Jurassic World: Rebirth (dir. Gareth Edwards)

by Jack Martin | Jul 3, 2025

Certificate: 12A

Running Time: 133 mins

UK Distributor: Universal Pictures

UK Release Date: 2 July 2025

WHO’S IN JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH?

Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, Ed Skrein

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Gareth Edwards (director), David Koepp (writer), Patrick Crowley and Frank Marshall (producers), Alexandre Desplat (composer), John Mathieson (cinematographer), Jabez Olssen (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A group of mercenaries head to a dinosaur-ridden island for a dangerous mission…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH?

Unlike the dinosaurs, the Jurassic Park/World franchise simply refuses to go extinct, even after Colin Trevorrow’s progressively terrible trilogy coming in like the asteroid to potentially wipe it out. What the T-Rex and co didn’t have, though, is money; despite mixed-to-negative feedback, the Jurassic World movies made over $1 billion each, proving that there’s still an audience who still wants to see genetically recreated dinosaurs tearing into humans at every available opportunity, regardless of the quality.

It’s also why we now have Jurassic World: Rebirth, with Gareth Edwards mercifully taking the reins from Trevorrow, and honestly that literal change in direction makes all the difference, for not only is it the strongest of the Jurassic World entries – low bar, I know – but at times it actually does what so few of the Jurassic Park sequels set out to do but never quite manage, and recaptures some of the awe and wonder from the original Spielberg classic. However, those hoping for something remotely different from a franchise that has often repeated itself to almost comical degrees will, much like the poor humans at the mercy of their prehistoric predators, find themselves out of luck.

Taking place a few years after Jurassic World: Dominion, the film opens with humanity having largely moved on from dinosaurs, who due to un-survivable climates have retreated to more tropical hemispheres where humans are strictly forbidden from entering. That doesn’t stop pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) from recruiting former military operative Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), her team leader Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and palaeontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) for a covert mission to an abandoned research facility, where they are tasked with obtaining DNA samples from three of the largest dino species for a drug that could potentially cure human heart disease. Of course, as is the norm for any Jurassic movie, the mission is thwarted by deadly prehistoric reptilian creatures – some of them mutated from previous experimentations – as well as the arrival of civilian Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono), who after being shipwrecked also find themselves on the dinosaur-occupied island.

It’s very much a back-to-basics moment for the franchise, as Edwards opts for a tone and scale that is closer to not just the original Jurassic Park but all pre-World movies, in what feels like covert compensation for having to endure the unlikeable stupidity of Trevorrow’s trilogy over the past ten years. Edwards and screenwriter David Koepp (who also wrote the first two movies) combine elements of Jurassic Park 1-3, from the awe and wonder of Spielberg’s entries to the B-movie silliness of the third, and even throw in unused elements from Michael Crichton’s original novel like an intense sequence involving a T-Rex and an inflatable raft, into a film that is relatively straightforward in its plotting, filled with simple but identifiable characters, and actually makes the dinosaurs themselves feel genuinely intimidating at times, particularly one that looks like if someone spliced a Xenomorph with the Rancor from Return of the Jedi. There are points where the film even plays with your expectations, particularly with characters who are initially set up as pure buffet items or have such obnoxious introductions that you can’t wait for them to get killed, only for them to show surprising depth later on where you understand them a bit more, enough to where you’re a bit more hopeful they’ll survive than when you first meet them.

The approach is far more heartfelt and even-handed than any of the other Jurassic World films combined – there are even entire sequences, such as one set in a Titanosaurus field, that outdoes the entirety of Dominion in one fell swoop – but when it comes to variety, Rebirth ends up offering more of the same, much to its detriment. From the tropical jungle setting to the snooty businessman with ulterior motives to monologues about the ethics of screwing around with nature, it packs in just about every trope imaginable from this series without offering anything fresh enough to distinguish itself from the others. They are also dragged out across a rather lengthy runtime which, while not quite as interminable as Dominion (which Rebirth is just fourteen minutes shorter than, or almost thirty if you count the extended version), often feels so slow-moving, even with its thin plot and surface-level characters, that you have no choice but to point out the familiar conventions just to keep yourself entertained. And of course, you’ll have characters doing some incredibly dumb things just to put themselves in even more danger, though again compared to the most recent movies they are far more downplayed here.

With all that against it, Rebirth certainly isn’t going to win back over sceptics who may already be done with this franchise and its overwhelming familiarity. But in terms of showing audiences that a halfway decent Jurassic World movie is still possible, even after a decade of worsening quality, Gareth Edwards delivers on that promise with a safe yet acceptable return to its roots, one that at least has a sense of wonder and even optimism that Trevorrow’s trilogy sorely lacked. Perhaps most notably, it breathes a bit of life back into a franchise that may be on the path toward all-out extinction, especially if it remains this formulaic, but under the right creative minds could still be preserved before the inevitable asteroid strike.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Jurassic World: Rebirth is a major improvement over recent franchise entries, thanks to director Gareth Edwards’ loving recreation of the tone and scale from the first three Jurassic Park movies, but its reluctance to deviate from its own tired tropes doesn’t turn it into the rebirth that the title promises.