Jurassic World Rebirth: Gareth Edwards' Latest Resurrects The Wrong Franchise Elements

Jurassic World Rebirth has massive footprints to fill. Ever since Universal Pictures' storied three-decade franchise debuted with Steven Spielberg's masterful Jurassic Park, there have been significant ups and downs in its subsequent outings. The latest, from director Gareth Edwards and writer David Koepp, creates some strong innovations, but muddles itself in the effort to recapture series magic. 

The Jurassic franchise has frequently suffered from a little bit of plot repetition, balanced against interesting new developments. Jurassic Park introduced audiences to John Hammond (Richard Attenborough), bringing archaeologists and a mathematician to check out his ambitious park of resurrected dinosaurs on Isla Nublar. It endangered everyone when security failed, including Hammond's grandchildren. The Lost World saw tragedy befall another island, Isla Sorna, including Ian Malcolm's (Jeff Goldblum) young daughter, Kelly.

Jurassic Park III closes out the original trilogy by returning to Isla Sorna. You guessed it, a kid's been endangered and marooned at the park, and our heroes have to find him. Jurassic World sees protagonists attacked by a hybrid dinosaur called Indominus Rex, threatening the young nephews of the park's Operations Manager, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard).  

Its sequel, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, sees a return to Isla Nublar to retrieve dinosaurs from a volcanic eruption, endangering the cloned daughter of Hammond's former partner. The film ends with dinosaurs being released into the world, perhaps the most revolutionary development in franchise history. The follow-up Jurassic World Dominion ignores that entirely to follow a horde of monstrous locusts and spend half the time in nondescript research facilities.

Jurassic World Rebirth Overcomplicates Its Characters

That may be a lot of backstory, but it's necessary. Jurassic World Rebirth is set five years after the events of Dominion, where most of the dinosaurs set loose on the world are dying because of Earth's climate, and the public is no longer interested in dinosaurs.

Shady pharma rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) commissions covert ops specialist Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), her longtime collaborator Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and their crew for an excursion into a tropical region where dinosaurs still thrive.

The goal is to take samples from the biggest dinosaurs from land, air, and sea to create an innovative treatment to cure heart disease. The team encounters the stranded Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his two daughters, and his eldest daughter's deadbeat boyfriend, and everyone rendezvous at a facility housing the most dangerous mutated dinosaur creations. 

Scarlett Johansson gives a layered performance as Zora, believably tough with emotional nuance. She shares believable chemistry with Mahershala Ali, who also turns in a fine performance. 

Johansson has a little bit of a romantic flair when paired opposite Jonathan Bailey, who is charismatic and exhibits believable scientific-level intelligence. Rupert Friend is great at the skeezy, unscrupulous executive, and the rest of the boat's crew are solid, though underutilized.

Where the film falters most is the inclusion of the disconnected family. The franchise has long used child endangerment as a plot device, but typically, said children are unfortunate relatives of someone who had some reason to be in that locale without expectations of danger.

Here, the family isn't connected to the central story whatsoever, and Reuben doesn't have a good reason to take his kids into dino-infested waters to begin with. The performances are good, sure, but their inclusion has unfortunate side effects.

Jurassic World Rebirth Needs A Focused Narrative

The family's inclusion in the story splits the narrative at one point into parallel journeys, with Zora and her crew on one path and the family-plus-boyfriend on the other. Unfortunately, the latter are there as self-endangering plot devices, so their half of that equation is as compelling as it is important, not very. 

There's an arc around the father coming to accept the lazy, annoying, useless stoner boyfriend, but the resolution is relatively unearned.

Almost all the time on the family would have been better spent building the relationships between the primary characters. Johansson's Zora and Ali's Duncan have history and a lifetime of stories, and the script is forced to awkwardly shoehorn their respective personal tragedies into a single 5-minute catch-up scene instead of building the characters organically.

A more focused narrative would better serve their complex character development without superfluous characters.

The design of the D-Rex, while a little inexplicable (whose bright idea was it to give that thing so many arms!?), is pretty cool and certainly frightening.

The tale is full of mutated dinos, like the Mutadon, that have solid design and pay off the franchise's gradually increasing exploration of the terrors of genetic engineering. It's a tad odd to cavalierly sidestep any possibility of ever doing something great with dinosaurs invading everyday life, marking a real missed opportunity for the franchise.

The inciting journey is also a little odd in context. Are dinosaurs so ill-adapted for our world that they're dying out (despite being spliced with modern species), and are they also close enough for dinosaur hearts to be useful in developing human heart medications?

Jurassic World Rebirth has talented actors giving quality performances, but it doesn't let the narrative focus on them. The mutant dinosaurs are exciting additions to the world, but cutting off the possibilities of them or anything surviving in the wide world is an odd way to bury the franchise's coolest unused potential. 

Jurassic World Rebirth still has fun moments, some great scenes, and a cute baby dinosaur, but it regrettably continues the franchise's trajectory of running from greatness as fast as Bryce Dallas Howard's Claire runs in high heels.

Final Rating: 5/10

Jurassic World Rebirth stomps into theaters on July 2, 2025.