I’m sure most of you are familiar with the cinematic masterpiece that is Jurassic Park. But did you know that “Jurassic” has now become a $6 billion franchise and Jurassic World Rebirth is the seventh installment? If you tell me you’ve seen every film in the series, I would not believe you. I’ve seen the original Jurassic Park countless times, but never watched the following two films in that trilogy (The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III) and also saw Jurassic World in theaters when it first came out in 2015 (and liked it well enough) but also never cared to watch the following two films in that trilogy (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Jurassic World Dominion). Now, here we are in 2025 with another refresh? reboot? of the franchise. The previous film, Jurassic World Dominion, saw the worst reviews and box office performance of the Jurassic World trilogy (even though it still made over $1 billion), but Universal and executive producer Steven Spielberg would not let this series die out (was that the right decision? Depends on how you’re looking at it). They brought back original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp to write a brand new dinosaur story with entirely new characters. It seemed like exactly the kind of dumb, fun, action-packed summer blockbuster I could mindlessly enjoy. And I do have such love for the franchise I felt already primed to like Rebirth. Unfortunately, the experience wasn’t as mindless for me as I had hoped and expected and, whether it was the movie or my overthinking or both, I couldn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I wanted to.

Though I have never seen Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom or Jurassic World Dominion, I was vaguely familiar with the plot of both from my time working with Universal as a client at my job for a few years. I knew that the previous trilogy had concluded with dinosaurs expanding out of their island habitats where the parks were located, and infiltrating the rest of the world with humans and dinosaurs trying to settle into coexistence. Whether or not anyone going into Jurassic World Rebirth is familiar with that plotline at all, the film picks up five years after the end of Dominion. The Earth’s atmosphere has proven mostly inhospitable to dinosaurs except for a small area near the equator that resembles their native Mesozoic Era climate. Big Pharma executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) puts together an illegal expedition to the island (illegal because entering the area is strictly prohibited) to extract dino DNA as scientists at his company, ParkerGenix, believe those samples contain the key to a revolutionary heart disease medication worth trillions. He recruits mercenaries Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) along with paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) for the suicide mission. They travel to the abandoned island Saint-Hubert, the former home of the InGen research lab for cloning dinosaurs, to collect blood samples from the three largest species: the Mosasaurus in water, Titanosaurus on land, and Quetzalcoatlus of the air. Because it wouldn’t be a Jurassic movie without children in danger, the crew encounters the Delgado family along the way. Father Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters college-age Teresa (Luna Blaise) and 11-year-old Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) had been on a sailing trip when their boat was attacked by a Mosasaurus. The family is rescued by the expedition team but are then forced to tag along on the mission to Saint-Hubert. (In my opinion, a rather clumsy way to get civilians involved.) On their journey, the cast encounter the classic dinos like Velociraptors, Dilophosaurus and a T. rex, as well as some fresh new threats.

While Rebirth has been described as a “reset” because it has no returning characters from previous films in the franchise, my number one biggest issue with the movie and the detail that prevented me from really enjoying it was that it was, in fact, not a reset. Dominion left this world in a place where dinosaurs are everywhere. They have become a part of everyday life. Rebirth opens with a scene of a traffic jam in Brooklyn caused by a Brontosaurus getting stuck under the Manhattan Bridge. My problem with this is that dinosaurs should be a novelty. It’s not as interesting or exciting to see them when they’re everywhere. It becomes commonplace. Krebs tries to sell Henry on the expedition by saying it’s different seeing dinosaurs in their natural habitat vs. where they are now. And, yeah, sure, seeing a lion on an African safari is different than seeing one in a zoo. Of course it’s much cooler. But still you can see a lion if you want to. In the original film, seeing a dinosaur is like seeing a mythological creature. Something that should not exist but somehow does. And that sense of complete awe and shock and wonder and breathtaking, mindblowing astonishment that comes with seeing something like that for the first time can’t be compared to seeing something you’ve seen before but just in a different setting. The same goes for the moviegoing audience. When Jurassic Park came out, people had never seen dinosaurs like that on screen. The characters’ awe was mirrored in the public’s. But now we have a bunch of these movies. And seeing dinosaurs just isn’t as exciting as it once was. Rebirth provides some meta commentary on this as well. The abandoned InGen research lab on Saint-Hubert was created in response to “the public’s diminished interest in seeing the same old prehistoric creatures”. How do you make dinosaurs exciting again? InGen’s answer was to create new ones. Hybrids. Mutants. “Engineered entertainment” is what Henry calls it. Rebirth’s big bad is the Distortus Rex, a creature that looks more alien than dinosaur, with six legs and a bulging head. Creators of both dinosaurs and sequels in film franchises always feel the need to make everything bigger and better. Well, bigger isn’t always better. I personally think they should have just retconned Dominion and whatever else that came before that to make dinosaurs a rarity in this world once again. However, screenwriter David Koepp said, “I wanted to respect what occurred in the first six movies, because I hate when you watch a franchise movie and they gaslight you and say, ‘No, that never happened.’ Or, ‘That was a timeline.’ I hate that shit. So I said, ‘No, that all happened, but I want to make them special again. How do we do that?’ I wanted us to be back in their environment instead of them in ours.” On principle, I agree with him. But in this case, I think we could’ve (and should’ve) made an exception. I genuinely think this movie would have been so much better if we all collectively pretended the last few films never happened.

I realize that is a really nitpick-y complaint. It’s a small detail that unfortunately undermines the entire film for me. However, I don’t think most people will be as bothered by it as I was. And I will say there were some positive aspects to the film as well. Director Gareth Edwards creates some really good tension in a few key moments. The scene where Teresa has to drag a raft past a sleeping T. rex is perfect edge-of-your-seat, holding-your-breath Jurassic Park stuff. (Also, that scene is apparently taken from the original “Jurassic Park” novel but wasn’t included in the original film). The movie also looks great. Like Spielberg’s original film, it was shot with Panavision cameras on 35mm and there are some really cool shots throughout the movie. It’s a little weird to compliment a movie for not including something, but I really appreciated the restraint on not pushing a romance between Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey’s characters. They seemed to have a minor flirtation but I was really glad it didn’t become anything more. It would have felt too forced and the movie didn’t need it. 

Everyone’s mileage will vary on whether nods to the original Jurassic Park in this movie are a positive or not, but they’re there regardless. There are small touches like a shot of the “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” banner, characters petting herbivores in awe, a version of the raptors in the kitchen (except this time it’s the mutant Mutadons in a gas station convenience store), and the iconic John Williams theme (which always hits). But there are also thematic homages. Part of this story is always questioning ethics in science. In the original Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcolm says, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” That’s more relevant now than ever. But Dr. Henry Loomis also brings up the idea that “science is for everyone”, especially as it relates to pharmaceutical companies selling the new dino heart medication technology for trillions of dollars. Another part of watching a Jurassic movie is predicting who will make it to the end. People in the theater were so nervous when the children were in peril but, if you’ve ever seen a movie like this, you know they’re not going to kill a kid. Gareth Edwards and David Koepp said they tried to play with expectations of who would die, but I think that mostly only applies to Xavier. His selfish, slacker-type is exactly the kind of person audiences could be on board with being eaten, but the filmmakers let him live long enough to redeem himself. For the rest of the cast, though, it’s easy (and fun) to predict how long they’ll be around. 

I’ve seen Scarlett Johansson play Black Widow in the MCU for many years so watching her be a tough action star felt totally on par for me. This is essentially the same role. Jonathan Bailey is charming as always and got some good laughs from the crowd as did David Iacono as Xavier. Who, by the way, I was shocked to find out was Cam Cameron in The Summer I Turned Pretty?? I truly did not recognize him at all. This cast actually had a lot of those IMDb shockers. Rupert Friend as Martin Krebs I thought looked familiar but couldn’t place only to learn upon Googling that he was in Asteroid City and, more importantly to me, Homeland as Peter Quinn (should I rewatch that show?). Also, Ed Skrein who plays Bobby Atwood, a less relevant member of Duncan’s crew, is another familiar face who played the villain in Deadpool (Francis/Ajax) and was the original Daario Naharis in Game of Thrones (before he was recast, if you know you know).

Overall, I thought the movie was okay, but just not as good as I was hoping it would be. The crowd seemed into it, though. And it did well at the box office despite not great reviews. So maybe I’m an outlier just too stuck on the small things. Someone on Letterboxd said Rebirth gets closer to recapturing the Spielberg thing than the last trilogy does, but doesn’t come close to the sentimentality or suspense. I agree. Rewatching the original Jurassic Park, you still get chills the first time they see dinosaurs. The new ones don’t have the same wonder. I just couldn’t get past the setup and I was probably too hung up on that to have as much fun as I wanted. I never would have thought that of this year’s non-superhero summer blockbusters, I would have liked F1 more than Jurassic World, but here we are! The film doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but when a movie like this in a billion dollar franchise does well at the box office (and, honestly, even when it doesn’t), we can almost guarantee this won’t be the last we see of it. Hopefully, they can find a way (like life does *wink*) to recapture the wonder in future films. 

P.S. For those of you who don’t know, Christopher Nolan (Inception, Interstellar, Oppenheimer) announced that his next film will be an adaptation of The Odyssey starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Jon Bernthal, and more. Following the critical and commercial success of Oppenheimer, this movie is set to be huge. Since Jurassic World Rebirth and The Odyssey are both Universal Pictures movies, it was rumored that the first teaser for The Odyssey would air before Rebirth in theaters. I’ll be honest, I was equally excited for that as I was to actually see Rebirth. There were some leaks online from early screenings that I refused to watch because I wanted the real experience. I can’t remember the last time I was excited to see trailers in the theater. I used to love watching previews and deciding what I wanted to see next, but I guess the internet has kind of ruined that since I see everything online first now. The previews all played and then the AMC ads that say “turn off your phone” and “don’t talk” started playing, followed by the Nicole Kidman AMC ad. I started to wonder if maybe they pulled the teaser after the leaks. But then, immediately before the movie started, it happened. They waited til the last second, really making the moment as dramatic as possible. Since the teaser still hasn’t been released online (as of writing this on 7/23), I can tell you it was, of course, awesome. People in the theater were so confused about what was happening because they just expected the movie to start but I was like, “Do you guys even cinephile??? This is half of why I’m even here!” Yes, I’m exaggerating for effect, but I also did buy tickets to see The Odyssey in 70MM IMAX opening night the second they went on sale a year in advance (the movie comes out 7/17/26) so… am I exaggerating? Bottom line: don’t think I could possibly be more excited for this movie.

2025 Count: 47 movies, 33 seasons of television, 3 specials