From a commercial perspective, rebooting the Jurassic Park franchise over the past decade has proved a sound if not terribly inspired idea. Creatively, however, we surely have to admit the Jurassic World films have been subpar at best, a judgement born out by the grab-bag of approaches individual instalments have pursued, none of which have stuck for longer than two indifferent hours at a time. 2015's Jurassic World, co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow, went for bluntly self-reflexive fabulism (dinosaur theme park as latter-day corporate entertainment) in a bid to win over those executives who may have had misgivings around the prospect of getting box-office lightning to strike twice in the same place. Trevorrow's most recent entry, 2022's Jurassic World: Dominion, went so far as to get the old Neill-Dern-Goldblum band back together, and left even hardcore loyalists disappointed. With Jurassic World: Rebirth, Gareth Edwards - who worked such wonders on his homemade blockbuster Monsters fifteen years ago, before finding steady employment in WB's Kong/Godzilla universe - attempts a return to Spielbergian first principles. Small things (a discarded Snickers wrapper in the prologue) which trigger bigger, disastrous things; images that tip a very specific hat to a gamechanging event movie; lots more of that old, familiar John Williams theme. Its self-contained, standalone story, care of original JP scribe David Koepp, sees Big Pharma exec Rupert Friend dispatching unlikely adventuress Scarlett Johansson and speccy academic Jonathan Bailey to an equatorial isle to collect dino blood, notionally to assist his company's research into a possible cure for heart disease - though if you believe philanthropy is the shifty Friend's motivation, you may just be the one person who still hasn't seen enough of this type of movie.
What's really being peddled is nostalgia for a blockbuster golden age, when audiences were dazzled week in week out; the Bailey character gestures towards that past in his introduction, taking down his museum's most recent exhibition with a morose "we sold a dozen tickets last week... no-one cares about these animals any more". One reason we were dazzled back in the day, though, was that what we were watching was to some degree new and surprising, or at least expertly crafted. Here, by contrast, Edwards is obliged to engineer a setpiece every twenty minutes, solely to prod us awake, and the bulk of these are striking less for their photorealism than for the glitchy mismatch between foreground and background, between the in-camera work and the largely digitised space around it. Those Nineties event movies more often than not appeared dazzlingly expensive; Rebirth must have spent a fortune on plane fares and appearance fees, yes, but its action looks cheap and rushed. The Williams theme does a lot of elevating heavy lifting, but what's beneath it, stuck forever at ground level, only underwhelms. Koepp outlines three distinct species of dinosaur (sea, land and air), which is a neat structuring device, but only one type of humanoid: bland. (Even with Mahershala Ali on board as a roguish captain, this has to be the dullest cast ever assembled for a summer movie, all going through the motions, all keeping one eye out for the production accountant.) And Spielberg's underdiscussed ruthless streak is beyond Edwards' peppy fanboying: where Jurassic Park strained at the leash of its original PG certificate (to the extent it's since been reclassified as a 12A), Rebirth seems regrettably declawed. A winsome family tag along on this mission for no good reason; with the exception of the occasional chomp, these dinos are cuddly compared to the acid-spitting monsters of their inspiration. The past gets misremembered. Between a full-throttle Jerry Bruckheimer comeback, the diverse terrors of the horror renaissance, several bold South Indian crowdpleasers and the Jaws reissue, 2025 was the liveliest summer season for some while, but you'd never guess it from something this rotely uninspired. Nostalgia isn't what this reboot needs. Extinction might be.
Jurassic World: Rebirth is currently available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and releases on DVD via Universal tomorrow.
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