It’s all about setting expectations. Mine for the Jurassic franchise – Park or World, it makes no difference – are pretty modest, so I always have a reasonably good time. If there are dinosaurs and some people get et, I’ve spent my couple of hours well. I even enjoyed Jurassic World Dominion, and nobody liked that one.
I’m an easy sell because I recognise that only the original Jurassic Park is anything near a masterpiece, and one a fair few rungs down on Spielberg’s leaderboard. I suspect where it sits on yours depends on how old you were when you first saw it, and that’s fine. All the rest are loosely-linked dinosaur adventures cobbled together from a lot of recycled parts. While they occasionally threaten to shoot off in a genuinely inventive direction, those threats never get carried out. Dinosaurs actually roaming the Earth wild? Don’t worry about it. Human cloning, and the possibility of human-saurian hybridisation? Never you mind.
But the folks at Universal sure understand the franchise’s core appeal, though: dinosaurs, and people getting chomped. Wonder and horror. And all you need for that is an island full of big lizards, and some people who want off.
Which is what we get here.
Set a few years after the last film, Jurassic World Rebirth sees the remaining dinos retreat to a few isolated hot spots clustered along the Equator, the modern environment having proved almost invariably fatal to them. These islands are completely off limits to outsiders, North Sentinel Island style.
Some people have reasons to risk dino death, though. Others are just plain unlucky. Into the former camp fall the expedition pulled together by pharmaceutical exec Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend). Led by Scarlett Johansson‘s cheerfully amoral mercenary, Zora Bennett, their job is to swipe DNA samples from the three largest dinosaur species. For science reasons. Yes, they have to be alive. Also for science reasons. It doesn’t make much sense, but it does set up a lot of dino action.
In the latter camp are doting dad Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s shiftless loser boyfriend, Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono). Their yacht gets capsized by a curious Mosasaurus. They wind up rescued by Zora and her team, which include paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), your standard issue heroic nerd with a side of anticapitalism; smuggler Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali); and a few poorly sketched crew members whose odds of survival seem low (Ed Skrein, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain).
Oddly, almost as soon as our rag tag team is brought together, they’re separated again. While our corporate mercenaries head off on their mission, the family unit get their own cross-country adventure, eventually coming back together for the big finale.
It’s a weird choice. Rebirth feels a little overstuffed with both characters and incident, and I suspect what we’re seeing is a result of two different concepts being crudely hammered together by screenwriter David Koepp. The result is clumsy and weirdly structured, relying on clichés and overly familiar tropes for characterisation, and still not having enough room to give everyone some depth. At one point a character is struck mute for a while by the trauma of their experiences, and I could swear it was just to free up some screen time. It’s hard to believe Koepp, whose last two produced scripts were for the excellent Black Bag and Presence, wrote this.
Of course, by then the dinosaurs have taken centre stage and I’m not too concerned with the narrative details. Director Gareth Edwards, who debuted with the indie kaiju flick Monsters and went on to do the 2014 Godzilla and at least some of Rogue One, relishes filming the big beasties. The little ones too, sure, but the man has a gift for depicting scale, and what better subject for him than dinosaurs. He does fine with the suspense sequences, but he’s better with the wonder. Nothing here rivals the big reveal scene in Jurassic Park – and probably nothing ever will – but a scene with a herd of Titanosaurus absolutely sings.
Of course, here we don’t have regular dinosaurs – or at least not all real dinosaurs. We’re stuck on the Island of Misfit Dinosaurs here, where flawed genetic crossbreeds unfit for display have been dumped -and apparently gotten on just fine in the meantime. That’s why this outing’s big bad isn’t a T-rex (although we do get one) or a Spinosaurus (and several of those) but the Distortus rex, a six-limbed abomination that looks a bit like a novelty dildo shaped like a xenomorph.

One of the interesting questions in the whole Jurassic franchise is whether the dinosaurs are animals or monsters, and over the years various characters and scenarios have argued for both sides. Rebirth sees that argument and studiously ignores it. The result is a plethora of fun, cool-looking new critters – winged velociraptors! – but no real narrative reason for them, and certainly no thematic pay off. The series has often played with sillier sci-fi elements – at one point John Sayles wrote a sequel that featured genetically engineered dinosaur mercenaries carrying guns – but generally to some point. In Rebirth, the spectacle is the point.
The other grand tradition of Jurassic is recycling, whether that be unused concepts from Michael Crichton’s source novels, or offcuts from various discarded scripts and treatments. There’s a lot in Rebirth that will seem very familiar, as it pulls not just from the extant franchise, but executive producer Spielberg’s earlier career. One sequence is an extended nod to Jaws, with an almost word-for-word dialogue lift. Another will have you listening for the crack of a bullwhip.

And yet… dinosaurs.
That makes up for a lot.
So while Jurassic World Rebirth may be clumsy, clunky, derivative, and repetitive, it does accomplish its two key goals, and that’s what matters.
There are dinosaurs.
People Get et.
That’s all I really want.
Jurassic World Rebirth is in Australian cinemas from July 3, 2025.