‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ Review — Mutating a Blockbuster Franchise Into Regurgitated Dinosaur Slop
17 years ago, a group of scientists got the bright idea to mutate dinosaurs. One of those mutations was a Distortus Rex, a Tyrannosaur mutation, also known as the D-Rex. Thanks to a Snickers wrapper, the D-Rex escapes, causing the facility to be shut down.
RELATED: ‘M3GAN 2.0’ Review — Is It Summer’s Salvation Or Its Judgement Day?
In the present day, five years after the events of Jurassic World: Dominion, dinosaurs are dying out and can no longer survive Earth’s environment. However, closer to the equator, the tropical atmosphere allows them to flourish. ParkerGenix, a pharmaceutical company, wants to manufacture a drug capable of preventing coronary heart disease.
But they need to extract blood samples from three of the largest living dinosaurs: Mosasaurus (water), Titanosaurus (land), and Quetzalcoatlus (sky). So a group of covert operatives decides to travel illegally to Ile Saint-Hubert to retrieve the samples, where they’ll most likely face certain death and where the D-Rex now roams free.
Jurassic World Rebirth is a lot like smashing the first three Jurassic Park films together with disappointing results. Written by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, The Lost World) and directed by Gareth Evans (Godzilla, Rogue One), Rebirth feels like it recycles all of the major action sequences from the Jurassic Park films with no character development whatsoever.
The motive for every character in Rebirth is money. The film gives these moments where it seems like it’s going to reveal some sort of back story or give some sort of reason for you to care about these emotionless doofuses, but it quickly backtracks or gives a half-ass response before tumbling into non-seriousness.
Zora (Scarlett Johansson) just finished a mission where she lost someone she was close to. Duncan (Mahershala Ali) had a son who died, which caused his marriage to end. The people with Zora and Duncan are just in it for the money, like them. A family is sailing in the Atlantic Ocean as some last hurrah before the college-age daughter goes off to NYU, and has the nerve to act like victims when the Mosasaurus wrecks their boat.
RELATED: ‘Ballerina’ Review – A Good Movie Done In By “Girlboss Fatigue”?
Reuben (Manuel Garcia Rulfo) is a dad that decided to take his two daughters and her daughter’s boyfriend (who is a lethargic turd, by the way) out in a boat in the middle of nowhere because “they’d done it before.” His youngest just wants to eat licorice, the NYU-bound daughter makes terrible decisions, and her boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono), is lazy and unlikable. You just want to slap this entire family for two hours straight.
Things open with the D-Rex escape and then flounder about in trite, boring dialogue for 45 minutes until the Mosasaurus shows up. The problem is that you end up despising all of the human characters. Zora doesn’t take anything seriously, Duncan laughs at everything, Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) is a nerdy paleontologist who has no actual qualities about himself apart from his dinosaur knowledge, and everyone else either whines about everything and survives the entire film and whines forever, or is a loud but eventual dinosaur appetizer.
Rebirth does give more screen time to lesser-known dinosaurs, as velociraptors and T-Rexes are reduced to mere cameos. Most of the screen time is split between the Mosasaurus and Quetzalcoatlus, which allows Rebirth to spend more time in the water than previous Jurassic Park and Jurassic World films. Many people get eaten throughout Jurassic World Rebirth, which is satisfying given how painful it is to endure their presence. It’s also interesting that the dinosaurs get more birdlike throughout the franchise. The Quetzalcoatlus sequences are cool because of the claustrophobic nature of its nest and the sheer design of it, which resembles a bird with its feather-like appearance and beak-like nose.
The character development in Rebirth is nonexistent, but so is an actual ending. All these people die, and the survivors settle on doing this one specific thing, and then the credits roll as they’re riding in the boat away from the deadly dinosaur island. There’s all this dialogue about how they shouldn’t go there, how they know it’s stupid, and how it’s highly deadly and illegal. But then everyone acts surprised and angry when people start dying and things go wrong. The entire film is almost as dumb as the D-Rex design.
Jurassic World Rebirth is the worst film of the Jurassic Park/World franchise because it has nothing original to offer. It spends so much time paying homage to the films that came before it that it lacks its own identity. These are some of the most annoying and entitled cinematic characters of the year and you root for them to end up in an archaic intestinal tract and grunted out into antiquated dino shit.
NEXT: ‘Jurassic World Dominion’ Review – At Least It’s Better Than The Last One
Jurassic World Rebirth (2025), Universal Pictures
PROS
- The dinosaurs
CONS
- No character development
- A story that is super dumb
- Characters that are majorly annoying
- A rehash of previous films is portrayed as homage
More About:Movie Reviews