04-07-2025
‘Jurassic World Rebirth' review: Torn between homage and reinvention
More than 30 years ago, Steven Spielberg directed the action adventure Jurassic Park, based on Michael Crichton's novel about genetic modification, paleontology and the dangers of man meddling with nature. Jurassic Park, the movie, in which velociraptors first darted across our screens and into our nightmares, premiered in 1993, and was a blockbuster.
Crichton wrote another novel and Spielberg directed its adaptation. The Lost World: Jurassic Park released in 1997. Neither did Crichton write any more Jurassic Park novels, nor did Spielberg direct further sequels though though he remained on as executive producer for the franchise's subsequent films—five of them, including the latest instalment: Jurassic World Rebirth.
Jurassic World: Rebirth, directed by Gareth Edwards, Jurassic arrives with the weight of an extinct franchise on its back and, despite moments of technical brilliance, struggles to escape the shadow of its better predecessors. It sheds the weight of legacy characters. No Alan Grant. No chaos theorizing by Ian Malcolm. A set of new characters, new dinosaurs, but an old story with familiar storytelling devices—a glossy repackage of the same exhausted DNA, trying to convince us it's evolved.
Set five years after Jurassic World: Dominion, the film opens with a flashback to 17 years earlier, when a security breach disrupted experiments taking place at a facility on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. Cut to present day America, a time when dinosaurs have lost their appeal and fear factor has waned. When harmless dinos causing traffic jams is a regular event. A once-celebrated dinosaur museum faces closure due to public disinterest.
At this time, the few existing species are relegated to remote island areas near the Equator. In this context, a biotech company plans an ambitious mission to locate and extract genetic material from the last known specimens of three dinosaur giants: the land-based Titanosaurus, the aquatic Mosasaurus, and the airborne Quetzalcoatlus. But this isn't about theme parks anymore—the goal is to develop a breakthrough treatment for heart disease using dinosaur DNA.
Launching a high-stakes mission is pharma company head Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) who recruits Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a covert ops expert looking for a big pay day. She's joined by earnest paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who somehow remains idealistic even when things start eating the support crew, and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who brings the water transport, a skilled crew and some gravitas that the film otherwise lacks. They're a capable trio that reacts to plot mechanics rather than driving them.
There's a 'humanising' sub-plot about a stranded family navigating the same dangerous terrain. The father's (Manuel Garcia Rulfo) plan to sail from Barbados to Cape Town with a small child, his older daughter and her boyfriend is highly questionable, and you can be sure things will go wrong. Fortunately, this subplot doesn't drag the film down, and it even adds some humour, courtesy of David Iacono as lazy boyfriend Xavier.
Once again, humans have misjudged the wild, and evolution has taken some deeply unexpected turns. The genetic manipulation has resulted in newer and more unpredictable species, such as the Distortus Rex (D-Rex). This new creature gives the movie a slightly darker, more suspenseful edge but lacks the iconic presence of a T-Rex or the cunning of raptors.
Gareth Edwards (Rogue One and Godzilla) brings scale and tension to well-staged action scenes. While the story tries to distance itself from the worn-out park setting, it can't seem to break free from the same narrative ruts: humans meddle, nature retaliates, and everyone runs from a new apex predator. A scene of a siege in a research facility recalls the original film's raptor kitchen scene but the dinosaurs no longer invoke that level of fear or awe.
Alexandre Desplat composes the score, remixing John Williams' iconic themes that make the film feel both familiar and new. Like the rest of the film, the music too seems torn between homage and reinvention.
Spielberg's original, for example, grappled with ethical questions about cloning, commercialization, and control. The ethical debates in Rebirth—while well-intentioned—come across as afterthoughts in a movie more concerned with showcasing its digital dinosaurs than exploring any meaningful theme.
Jurassic World Rebirth doesn't reinvent the franchise, but delivers thrilling action with a smartly chosen contemporary cast. The plot, the motivations, the situations are silly and sometimes unthinking—such as feeding packaged candy to a tiny dinosaur. This latest instalment feels more like a repackaged fossil than a genuine resurrection.
