It’s been more than three decades since Steven Spielberg released Jurassic Park, one of the most impressive and groundbreaking films of all time. Since then, the franchise has become worth more than 10 billion dollars, creating six more movies, cartoons, comics, video games, theme park rides, and countless toys and other merchandise. It’s safe to say Jurassic Park is among the upper echelon of the most lucrative franchises ever, and it continues to churn out media in all forms.
With just a three-year break from 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion and with multiple seasons of Camp Cretaceous and Chaos Theory in between, the franchise’s newest release, Jurassic World Rebirth acts as a soft reboot and continuation of the story we’ve seen up to this point.
Directed by Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, Godzilla 2014) and written by original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp, Jurassic World Rebirth brings an entirely new group of characters to the series, played by the now-highest-grossing actor of all time, Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey (Wicked), Rupert Friend (Obi-Wan Kenobi), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Magnificent Seven) and Academy Award-winning actor, Mahershala Ali.
The story features Martin Krebs (Friend), a major pharmaceutical representative who, five years after the events of Dominion, brings together an under-the-radar team of special ops members Zora (Johansson) and Duncan (Ali), and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Bailey) to travel to an abandoned island used by Ingen in the past to experiment on their creations, in hopes of concocting new and exciting dinosaur species for their theme parks.
Krebs hires the team in hopes of retrieving live blood samples from the island’s three gargantuan creatures, the Titanosaurus, Mosasaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus, to further research into a cure for heart disease.
Meanwhile, Reuben Delgado (Garcia-Rulfo) and his family are sailing near the island, and after being capsized by the passing Mosasaur, they are picked up by Zora and her team. While the team searches for the massive reptiles, they encounter failed experiment dinosaurs who caused the initial abandonment and have overrun the island since, including raptor-like Mutadons and the terrifying Distortus Rex.
If the story sounds like a simple sci-fi point, click, and retrieve adventure tale, you’re not far off. Things do feel a little low-effort in the story department. Granted, it’s not much different than the reasons characters head to Site B in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and certainly holds more water than Alan Grant getting finagled onto Site B in Jurassic Park III.
Related: ‘Jurassic Park’: How Steven Spielberg Made a Horror Movie with Dinosaurs
I found that I have a greater interest in a simple story than one with distractingly odd subplots, like Chris Pratt leading a motorcycle gang of raptors, a deceased child who was cloned as a way to bring her back, or the world-ending locusts that were brought on in the other Jurassic World films.
Yes, there are mutated dinosaurs. However, these creatures with physical abnormalities or basic hybrid features are so much more believable than the Indominus Rex, which could essentially turn invisible with a Predator-like cloaking power at its command and was explained away by its genetic mixing with… a cuttlefish.
Where Jurassic World Rebirth predominantly shines is in its ability to go back before the prior Jurassic World movies and capture the wonder and fear of the first two Jurassic Park films. There was a sense of awe when the team encountered the creatures, and a purposeful feeling of sadness that we’ve forgotten the beauty behind them. Dr. Loomis talks about growing up under the tutelage of Dr. Alan Grant, and we can see the similarities between the two characters’ passion for prehistoric animals. Much of this can be attributed to David Koepp’s screenplay and Alexandre Desplat’s incredible score, but the film still felt like Spielberg had his fingerprints all over it.
The dinosaur attack scenes were plentiful and intense, particularly the showdown with the Mosasaurus and the highly anticipated raft scene, which basically came straight out of Michael Crichton’s original Jurassic Park novel, but was cut from appearing in the first film. I was incredibly excited for this scene, and it didn’t disappoint in the slightest, quickly becoming one of the most memorable attack scenes in the franchise.
Some of these moments were downright scary, and while we could mostly guess which characters would die and which would live, Rebirth contained an edge-of-your-seat ferocity that was completely missing in the Chris Pratt trilogy.
Related: ‘Jurassic World Dominion’ Review: Delivers a Proper Extinction Level Event
Jurassic World Rebirth didn’t just throw mutant dinosaurs in our face, either. They were explained, and we were segued, as it kept a T-Rex attack, showed us everything we wanted and more from the Mosasaurus, gave us fun callbacks to franchise favorites like the Velociraptors and Dilophosaurus, and then hit us with new encounters with new and mutated species.
I’ve seen a lot of reviews complaining that Jurassic World Rebirth is more of the same thing, and should just end already. Maybe the second part is true, but I’m truly not sure what fans wanted with this film.
It steered away from the silly, straight-up action film franchise it had turned into, it added an entire new cast of characters, great dinosaur scenes, an excellent musical score from an Oscar-winning composer, and incredible special effects, both practical and digital. Callbacks to the earlier films in the franchise were done tastefully and quickly, not set up as nostalgia bait that made no sense.
We’re talking about the seventh movie in a franchise here. How many franchises out there can say their seventh films are even mediocre? Especially in the sci-fi or horror genres? Not many.
I’m certainly not saying Rebirth was a perfect or even an amazing film. The story was too by the numbers, several of the supporting actors outside Johansson, Bailey, and Ali were clunky and frustrating, and the villain was kind of a wiener. I honestly felt like the Mutadons and D-Rex were a little underutilized for how they were marketed, and I think some of the characters’ depths were explored in the wrong places.
Seeing this film in the theater and having those feelings of awe and wonder wash over me brought me back to being seven years old and seeing Jurassic Park on the big screen for the first time again, even if just for a few minutes. That is how you do nostalgia. That is how you make a legacy sequel. And while I think Jurassic Park Rebirth is a great stopping point for the franchise (even though it won’t be), I think it’s the best JP film since The Lost World, and certainly well worth a watch.
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