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Go behind the scenes of Jurassic World: Rebirth with the cast and crew
Featurette: Universal Pictures

Jurassic World: Rebirth
Directed by Gareth Edwards
Rated PG-13
Trounced 2 July 2025
#JurassicWorldRebirth

Jurassic World: Rebirth reenergizes the long-running franchise with a fresh cast of characters eager to put Dominion in the past.

Primal Scream

It was a little nerve-wracking to hear the filmmakers’ ambitions for Rebirth were focused on recreating the magic of the original Jurassic Park. This after the Jurassic World trilogy quickly went from great to laughably bad with two shoddy sequels. It sounded like Kathleen Kennedy and J.J. Abrams talking about dissecting the DNA of the original Star Wars trilogy to make a new series instead of simply taking the story ideas George Lucas already had in the pipeline when he sold Lucasfilm to Disney.

Mercifully, Rebirth turns out to be a decent adventure movie with Gareth Edwards at the helm. He’s also the guy who directed Rogue One, arguably the best theatrical release of the five Star Wars productions so far under Disney’s ownership. And it was a prequel to the original trilogy Kennedy and Abrams tried to mimic.

But Rebirth gets off to a shaky start.

The opening involves a clean room in a dinosaur laboratory, a place where brilliant scientists are attempting to engineer exciting new dinosaurs to keep commercial interest in dinosaurs humming along. Unfortunately, it involves what amounts to a stupid human trick. One of those genius scientists working in a secured clean room turns out to be a rather dim bulb instead of a bright mind. He’s the one with his protective mask open while he chomps down a Snickers bar. The wrapper drifts to the floor, unnoticed by the slob. And, by the magic of air pressure and vacuum seals, the wrapper follows the scientist into a lab area housing a monstrosity, the terrifying result of man’s toying with creation.

The wrapper short circuits a door, safety alarms sound and emergency procedures are initiated. Then the buffoon becomes nothing more than a human candy bar for the monster dinosaur.

It’s an unnecessary sequence, but at least it’s all handled before the opening title card.

Forget about it. Move on.

In the movie, that means moving on to the present day, 17 years after that horrible exhibition of human stupidity. It’d be so nice to see these dinosaur scientists make a mistake that doesn’t encourage audiences to smack their foreheads. But there are likely two more movies in this next anticipated trilogy, so maybe next time.

Cast Aways

As the new characters are introduced, the story starts to recover.

And it is an interesting idea that drives the action. Cutting to the chase, the mission proposed to Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson, Avengers: Endgame) is to go to the tropical, equatorial location of that fateful incident and retrieve blood samples from three of those experimental dinosaurs left to roam free. The potential is there to exploit their blood and tissue samples and generate a cure for heart disease.

The remote location is a no-go zone. Violating the quarantine is a guarantee of prison time.

But, for a $10 million paycheck, Zora’s pretty darn quick to jump at the opportunity.

David Koepp, whose experience with this world goes all the way back to 1993 and the original Jurassic Park, hits on a good storyline, taking a cue from current events and concerns around "big pharma." Under the roar of rampaging dinosaurs there’s a political statement to be heard: should these intrepid (and hopefully much smarter) scientists retrieve the samples and hand it over to big pharma, which would potentially price the majority of the world’s population out of access to the miracle drugs? Or do they do something else, something for the common good: donate the samples to the open-source scientific community so all peoples everywhere can benefit from the findings?

But in doing so, Zora would lose her big pay day.

We all have dilemmas to conquer.

Time is taken to establish relationships, particularly between Zora and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali, Hidden Figures); they’ve both suffered through significant personal losses during the years-long friendship. And there’s a nice dynamic that develops between Zora and Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, Wicked), the team's voice of ethics and the common good.

This time around it’s a large, mostly likable cast of 11 characters split across two groups. There are the scientists and boat team, but there’s also a family of globetrotting adventurers: a dad, his two daughters and the older daughter’s boyfriend. The latter falls into the category of least likable. By design, of course. It’s a growth opportunity to watch the kid turn into something like a young man.

Having 11 players means there’s plenty of opportunity to lose a few, or even several. Those 11 slim down to seven as the mayhem runs its course.

Movie Moments

Edwards makes Rebirth fun by throwing in some really nice Spielberg-inspired moments. At times it’s like the movie’s not only a tribute to the original Jurassic Park, but also other Spielberg classics, including Jaws and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In putting it all together there’s a nice blend of on- and off-screen gore.

One nifty scene in particular involves a vial of recently collected tissue samples from a dinosaur egg. The vial is kicked around a mysterious temple and rolls precariously close to a cliff’s edge. It’s reminiscent of the Club Obi-Wan vial of antidote scene in Temple of Doom.

Another cool movie moment features a rescue helicopter that vanishes into a deep fog, then, as the fog breaks, is next seen crushed in the mouth of a nasty mosasaurus.

And there’s a very funny bit as the team lead, a representative of a major pharmaceutical company, Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend, The French Dispatch), tries to make a run for it in a high-tech Jeep. The car’s ultra-sensitive alarms keep warning him to slow down, there’s a pedestrian ahead. But it’s not really a human. It’s a massive dinosaur. This happens a couple times during this quick sequence and it’s quite entertaining.

Perhaps that’s one of Rebirth’s biggest selling points. Unlike the past couple Jurassic movies, this one has some replay value. Lots of bits and details to revisit or catch ones previously missed.

The visual effects of aquatic dinosaurs at sea are quite impressive, as are some of the other dino encounters in and around the lab. But there also some duds; some of the visuals seem a bit clunky, perhaps a compromise made in this movie’s reduced production budget of "only" $180 million or so.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.