than just backgrounds), which, in my view, are an underrated feature of VFX that can really add to a film’s atmosphere. This island—Ile Saint-Hubert, in the middle of the Atlantic—is the most visually captivating and geographically realized since Isla Sorna in The Lost World.

With Koepp seeming to backtrack from the previous trilogy’s concerns, Jurassic World: Rebirth features early titles that inform the viewer that dinosaurs’ newfound dominion over the earth, realized over the last two films, has been scaled back by the fact that dinosaurs are just not compatible with most features of the modern climate of the Earth. Outside of zoos, dinosaurs now thrive only in small pockets around the equator, which the countries of the world have declared “No-Go Zones.” Of course, the team will have to go where they are not supposed to go to get the samples. 

Rupert Friend, who looks an awful lot like Orlando Bloom these days, plays the rich, smarmy corporate guy who bankrolls the team and tags along on the mission; his pharmaceutical company wants to develop heart disease medicine using biological material that must be gathered from large, living dinosaurs. The rest of the cast is also relatively strong. While there’s no one here who has more on-screen charisma than the original cast’s core trio of Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum, the leads—Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey—are more than capable. Scarlett Johansson inhabits the lead action heroine role with ease. She plays Zora, a mercenary thankfully devoid of the forced sassiness, unbelievable proficiencies, and other kick-ass-girl tropes Hollywood usually grafts onto these sorts of female roles. It’s clear that Koepp and Edwards are comfortable with Johannson as the lead, and Johannson is comfortable leading a film like this. It feels natural and it works. 

Mahershala Ali plays the traumatized male lead, Duncan, but the film thankfully doesn’t get too bogged down in exploring his trauma. Duncan is tough and capable and Ali never has to lean into macho tropes to establish his competency, as Chris Pratt’s Owen was made to do constantly in the original Jurassic World. Jonathan Bailey’s paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis, likewise threads the needle of avoiding being an annoying stereotype while remaining sharply drawn and narratively effective. There’s a sense that the filmmakers purposely wanted to avoid the missteps made with previous new characters added into beloved franchises.

Most importantly, there are also no supporting characters I despise, unlike almost all the new additions and team members in both Forbidden Kingdom and Dominion, apart from Owen and Claire. Sure, the boyfriend character is annoying, but he is meant to be. When their sailboat on the Atlantic capsizes, a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his two daughters (Luna Blaise and Audrina Mirandaare), and the eldest daughter’s boyfriend (David Iacono), are brought on board the main team’s boat, and thus added to the mission plotline. Did we need another family-in-peril subplot? Probably not, but the subplot is also standard Hollywood, so I can’t complain too much. It also reminds me of how I never really liked the kids in the original Jurassic Park when I was a kid. 

Furthermore, Koepp’s screenplay makes it clear, if we ever doubted, what the primary concerns of the series are by underscoring the literary and cinematic influences. Apart from Crichton’s original novels, the Jurassic series is spawned from early science-fiction, especially the works of H. G. Wells, and monster movies, especially the original monster movie, King Kong (1933). The first half of Rebirth clearly echoes aspects of King Kong, with an extended sea voyage that builds up our fear of getting onto the island. For nearly a century, King Kong has shown the adventure genre the value of the slow build up.

Building off of Crichton’s omnipresent ethical concerns about technological overreach, each entry in the Jurassic series is, in a way, dealing with the same moral fable that H. G. Wells introduced over a century ago about the danger of manipulating the natural world through genetic control. With the focus in this film of going to a strange island of dinosaurs and genetic mutants, the Wells’ novel I was particularly thinking of is The Island of Doctor Moreau, as well as the early film adaptation, Island of Lost Souls. (Of course, we should also recall The Food of the Gods, with medical advancements going wrong, and the original Frankenstein.) Koepp brings a smartness to the film’s play with generic influences that is on a different level from the previous three films.

The self-proclaimed “Rebirth” of the Jurassic World franchise in the summer of 2025 also affords us an opportunity to gauge the standing of what I call “Franchise World”: the dominion of the franchise model in Hollywood cinema that emerged in the 2000s but which has its roots going back much earlier. Franchise World took a new turn a decade ago, in 2015, with the “diegetic reboots” of Jurassic World and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (a phenomenon the 3 Brothers first discussed in Part 2 of our Roundtable on The Force Awakens from January 2016). 2023’s “Barbenheimer” event did not defeat Franchise World, and 2024 saw a slew of sequels, late and new. Jurassic World: Rebirth shows that Hollywood is nowhere close to being done with franchises, but the distinct Frankensteinian fusions of the 2015-2024 period might be on the outs. Gone, perhaps, are the forced combinations of old characters with new, younger generation casts (brilliantly diagnosed in Scream 5, as we discussed on Episode 28 of the podcast). Dialed down are the themes of Old-versus-New as well as the anxious self-critique incorporated into the storyworlds of these consumer movie products. 

Jurassic World: Rebirth is trying to win back audiences by capably repeating, with some variation, what people like about the originals, rather than providing fan service in combination with forced new elements. There is still meta-commentary present in the film—meta-commentary has been present in blockbusters since E.T. played with Star Wars action figures—but not to the same degree as that which has dominated franchise films for the past decade. Is this the rebirth of the franchise sequel as a more grounded and fun and less anxious and self-reflexive kind of film? In other words, as I asked when reviewing last year’s summer success, Twisters, are we seeing the rebirth of the 1990s style summer blockbuster? We will have to see what the remainder of summer 2025 presents us.

7 out of 10

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025, USA)

Directed by Gareth Edwards; written by David Koepp; starring Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, and Ed Skrein.

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