Jurassic World: Rebirth (Universal, Amblin Entertainment, Dentsu, India Take One Productions, Latina Pictures, SKY Studios, Taiwan Film Company, Kennedy/Marshall Company, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Saturday, March 14, my husband Charles, his mother Edi, and I watched a streaming telecast of the 2025 movie Jurassic World: Rebirth. It was a well-made film directed by Gareth Edwards, who made his debut in 2010 with an ultra-low-budget horror film called Monsters and has since been called upon to helm such major-budget franchise films as Godzilla (the 2014 reboot that launched the so-called “Monsters cycle”) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), which Charles and I watched together on DVD and thought was essentially The Guns of Navarone: the bad guys have a super-weapon and the good guys send in a commando team to blow it up. Jurassic World: Rebirth was written by David Koepp, who wrote the first two films in the Jurassic Park cycle (the two, Jurassic Park and The Lost World, which Steven Spielberg personally directed). It was a good movie but also a surprisingly workmanlike one. Part of the problem was a low-voltage cast, with only one major “name” (Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, a secret agent and hired killer for an unnamed country) and one semi-“name” (Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid, a Black fishing boat captain who’s inveigled to sail the white people into the middle of dino-country; Ali is best known for having played pianist Don Shirley in Green Book, a nice, liberal film that won the 2019 Academy Award for Best Picture over Ryan Coogler’s radical masterpiece Black Panther, but here Ali is playing a typical insulting stereotype instead of the urbane, cultured Don Shirley). There’s an opening prologue set in Île Saint-Hubert in the Atlantic Ocean in 2008, where executives at InGen, the genetic engineering company that revivified the dinosaurs of old in the original Jurassic Park and its sequelae, decide once again that their dino-attractions have got stale and they need to create new monsters to display to the general population. Alas, a fugitive candy bar wrapper blows into the middle of the station’s security system and disables the locks that are supposed to keep the new dinosaur, Distortus Rex, safely confined. With the dinosaur loose on the island, the entire complement of humanity evacuates and leaves the island abandoned.

Flash-forward 17 years, and there’s been an unexpected development in the sudden co-existence between humans and dinosaurs posited in the previous two films, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Jurassic World: Dominion (2022). Whereas Jeff Goldblum’s character in Fallen Kingdom (the same one he played in the original 1993 Jurassic Park, as he had naturally aged) intoned, “Humans and dinosaurs are now gonna be forced to coexist. These creatures were here before us. And if we’re not careful, they’re gonna be here after. We’re gonna have to adjust to new threats that we can’t imagine. We’ve entered a new era. Welcome to Jurassic World,” David Koepp decided to avoid the bothersome necessity of having humans and dinosaurs co-exist for an extended period of time. Instead, after a spectacular sequence of a Brontosaurus stamping around the streets of New York City before it expires from natural causes, we’re told that because the climate of Earth c. 2025 is so radically different from what it was when the original dinosaurs actually lived, they’ve retreated to a band of climate on either side of the Equator that approximates what the whole Earth was like when dinosaurs ruled it. For obvious security reasons the governments of Earth have come together and declared that band off limits to humans, though that doesn’t stop Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), executive for the ParkerGenix drug company and the villain of the piece, from organizing an expedition to Île Saint-Hubert to collect genetic samples from three dinosaurs, the aquatic Mosasaurus, the land-based Titanosaurus, and the flying Quetzalcoatlus. The purpose is to figure out what made dino-hearts beat so long and hard in hopes that could be used to develop a drug to treat heart disease. Krebs recruits Zora Bennett and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, in a role obviously patterned on Richard Dreyfuss’s cute-scientist character in 1975’s Jaws) to his cause with the promise of eight-figure salaries if they join. Bennett in turn hires trawler captain Duncan Kincaid to take them on his boat, and Kincaid brings along a crew of maritime pilot LeClerc (Bechir Sylvain), mercenary Nina (Philippine Velge), and security expert Bobby Atwater (Ed Skrein).

Along the way they rescue a family who’ve become shipwrecked: Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo); his two daughters, teenager Teresa (Luna Blaise) and pre-pubescent Isabella (Audrina Miranda); and Teresa’s slacker boyfriend Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono). Xavier is obviously the comic-relief character, though unlike Frank McHugh and the others who played those sorts of roles in the 1930’s, Iacono is quite cute (and we get lots of yummy shots of him topless!). The intrepid explorers hope to collect the samples by shooting miniature harpoons into the dinosaurs that will draw their blood. Then, when their reservoirs are full, the tubes containing the samples will be fired out of the animals and will fly to safety via parachute-equipped vials. Along the way Dr. Loomis starts having ethical qualms about what they’re doing and whether, instead of turning the samples over to Krebs, maybe they should do the genetic sequencing themselves and release the files to the whole world as a public-domain item rather than letting ParkerGen have a monopoly on the world’s only effective treatment for heart disease. Once they get to the island, Kincaid’s boat runs aground on the shore, cutting off their principal route of escape. The team manages to collect all the samples, though they decide to take the one from the flying Quetzalcoatlus by drawing it from an egg rather than having to deal with an airborne dinosaur with a 35-foot wingspan and a body the size of a school bus. This requires an elaborate rappelling operation during which Dora, Henry, and LeClerc descend on ropes to the dinosaur’s egg, and though LeClerc gets eaten by one of the Quetzalcoatli, the other two return to safety and just barely retrieve the all-important sample. Zora announces that a helicopter is coming to extract them once the job is finished, but its crew has orders to do only a two-minute fly-by and to leave without landing if there’s no human response in that time. The crew finds the still-stocked grocery store the original 2008 inhabitants abandoned (Charles, who works at a grocery for a living, was startled that we were supposed to believe the food was still good after 17 years in a tropical environment without electrical power) and realize that running the lights is attracting the dinosaurs.

Various genetically engineered creatures menace them, including T. Rexes, a Mutadon (a hybrid aquatic/land-based creature), and our old friend Domitus Rex from the prologue, since David Koepp is a good enough disciple of Anton Chekhov that he uses the Domitus Rex as Chekhov’s pistol and has it dispatch the villain Martin Krebs at the end. The others flee in an outboard boat the original researchers had situated at the end of a long tunnel after somehow being able to use a life raft that the T. Rex toyed with for quite a long time but didn’t puncture. With Krebs dead, the remaining crew members decide to release the dino-DNA formula to the world even though this means they will end up broke. Jurassic World: Rebirth is comparable to the nearly forgotten third film in the Jurassic Park sequence, 2001’s Jurassic Park III, directed by Joe Johnston from a script by Paul Buchman, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. Like Jurassic Park III, Jurassic World: Rebirth is a coolly efficient thrill machine that suffers from the lack of any interesting human characters (though Jurassic Park III at least brought back Sam Neill’s character from the original Jurassic Park). It’s also set mostly on an island and therefore, after the first 2025 sequence of the dinosaur expiring on New York City streets, doesn’t give us the frisson of showing the beasts interact with humans in an urban environment, something that was de rigueur among the best dino-movies of the past (The Lost World, 1925; King Kong, 1933; and Gojira, the original 1954 Japanese version of Godzilla and a much superior version to the one palmed off on U.S. audiences two years later). Gareth Edwards is a potentially interesting director but, like Rian Johnson and Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son), he got a career boost from a low-budget independent first feature and drew big-budget franchise tent-pole assignments long before he was ready for them. As he did with the 2014 Godzilla and 2016’s Rogue One, Edwards plays by the rules and turns in a movie that delivers the entertainment goods, and has a vestigial anti-corporate social commentary that sits oddly in the current Zeitgeist and seems more like a leftover tic than a serious plot point, but despite one Academy Award nomination (for Best Visual Effects, which it lost to Avatar: Fire and Ash, third film in James Cameron’s stunning cycle), Jurassic World: Rebirth is nothing special.