Jurassic World Rebirth (Spoiler Review)

“We put ourselves in a place where we don’t belong.”

– Dr. Henry Loomis

I’ve been a long-time Jurassic Park fan for as long as I can remember. I’ve watched the movies, read the books, worked on all the Jurassic-attractions at Universal Orlando (minus Raptor Encounter), and collected the memorabilia for a large majority of my life. Even the films that I know are objectively “not great” such as Jurassic Park III and Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom I can still find enjoyment in as they have their place in the franchise as a whole. I was hyped out of my mind in 2015 when Jurassic World stomped into theaters, but with the release of Jurassic World Dominion in 2022 (the directors cut released later was an improvement, but didn’t solve the issues I had), I could start to see how much Universal seemed to fumble this franchise toward the end, and this movie in a way highlights the biggest issue I had in that regard.

This review is going to eventually be focused on Jurassic World Rebirth and will contain several specific spoilers, but I will also go into my thoughts and opinions on the state of the Jurassic franchise as a whole to give context to some of the issues I had with this film.

Ever since 1993, the franchise, or for the most part Dr. Ian Malcolm specifically, has been constantly warning us that nature cannot be controlled and once we open up genetic power there is no putting it back in the box. The lunch scene in the original film sets this up perfectly with Malcolm explaining the inherit dangers with genetic power and what they’ve done at Jurassic Park, while John Hammond refuses to see beyond the miracle he’s accomplished. That entire scene I believe to be the thesis statement for not only the film, but the franchise. We had five films since then telling us how these animals CANNOT leave these islands. The franchise has naturally always been heading that direction beginning with the first novel where they have to prevent the velociraptors from escaping, and was showcased even further in 1997 with The Lost World Jurassic Park in the “San Diego Incident”.

It’s all perfectly set up with the multiple warnings sprinkled in through the various films, and we finally get there at the end of Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom. That film, though not very good, leaves us with one of the most interesting cliffhangers in the series. The thing that should never happen finally happened, and we’ve been told so many times that it would wreak havoc on global ecosystems and have untold consequences if that were to happen….

…until the final monologue in Jurassic World Dominion, where we’re told “If we’re to survive we’ll have to trust each other, depend on each other: coexist” and then cuts to a series of shots of dinosaurs and animals living side-by-side, with little to no consequences for the actions we’ve been warned about for the previous couple of decades. These animals are invasive species with genetically accelerated growth and reproductive rates and no natural predators, there’s so many stories to be told in this new “Jurassic World” they’ve set up so well, only to drop the ball pretty hard. Jurassic World Dominion should’ve been Ian Malcolm’s ‘I told you so’ film, and it absolutely blows my mind that he was denied that after such a well paced setup for it.

All of that being said, this brings us to the year 2027, when Jurassic World Rebirth takes place in the canon.

SPOILER WARNING

Though I do have SEVERAL thoughts on this film and the direction it steers the franchise, like I stated in the beginning I still enjoy each of these movies in some capacity. I am very harsh on them and some of my thoughts are so specific that I’m not sure if the casual viewer would notice or even care. I am incredibly passionate about this franchise and dinosaurs in general, so I fully acknowledge that some of my issues are very nitpicky, but they’re still unfortunately issues. I do not believe this film to be the worst thing to happen to the series, Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous Seasons 4 & 5 on Netflix claim that award. There are several things done in this specific movie I’d like to talk about, so I’m going to go through them in chronological order as the film progresses.
Last chance: spoiler warning.

The first thing right out the gate that bothered me about this film is about half of its marketing ended up being completely false. The most obvious one being the quote Zora says in almost every trailer & TV spot “This island was the research facility for the original Jurassic Park.”. For starters, that line didn’t even end up being in the film, which is fine because that happens all the time with movies, dialogue gets trimmed down in post-production the closer to release a movie gets and I’ll get to the issue in a minute. The movie begins, and we’re introduced to a new island: Ile Saint-Hubert in the year 2010.

This is our 4th dinosaur island for those keeping track: Isla Nublar (Jurassic Park, Jurassic World, Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, Camp Cretaceous Seasons 1-3), Isla Sorna (The Lost World Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III), Mantah Corp Island (Camp Cretaceous Seasons 4-5), & Ile Saint-Hubert (Jurassic World Rebirth).
I’m not entirely sure why they decided to make up the last two islands when we already have Isla Sorna that we haven’t been to since 2001. Ile Saint-Hubert is at the very least, very visibly unique and distinguishable from the other three. The on-location shooting in Thailand is very evident and looks very good in the film.

(deep Jurassic-lore alert)
After John Hammond’s passing in 1998, Simon Masrani bought out InGen (International Genetic Technologies), the company had recently gone under after the very public “San Diego Incident” in 1997. InGen, now under Masrani Global, began construction of Jurassic World in 2002, clearing out and reclaiming Isla Nublar, while transporting dinosaurs from Isla Sorna to stock the park (according to the Jurassic World viral website in 2015-2018 and “The Evolution of Claire” by Tess Sharpe). Jurassic World would then open to the public in 2005. Sometime between 2005 and 2010, the public became relatively bored of dinosaurs (a stretch, but whatever), and Masrani needed something new and fresh to keep park attendance at an all-time high. The research being done on Ile Saint-Hubert in 2010 led to the eventual creation of the indominus rex which was planned for Jurassic World’s 10th anniversary in 2015, and then led to the downfall of the park and InGen as a whole. InGen’s assets and research were then later purchased and distributed by several other corporations.
(Rupert Friend’s character has a line of dialogue that connects the pieces)

My Jurassic-nerd brain ate that up, the lore works and it’s awesome, so why do I have an issue with it? Because it shows that this island in fact has zero connection to the original Jurassic Park. I don’t know if something happened late in production that made this change from a Jurassic Park island to a Jurassic World island, but it truly feels like a lie that was utilized as nostalgia bait to bring back doubtful fans after the previous two films. Again, I love the lore, I hate how they marketed said-lore because it wasn’t a big enough moment in the film that it felt they needed to misdirect to avoid spoilers with.

All of that aside, I thought the inciting incident was well done up until a point. The Snickers™ wrapper I thought was a perfect example of the “butterfly effect” that Malcolm describes in the original film, until it being sucked into the vent shut down the entire security system across the entire research facility. It could’ve just prevented the door from closing all the way, allowing whatever gasses they were using to attempt to euthanize the Distortus rex (D-rex) to leak into the facility, causing an island-wide evacuation and that would’ve been fine. I’ll talk more about the D-rex later on. On a positive here, the logo reveal at the end of this scene is incredible. The use of the color red in this moment and through the rest movie is very unique and used incredibly well.

17 Years Later

The rest of Jurassic World Rebirth takes place 5 years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, and the planet’s modern environment has proven inhospitable to prehistoric life. Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures can now only be found in a few isolated locations near the equator (RIP to Blue in snowy Nevada). While I’m relatively ok with this reasoning, and they later pull one of Malcolm’s lines from the novel to explain it, but it just shows me how hard the dinosaurs-finally-getting-to-the-mainland ball was dropped where they decided to reel that back just one film later. While I understand a return to form after the box office results of Jurassic World Dominion, it’s just sad to see so much buildup and anticipation just for them to pull back so suddenly.

We’re introduced to Martin Krebs, Zora Bennett, and Dr. Henry Loomis as Loomis’ museum is closing down. Dr. Loomis explains that they need blood samples from living specimens of the 3 largest prehistoric species to help find a cure for heart disease. My nitpick here (and I’m fully aware this is an insane nitpick) is Dr. Loomis is a paleontologist and he incorrectly refers to quetzalcoatlus and mosasaurus as ‘dinosaurs’ when they are not. This would’ve been an awesome opportunity to have one of the other characters make this mistake, and he throw in a “not dinosaurs”, but again I’m aware this is a crazy paleo-nerd nitpick. The introduction to our 3 titans is very well done though and very ominous with their skeletons looming overhead while Dr. Loomis describes them.

The characters in this film were extremely hit or miss. I thoroughly enjoyed Jonathan Bailey as Dr. Henry Loomis, Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid (probably my favorite performance in the film), and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Reuben Delgado (the dad). The other characters I thought were extremely forgettable, and I was hopeful with David Koepp writing the screenplay after having written the screenplays for both Jurassic Park and The Lost World Jurassic Park. There’s several characters in here that were only placed in the film to add a body count, and none of their deaths really felt consequential to anything in the story. I wanted this movie to have an emotional death like Eddie has when saving the trailers in The Lost World, or even a main character we get to know such as Mr. Udesky in Jurassic Park III. The only characters that die in this movie (besides Rupert Friends’ character, but his death even feels uneventful) are the mercenaries, and you kind of figure out right out the bat that they’re only in this movie to be dinosaur food.

Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett I felt was ‘ok’ at best, she has several shifts that didn’t make a ton of sense to me. For example, there’s an entire scene dedicated to hearing about how sad and broken she is that someone died on her last mission. A few minutes and two character deaths later, she’s going on about how they need to hurry up with the mission so they can get rich. I get in the context of that moment she’s in survival mode, but her transition through the film didn’t really land for me unfortunately, she also seems to bounce back and forth between being rude and suddenly being ultra-kind as well. I believe this to be a script issue and not an actress issue. I did love how excited she was about this franchise in every behind the scenes interview she’s in, and you can tell it’s genuine.

I have a lot of praises when it comes to the dinosaurs and other prehistoric life in this film, and they actually solved several of my complaints from the previous entries in the franchise. There are three scenes in this movie that I absolutely loved: the mosasaur attack, T. rex river raft, and the quetzalcoatlus nest.

I truly loved that the animals finally behaved like animals again, this is something we haven’t really seen since The Lost World Jurassic Park. In the first two films, heavy emphasis was placed on the dinosaurs being animals reacting to their environments rather than blood-thirsty monsters hunting you down as this is what separated these films from monster movies. Dr. Alan Grant even directly says, “They’re not monsters, Lex, they’re animals.” and The Lost World goes even deeper into their behavior with the stegosaurus herd and the tyrannosaur pair protecting their baby. Since then, the Jurassic movies have devolved into monster films, and the hybrids such as the indominus rex, indoraptor, distortus rex, and mutodons are allowed to act like monsters because it sets them apart from the natural animals that also exist in this space. However, there’s moments such as in Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom when the volcano is erupting and the carnotaurus decides it’s going to stop what its doing and hunt another dinosaur, and then the tyrannosaur stops and decides it’s going to hunt the hunting carnotaurus. This would never happen, these animals would be in pure “I need to get away from the volcano” mode. Dinosaur behavior has always been my absolute biggest critique of the sequels (minus The Lost World).

I found it ironic that the animals living on actual monster-island in this one behaved more like animals than the ones in the previous several movies. I loved the cross-species symbiosis of the spinosaurus and mosasaurus, it would’ve been awesome to have explored that a little more (this will come up later in my “I wish they…” section). We see the tyrannosaur taking a nap and drinking from a river before the action picks up. Even with the action (which this scene is pulled straight from the book and actually improved upon. I’ve waited a long time to see this sequence), the tyrannosaur doesn’t just sprint over and start attacking. It notices something different in it’s environment, wanders over to investigate, realizes it’s food, and then pursues. And the quetzalcoatlus doesn’t attack the team because it’s evil, it’s just defending it’s nest. Dinosaur behavior is such a high-bar to clear for me in films, and I thought they hit that one right on the head in this movie and I won’t stop praising that aspect.

The designs of the tyrannosaur and mosasaur are the best I think we’ve seen in the franchise, the color patterns and skin texture was so good on both of them. I do wish we could’ve seen this tyrannosaur more, but this movie resolved two of my complaints from the previous films not giving the mosasaur anything to do but “jump and grab” and the quetzalcoatlus not getting an “on the ground” scene. We spend a very long time with the mosasaur which I loved, the entire sequence feels like Jaws, but not in a “we’re just going to copy Jaws” kind of way. I also loved seeing the quetzalcoatlus scuttling around the tight space of their nest really showcased the scale of how big these pterosaurs actually were. In Jurassic World Dominion we see it attack a plane, but never got a scene of it on the ground with our characters because we so quickly move onto another species. I think this scene, along with Gareth Edwards’ ability to showcase scale really well, gave the maximum impact I wanted it to have and I was very content with it. It gave me literally exactly what I was asking for when walking out of Jurassic World Dominion 3 years ago.

The scene with the titanosaurs in the field isn’t my favorite scene like the other 3 I’ve talked about were, but it is very well done. The suspension of disbelief that these 60 foot-tall creatures (although in the movie they’re closer to 150 feet, but we are on monster island so it’s ok) were laying down and hiding in the chest-high grass that our group is marching through was stretched a little. Overall, it’s a very “been there, done that” sequence with the Jurassic Park theme playing and the large sauropods walking around. However, the moment when the music stops and Jonathan Bailey reaches out to touch it and gets emotional, 10/10. This scene and a few others in the film really stands out in a good way that they shot on location in Thailand, the locations were beautiful and truly brings this movie to life in a way a soundstage can’t. This is unfortunately where the parts that I really enjoy ends.

The Third Act

I enjoy the slow build of the first act, and thoroughly enjoy the second act. However, this movie quickly falls apart for me in the final scenes in this film. I’ll start with the mutodons (the velociraptor/pteranodon hybrid) and the lack of velociraptors. While I do understand cutting them out of the film, I wouldn’t mind the lack of raptors in this movie if I haven’t been craving a scary velociraptor sequence since 2001, we’ve only had our best friend Blue in recent films. Velociraptors used to be terrifying, especially in Jurassic Park III, and now because of Blue they’ve been treated like man’s best friend ever since. I would’ve liked to have seen a quick raptor chase where the family makes it to the gas station and they realize the velociraptors refuse to even approach the building, this would give you a sense of “we escaped, but what have we run into?” with something like that, and it would’ve satisfied both worlds.

However, the fake-out introduction to the mutodons is very well done, I’ll give it that. We haven’t in this franchise yet seen anything actively hunt and prey upon velociraptors, so that was fresh to see, but I still wish we could’ve gotten just a tiny bit of screentime with them. My issue is every time we see the mutodons after this scene, is they just act like velociraptors, which just made me wish they were scary velociraptors. They gave these hybrids wings, so I was hoping we’d get a unique sequence with them, but they opt to just re-create the “raptors in the kitchen” scene from the first film again. Literally everything these creatures did, velociraptors can also do. The only thing they’d do differently is they’d fly in and out of the frame, but they never used their flying capabilities to pursue our characters. I do like that we quickly got the “raptors chewing through the skylight” from the novel, that was cool to see. However, having velociraptors chase you down through the sewer pipes I think would’ve been just as scary, if not scarier than the mutodons, because we already know what velociraptors are capable of.

The distortus rex. Universal actually did a pretty good job keeping its design a secret until the last couple of weeks leading up until the movie’s release, I was upset seeing several of them on display in a gift shop at the exit of the Jurassic Park River Adventure at Universal Islands of Adventure just a few days before I was able to see the film. Besides that, they gave us just enough glimpses to know this thing was a monster and set our expectations, but never showing us much of what it was capable of.

In an interview, Gareth Edwards stated that he “wanted us to feel sorry for it as well as terrified, because its deformities have caused it some pain, and there’s an encumbrance to it.” With this, I was hopeful we were going to get a sympathetic “Frankenstein’s Monster” story with this creature. This was set up earlier in the film when Dr. Henry Loomis explains that it’s inhumane to keep these monsters alive after they’re discarded. They aren’t natural, they’re the only one of their kind, they didn’t ask to be made, and according to the director: their man-made deformities cause it pain. This monster is scary, but not evil, and by no fault of it’s own. The movie unfortunately doesn’t explore this in the slightest and dives straight into bloodthirsty evil monster.

The D-rex isn’t around for long either, and it also rapidly changes size through the sequence. It goes from lumbering around in the fog, to having an actual helicopter in it’s mouth, to being about T. rex sized soon after. They quickly establish that it’s attracted to light, so Duncan lights a flare to distract lure it away so the rest of the characters can escape on a boat. Duncan’s light goes out and it just walks away (I guess?). After about 10 seconds in the dark he fires a flare into the sky, waves another flare around, and the characters use the boat’s flashlight to locate him and pick him up. At this point, since they had just established the light thing maybe 4 real-time minutes ago, I believed we weren’t done and the D-rex was coming back. I was wrong, they just pick up Duncan and ride away into the sunset with their little boat. Now I do appreciate this movie ending with them just escaping rather than on a dinosaur fight, it just ends VERY suddenly and anticlimactically. To rub salt in the wound, they finish out by attempting to re-create the pelican scene from the ending of the first film but with dolphins instead, completely missing the dinosaur/bird symbolism that the moment they’re copying had. On top of even all of that, they’ve heavily established that the coastline is unsafe for boats, as we’ve had two major sequences of the spinosaurs and mosasaur teaming up to take down not one, but two much larger boats, but since the movie is over the ocean is safe now I guess.

An ending I would’ve liked to have seen (and I know I just said I was glad it wasn’t a dinosaur fight) was to revisit the spinosaur/mosasaur symbiotic behavior from earlier. When the D-rex follows the boat into the shallow water like it did, have the spinosaurs work together to drag it out into deeper water for the mosasaur to finish off, as it’s too big for the spinosaurs to kill on their own, and the mosasaur cannot enter shallow water as also established earlier in the film. This would have added payoff to the symbiotic behavior, given the movie a final “bang”, and also would’ve had a reason for the mosasaur and spinosaurs to not attack the boat as it’s leaving the island. This movie also would’ve been an interesting opportunity to pull the ending from the novel, because if dinosaurs shouldn’t be left to their own devices, actual monsters definitely shouldn’t be. I’ve heard the original ending of the film was different and it changed partway through production, and with how suddenly this movie ends I’m curious to see what it was going to be.

I know I spent the last several paragraphs of this pretty much tearing this movie up, but a vast majority of my issues come from the final 20 or so minutes of the movie. I do for the most part enjoy it up until the quetzalcoatlus scene, and I don’t hate this movie by any means, but when it crashes: it crashes hard. I liked it more than Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom, but less than the extended directors cut of Jurassic World Dominion. My overall rating for Jurassic World Rebirth is a 4/10. There are several elements that I like about this movie, but the entire third act, and several of the dialogue-heavy scenes (especially the one between Duncan and Zora early on in the film) are pretty hard to trudge through. I think if they had spent more time working on this movie it could’ve been greatly improved upon, it had one of the fastest production turnarounds I’ve ever heard of. It didn’t get a director onboard until February 2024, started filming in June 2024, and released July 2025.

I don’t like the argument that “it’s just a silly dinosaur movie, what else are you asking for other than dinosaurs” when the first couple are very intelligent films, and the very core of the franchise is intelligent, it’s just sad to see them stepping away from that with the recent additions. There’s not anything wrong with enjoying this movie, there are some very solid sequences tucked away in this film, and if you enjoyed it I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong. I just don’t like that argument when I feel I have actual valid criticisms with this franchise, I got some of that with Fallen Kingdom and Dominion as well.

It’s not bad enough for me to beg them to stop making more Jurassic movies (I’ll politely ask though), and even if they keep making them, the blood-oath I signed with this franchise requires that I’m still there at every single premier. I’d just love to see them put more care into these films, and stop relying on name-recognition alone to carry it. I don’t know much else that you can do with this series, especially since they’ve already stepped back from the “out in the world” aspect of it. I hope if they make another (which judging by the box office so far on this one I think they will), that they really take their time with it, I don’t want to watch my favorite movie franchise founder out.

My current ranking of the Jurassic films:

1. Jurassic Park (1993)
2. Jurassic World (2015)
3. The Lost World Jurassic Park (1997)
4. Jurassic Park III (2001)
5. Jurassic World Dominion (directors cut)(2022)
6. Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)
7. Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom (2018)