Jurassic World Rebirth Review: Finally, A Dinosaur Movie That Recalls What Made Us Care

Jurassic World Rebirth begins with a brazen act of creative arson, razing the entire concept of 2022's Dominion in a single throwaway remark about climatic change annihilating most dinosaurs. This isn't simply a course correction; it's a full-throated vow that this franchise will abandon its pursuit of Marvel-style worldbuilding in favor of remembering what made Michael Crichton's premise so brilliant: dinosaurs are most terrifying when surrounded, secretive, and really hungry.

For the first time since the 1993 original, I experienced genuine wonder when viewing a Jurassic film. Gareth Edwards' camera lingers on amber-lit closeups of scales and feathers, making us feel the weight of 65 million years between these creatures and our planet. After years of Velociraptor buddy cop dynamics, this film reaffirms the fundamental truth: an apex predator is not your friend; it is your extinction event.

Spielberg's Shadow Looms Large—And That's A Good Thing.

What We Lost When Jurassic Park Stopped Being a Horror Franchise.

David Koepp's writing reads like a direct response to the franchise's identity dilemma. By transporting Scarlett Johansson's mercenary crew to an abandoned InGen facility overrun by the grotesque "Distortus Rex" (a Cronenbergian nightmare blending T-Rex bulk with beluga skull protrusions), the film returns to the original trilogy's formula: 60% Alien, 30% Jaws, and 10% childlike wonder being ripped to bloody shreds. The famed raft scenario from Crichton's novel, long thought unfilmable in 1993, has become the franchise's most terrifying setpiece since the kitchen scene.

Edwards photographs these dinosaurs like kaiju in a Japanese monster movie, allowing their sheer physicality to overshadow human arrogance. When the Distortus Rex charges at Johansson's squad amid a nighttime rainstorm, you can almost smell the rain-slicked scales. When compared to Dominion's sterile CGI locust swarms, it becomes clear that we traded Spielberg's Spielbergian charm for corporate committee filmmaking. Rebirth restores the auteur touch.

The cast deserved more than this script.

Scarlett Johansson Anchors The Chaos, But Character Development Is Extinct

To be clear, no one goes to a Jurassic movie to hear Shakespearean monologues. However, recruiting Oscar winners like Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey simply to use them as exposition distributors wastes valuable resources. Johansson shines as Zora Bennett, a PTSD-stricken soldier whose practical survival instincts collide with Bailey's idealistic paleobotanist. Their chemistry ignites during an Aliens-inspired scenario in which Compys is stalked through ventilation shafts - a masterclass in using shadows and sound design instead of jump scares.

However, for every character beat that lands, two more are eaten by the ravenous mouth of setpieces. The stranded family subplot (starring Manuel Garcia Rulfo's hapless fisherman) feels like Spielberg-lite emotive DNA splicing, while Rupert Friend's nasty pharma CEO could as well wear a "Please Boo Me" name tag. These are not characters; they are Jurassic Park ride vehicles.

Why Does Rebirth Work As A Franchise Epitaph?

Hubris was consistently the most dangerous predator.

Two elements moved me unexpectedly: seeing practical animatronics merged flawlessly with CGI (the Mosasaurus breach haunts my nightmares), and the script's understated admission that dinosaurs may not be franchise workhorses. By closing on a note of hard-won equilibrium rather than sequel bait, Rebirth echoes the original film's moral clarity: some animals belong in museums, not multiplexes.

This is not a perfect film. Even for a show about chicken-sized dinosaurs with the ability to open doors, the third-act mutation plotline seems unbelievable. But when Edwards sets the Distortus Rex's climactic scream against a scorching jungle sunset, I realized why I loved Jurassic Park as a 10-year-old: dinosaurs make humans feel terrifyingly, gloriously little.

New movies nowadays burn bright and expire quickly; see Jurassic World Rebirth in theaters while it still roars.

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