‘JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH’ Another Careless, Lumbering Corpse of IP Resurrection

If there’s one thing that defines Gareth Edwards as a director, it’s his knack for scale. The guy knows how to make things look and feel epic. But the only thing impressive about the scale in Jurassic World Rebirth is just how completely flat and lifeless it all feels. Across seven films, audiences have marveled at prehistoric monstrosities resurrected via ancient Dino DNA, stirring up all the usual ethical woulda, shoulda, coulda hand-wringing. “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should” has never felt more relevant, nor as exhaustingly humdrum as it does with Rebirth. And yet here we are, in the fourth new-era Jurassic World movie (seventh overall), with a film so devoid of purpose and personality that it feels like a supergroup doing a really expensive cover of someone else’s greatest hits album.

It’s offensive in how thoughtless and personality-free it all feels. Its barebones “let’s survive a dino encounter, with some kids in tow” plot is just more of the same we’ve seen six times prior, without anything else justifying its return. Strangely, Jurassic World: Rebirth borrows most heavily from Jurassic Park III, a film that, while not without its scrappy charm (never forget the talking raptor dream), effectively killed the franchise for over a decade. III wasn’t beloved, but it had personality (again, a velociraptor says “Alan” in a dream). Rebirth imitates its stripped-down survival formula, a mission to secretly capture Dino DNA out in the wild while also self-rescuing, minus the energy or weirdness that gave III a pulse.

Rebirth brands itself as a legacy sequel and sort-of reboot, but what legacy exactly is it honoring? Unclear. It (thankfully) ditches all the familiar characters, sparing us another round of Chris Pratt’s Blue-wrangling hand gestures and the sad return of the OG legacy trio, but still finds time to drop plenty of visual references to earlier installments with all the joy of checking consent boxes on a newly installed app. It just doesn’t compute. We’re only three years out from Jurassic World: Dominion belly-flopping into multiplexes. There’s no breathing room between that trilogy being put to bed and this so-called “rebirth,” no built-up appetite for more thunder lizard madness, and no bold reimagining on any level.

Instead, this is just a fast-tracked, hollow installment trying to pass off brand fatigue as momentum. It’s baffling. Why the need to rush back into the fray without a fresh angle? The result runs on cinematic empty across the board: no real characters, no meaningful stakes, and certainly no inventive dino chaos. One new creature, an abomination that looks more like boilerplate Marvel kaiju than Mesozoic menace, is emblematic of the film’s identity crisis. If there’s a vision here, it’s hiding behind a thick fog of corporate maximalist obligation. Zhuzh the product, get the bag.

That’s basically the plot as well. We’re informed that in the current era of this universe, nearly three decades after Jurassic creatures were reintroduced to the modern world, public interest in dinosaurs has essentially evaporated. After the last few films’ events, when the prehistoric beasts broke loose and started wandering the globe, they’ve apparently begun dying off en masse because the air wasn’t warm enough or something. Now, the remaining population clings to a strip of islands around the equator, which the world’s governments have unilaterally banned access to. Sure, there are the occasional stragglers, some dino leftovers roaming the edges of civilization, but the public couldn’t care less. Dinosaurs are passé. Case in point: a brachiosaurus slowly dying in downtown L.A., and the only concern is how much it’s slowing down commuter traffic. Oh, and someone’s tagged its rear flank like it’s a freeway underpass.

This is the uncaring world Rebirth drops us into. In the shadow of the dying dino, crafty mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) rendezvouses with scummy pharma bro Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend). His pitch to her: collect the blood of three of the most colossal dinosaurs to ever walk, swim, or fly, in order to cure heart disease for Big Pharma and cash out with an eight-figure payday. What David Koepp’s script fails to grasp is that the initial premise — a world so numb to dinosaurs that people are spray-painting them like ad space — is way more interesting than yet another trip to the same generic equatorial jungle, with its tall grass, murky CGI shoals, and zero personality to call its own. And yet, that’s the journey we set out on. Once again.

From there, Jurassic World: Rebirth is the equivalent of the iconic John Williams theme played on a precorder. The majesty is simply gone. The special effects look muddy and half-baked, worse even than its most recent predecessors in key moments. There are a few soaring flashes of visual wonder—the dance of skyscraper-sized Titanosaurs, or a sequence where a T. Rex chases an inflatable raft down a too-slow river—but by and large, Rebirth lacks visual majesty. For a film flexing a $180 million production budget, Edwards, who so often stretches a dollar for maximal effect, delivers work that looks cheap and wonky. The VFX, clearly rushed through post, feel disconnected. Interactions between humans and dinosaurs reek of green screen awkwardness, with actors reacting to tennis balls on sticks. What used to inspire awe now barely earns a shrug. I guess I too now understand why the world became tired of dinosaurs.

The flat stock characters don’t help. ScarJo, who’s more than capable of injecting humanity into blockbuster fare, is never believable as a no-nonsense mercenary. She shambles between being a hard-nosed, mission-driven gun-for-hire and a sentimental humanist who calls her fellow armed goons “friends” and suddenly wants to do things “for the greater good” instead of just securing the bag. A crisis of conscience is fine, even welcome, but it’s not earned here. This character is flat as hell. So too is the rest of the gang. And while it’s hard to begrudge Mahershala Ali a paycheck, he is 100 percent just here for the paycheck. That’s not to say he’s bad. He’s his usual effortlessly magnetic self, but the role is paper-thin and utterly dimensionless. A stock character in a film comprised entirely of stock characters.

Rounding out the cast is Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a bespectacled yet inexplicably jacked museum scientist who, for reasons never explained, knows how to cock a specialized tranquilizer rifle like he’s been training for this his whole life. Ed Skrein shows up as your standard-issue soulless goon. Then there’s the Delgado family: a father/daughter/daughter-and-her-boyfriend crew of ocean sailors, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, and Luna Blaise, who get swept up in the dinosaur blood heist purely to ensure that, yes, some kids’ lives are in peril once the chaos kicks in. But none of these stories ever amount to anything and the mash-up of the pharma explorers and oceans survivors never mesh. The script gives everyone equal screen time in the worst way possible, flattening them all into the same forgettable mush.

It’s almost like there’s a curse on this franchise, where even great filmmakers manage to fall flat on their faces. Steven Spielberg. Joe Johnston. Colin Trevorrow. J.A. Bayona. All of them have delivered a subpar to outright bad Jurassic Park movie. Where the franchise consistently fails is in its absolute terror of taking risks. Every sequel clings to the same tired formula: park/facility, escape, kids in peril, repeat. What everyone forgets is that the first movie was, at its core, a horror film. It was built on suspense, silence, and dread. The raptors in the kitchen were scary. The T. Rex in the rain was scary. No entry since has tried to actually be scary. They’re too busy chasing spectacle or nostalgia or some weird hybrid of both, and none of it sticks. Rebirth had the perfect opportunity to pivot, to shake things up, to try anything new. Instead, it chose to follow the same footprints into the same tired pit. Again.

What sucks the most about Jurassic World: Rebirth is how much of a missed opportunity it is. This was a chance for the franchise to step out of the disappointing shadow of the previous Jurassic World trilogy, to move beyond the nostalgia baiting and constant winks to the past, and finally chart a path forward. They had a promising director in Gareth Edwards, who has proven he can deliver eye-popping blockbuster fare in both original stories and legacy franchises. The casting of Scarlett Johansson and, especially, Mahershala Ali hinted at some actual thespian firepower coming in to elevate the material. Instead, their characters are so lifeless and flat that their presence fails to elevate anything.

There’s just no love here. No passion. No reason for this to exist. It’s a rehash of a rehash. A cover of a cover of a cover. A cynical regurgitation of the same, not even bothering to masquerade as new. It’s soulless dreck. It’s not the worst Jurassic Park movie — that honor still belongs to Fallen Kingdom and Dominion — but it’s right there with the bottom of the pack. There is nothing inspired here. It’s regurgitated tripe masquerading as a revived species. Have mercy Universal and just let them die already.

CONCLUSION: It’s barely been three years since the last bad Jurassic World movie, but Gareth Edwards’ latest somehow manages to remind us just how far this franchise has fallen with ‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’. A true disappointment in a long string of them, this is soulless, flat, and uninspired work that wastes the likes of Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali. It might satisfy audiences who just want to see big dinosaurs going roar on the big screen, but anyone expecting even a flicker of imagination or purpose is in for an extinction-level letdown.