A One Mann’s Movies review of “Jurassic World: Rebirth” (2025).
I went into this film with very mixed feelings. One half of my brain was saying “Oh God no, not another rehash of this tired old Dino-stuff”. The other half was saying “But it IS directed by Gareth Edwards, and you’ve REALLY liked his past work”. (Both “Rogue One” and “The Creator” made my Top 20 Films of the Year list, at No. 5 and No. 14 respectively.) Add onto that some insanely positive comments from the early screenings (the “best since Jurassic Park”) and I was edging my expectations more towards the positive than the negative.
Well! What a load of old tosh! I can only assume the “best since Jurassic Park” people were tweeting that from Universal’s all-expenses-paid influencer-screening in Aspen, Colorado. (Although I’ve just read Kevin Maher’s 4-star (4-STAR!!!) review in The Times, where he also describes it as “a more artful and sumptuous film than even Spielberg’s original”. Nurse, Nurse! The screens!) For both myself and the Illustrious Mrs Movie Man thought it was pretty universally dreadful.
Hatchet-job incoming!
Bob the Movie Man Rating:
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” Plot:
Pharmaceutical fixer guy Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) needs dino-DNA from the three largest species of land, water and air dinosaurs in existence. The problem is that the only place that these phials of blood can now be acquired is from the Caribbean island of Ile Saint-Hubert near French Guiana and that island is strictly quarantined. Krebs hires a team, led by ‘mercenary’ Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), to raid the island and get the samples.
Certification:
UK: 12A; US: PG-13. (From the BBFC web site: “Moderate threat, violence, language”.)
Talent:
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, Ed Skrein, Adam Loxley, Niamh Finlay.
Directed by: Gareth Edwards.
Written by: David Koepp. (Based on characters created by Michael Crichton…. but this is a stretch to say the least…. the only link back to the original material is one single mention of Alan Grant!)
Running Time: 2h 14m.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” Summary:
Positives:
- Johansson, Ali and Bailey all deliver really well on the material they are given.
- There are two good lines in the script I will give them credit for.
Negatives:
- The special effects are truly, TRULY awful.
- The characters are two-dimensional.
- The script is weak, some of the dialogue is creaky and the story predictable.
- The story really doesn’t follow on well from the last films.
- The dinosaurs seems to have had a common-sense bypass since the last movies.
- Enormous dinosaurs can hide in long grass… who knew?!
- Clunky callbacks to the original film.
- A score from Alexandre Desplat that is at times intrusive and annoying.
Review of “Jurassic World: Rebirth”:
I don’t care what anyone says, the special effects were just bad.
After the film, the Illustrious Mrs Movie Man commented “how can they make a film in this day and age with special effects that are THAT bad”. And I absolutely have to agree with her. I was reminded at times in here of the dodgy back-projection driving scenes of Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s “North By Northwest”. I mean, that was forgivable… it was made in 1959. There’s no excuse here.
In a scene where the Delgado family is being ‘terrorised’ on a river by a T-Rex, there was absolutely zero tension for me. It just didn’t look as if the dinosaur was ever there! Similarly, in a clifftop scene with a most unrealistic view, I was reminded of the dodgy special effects of “Paddington in Peru“, a film with half this film’s budget! In many ways (and justly), the SFX of “Jurassic Park” – a film made 32 years ago – look like a masterpiece in comparison.
A poor script from the usually reliable Koepp.
Even the great David Koepp can have a bad day. The script features a bunch of two-dimensional people doing two-dimensional things.
Zora Bennett (Gordon’s kid), played by Scarlett Johannsson, and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) are so bland that Koepp tries to force fit some depth by giving them fatuous and shallow back-stories: Bennett is grieving the loss of a colleague in Yemen, who (one assumes) she was having an affair with; Kincaid is separated from his wife due to an unspecified loss of their child. But it all feels like flimsy set-dressing, with no relevance to the later story or emotional resonance.
Credit where credit is due.
The dialogue is also nothing special except that is for two lines that stand-out from the rest. The first is when the annoying potential-Delgado-son-in-law, Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono), gets a look at the peril the island presents and muses “When a old person buys a bed, do they think ‘Is this the bed I’m going to die in’?” The second is when palaeontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) says that he wants to die in a warm shallow sea and be quickly covered in silt! (Although Koepp spoils it by adding some mansplaining after than, when he should have just let it be.)
The Delgado family.
Where the film does ‘pull a Spielberg’ is in sensibly separating the Delgado family from the well-armed contingent and having them cross the island to safety. Yes, this is again leaning back into the trip of Alan Grant, Lex and Tim from “Jurassic Park”. But it at least adds some humanity to the story. (How they got together though is stupid: why on earth would Reuban (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and young Isabella (Audrina Miranda) choose to jump off the boat into dinosaur-infested waters?? It makes utterly no sense!)
Reuban unfortunately can’t decide how bad his leg is injured: sometimes he says it’s too bad to walk on; at other times he seems to be walking perfectly well; at other times he thinks “ooh, I’d better have a stick”. I think this guy needs a disability test before the government gives him ANY PIP benefits…!
A touch of ’28 Years’ cop-out in the story.
I also had issues with the story, also by Koepp.
We start with a cop-out in the same vein as “28 Years Later“. At the end of “28 Weeks Later” the virus had already infected mainline Europe, an inconvenience brushed under the carpet by Alex Garland in the sequel with an opening title. Similarly, the plot for “Rebirth” falls apart if DNA is available from all of the huge dinosaurs already roaming the earth after “Jurassic World: Dominion“. But, who would have thought it? It turns out the dinos have all caught a chill and either died off or – like Floridian Snowbirds – migrated to equatorial climes. (“So, why couldn’t the team just go to some of those open equatorial countries to get their DNA?”. “Ssssh, don’t ask difficult questions”).
The general concept of having to get three DNA-McGuffins from three different species is also a lazy bit of plotting. Why do they have to be from a land, sea and air species? Just to make life difficult? The script also states that they need these huge animals because they have the biggest hearts and therefore “live the longest”…. well, that definitely isn’t the case for dogs, so I don’t see why it should be for dinosaurs?!
How do you hide an elephant in a cherry tree? You paint its toenails red.
The film also has some utterly ridiculous moments. The most heinous is when the intrepid gang are crossing an open area of grassland (presumably a call-back to the Velociraptor scene in 1997’s “The Lost World: Jurassic Park”). Imagine their surprise when they turn round and find two enormous Titanosaurs with enormous tails just standing there, clearly with love in the air and about to have – in the words of Black Adder – ‘rumpy-pumpy’!
Now, maybe Titanosaurs are really, REALLY good at hide-and-seek. But – I’m sorry – the reveal is utterly ludicrous, even more so when the camera zooms back, to John Williams’ classic theme, to show the whole valley is filled with about another hundred of the things within easy view. Perhaps ‘Zee’, Kincaid, et al. were all just staring at their phones like the annoying people crossing Waterloo Bridge in the morning? (Yes, I know the original film could be tarred with having the same issue when Grant and Ellie have their first dinosaur encounter: but at least they were travelling fast in a jeep… not walking on foot.)
In another issue with scale, the T-Rex in the river is sometimes diving and up to its neck in water and then, in the next frame, only up to its ankles.
Generally dumb dinos.
I’m sure dinosaurs were never the smartest tools in the box (a T-Rex brain has been estimated to be about two-thirds smaller than a human’s… about the same size as a monkey), we had grown to fear them from the previous films as intuitive and clever hunters. In this film they just mostly seem to be stupid. A T-Rex can’t seem to see people, running around making a lot of noise in its peripheral vision, and then when it does is foiled by a bit of rock in the way; a Mosasaurus seems able to attack a yacht with ‘food’ on it but seems incapable of eating that food when it is readily available to it; a finale scene has a ‘D-Rex’ cornering its prey but unable to lunch. The result is that I seldom felt thrilled by any of the dino action in the film.
Clunky callbacks.
The film lumbers along with way too many clunky callbacks to the previous films:
- “Objects appear closer in the mirror” – yes, we already did that way better in “Toy Story 2”;
- A fluttering down of a “Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth” banner (sigh);
- Duncan waving red flares;
- A dino-hunt in the aisles of a gas station, almost an exact copy of the kitchen scene done so muc better in JP;
- A mad-drive to the docks, past the dock sign;
- (There are probably lots more.)
Intrusive music.
I normally enjoy Alexandre Desplat’s film music. But here, I found some of the music plain annoying. I’m not sure he really nailed some of the action-based music. And in other dialogue-based scenes (one in particular featuring Loomis in the museum), there is some hugely unfitting tinkling music going on in the background that I found incredibly intrusive and annoying.
So, what DID I like?
Having got all of that off my chest, what can I say that is positive about the film?
Well, the star cast of Scarlett Johannsson and Mahershala Ali are both professional and deliver the material they are given as best they can. Johannsson makes for a great female action hero. And Ali’s personable 1000-Watt smile is used to great effect.
The film is also great for Jonathan Bailey as Dr. Henry Loomis. The “Bridgerton” heartthrob doubles-down on his somewhat forgettable “Wicked” role and delivers a really personable character. One of the few characters that I could really root for.
Summary Thoughts on “Jurassic World: Rebirth”
In looking at social media over the last couple of days since I saw this film, I am genuinely bemused by some of the good reviews for this one. Are there two prints of the same film in circulation: one good and one dodgy? If not, then it is certainly a Marmite film. I’m the first to die-in-a-ditch to defend the rights of different people to get different things out of a film and rate it differently. But sometimes I just don’t get it. For this one just felt like 135 minutes of life I will never get back again.
Sadly, it seems to be making a ton of money: so “Jurassic Park/World 7” will almost certainly not be the last jaunt into dino-land.
Where to Watch it (Powered by Justwatch)
Trailer for “Jurassic World: Rebirth”:
The trailer is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jan5CFWs9ic.
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