The strangest thing has happened to the Jurassic Park films over the past 32 years. In the original movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, the characters were mesmerized by dinosaurs. They saw these amazing beings, resurrected from DNA that was hundreds of millions of years old, and either stared in wonder or shrieked with fear. (Spielberg is known to be pretty good at capturing that whole “awe” thing.) But since then, each successive sequel has chipped away at that sense of discovery. In particular, the first three Jurassic World movies, which spun off the earlier films, even hinged on a feeling of widespread apathy toward the creatures that people previously couldn’t look away from.
This indifference has become a bizarre pattern—one that the franchise’s newest installment, Jurassic World Rebirth, seems intent on changing. I will give the director Gareth Edwards, who’s made epic blockbusters such as Rogue One and 2014’s Godzilla, some credit here: Rebirth, like the filmmaker’s other movies, has an impressive sense of scale. The action is also visually clean and easy to follow, and the film takes its time to showcase the ancient CGI-generated beasts in their environment. But my praise ends there: This is otherwise a plodding, disenchanting experience that adds some more roaring dinosaurs in exchange for any memorable characters or narrative stakes. It has little reason to exist, beyond cashing in at the summer box office.
Rebirth serves as a vague reboot of the Jurassic World trilogy. Audiences showed up for the trio of films, which grossed several billion dollars in total at the box office—but each entry was progressively more reviled by critics. 2015’s Jurassic World introduced a fading dinosaur theme park where things soon went horribly wrong; by the start of 2022’s risible Jurassic World Dominion, the oversize reptiles were fully living among humans. They had essentially become little more than an everyday nuisance. I’m still unsure why anyone thought that rendering these rare creatures as ubiquitous and nonthreatening would be an exciting development, but it certainly was not.
With his film, Edwards attempts a reset. Dinosaurs still walk the Earth (thanks to the advanced DNA-cloning technology deployed back in Jurassic Park), but they can’t survive in most of today’s ecosystems. Thus, the beasts have retreated to a narrow equatorial band more reminiscent of their prehistoric environment, and are largely congregating on one remote island off the coast of French Guiana. This premise transparently harkens back to the franchise’s early aesthetic: There’s an abandoned jungle, overgrowth on science labs, and strange noises in the distance.
The plot will also be familiar to fans of the series—it’s nearly a mashup of two earlier sequels, The Lost World and Jurassic Park III. A band of highly skilled mercenaries, led by the covert-ops expert Zora Bennett (played by Scarlett Johansson), head to the island to extract dino-blood, intended for pharmaceutical-research purposes. At the same time, a civilian named Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is crossing the Atlantic on a boat with his kids in tow; the family shipwrecks and thus gets mixed up in the adventure. Filling out the group of dino-hunters are hardened soldiers, including Duncan Kincaid (a squandered Mahershala Ali), and craven capitalists, such as the businessman Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend, doing bargain-basement villainy). But only one character actually seems to care about the reptiles: the paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who’s there to excitedly jabber about science once in a while. For everyone else, the proceedings are just a heavy, sweaty inconvenience.
As such, it’s hard not to feel the sweltering boredom wafting off the ensemble. As Zora, Johansson is at least high-energy, yet her spirited line deliveries don’t make up for her character’s almost distressing ignorance of the dangers around her. The rest of the group is rendered by capable performers, but their dialogue consists of rote exposition and the occasional scream, as pterodactyls dive-bomb them and T. rexes snap in their faces. And though there’s plenty of prehistoric-monster action, the film lacks the designated “hero” or “villain” creature of Jurassics past. Without one, the dinos amount to little more than wallpaper.
The closest that Rebirth comes to innovation is with the “Distortus rex,” a mutated T. rex with a big blobby head and six limbs. It’s a weirder-than-usual product of genetic engineering gone wrong—and, as a creation of more straightforward horror, a potentially fun new spin for the series. But the design for the Distortus is more comical than not; it’s a silly, lumbering non-threat that’s mostly kept at bay. The original Jurassic Park already provided plenty of material about science running amok, and the first Jurassic World was a cautionary tale about capitalism falling prey to its worst instincts. For all of the impressive effects on display, Rebirth has nothing to add to the Jurassic canon beyond a simple warning: Going to an island full of dinosaurs would probably be a bad idea.
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