Jurassic World Rebirth review: here we go again, chomps

I was less than a month old when Christopher Reeve-led Superman soared onto Scottish screens in 1978. Not yet super-sentient, when I eventually caught up with Richard Donner’s masterpiece, I bought the tagline: ‘You’ll believe a man can fly.’

At the time the most expensive film(s) ever made – Superman II was shot concurrently, before being temporarily abandoned amid fractious drama – its boundary-pushing cinematic magic was boosted by the wonder of Reeve’s and Margot Kidder’s chemistry.

Of course, John Williams’ whirling score, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, was also awe-inspiring. As it was again in 1993, when Steven Spielberg convinced us a T. rex could roar once more in Jurassic Park.

Adapted from the Michael Crichton novel, it genetically spliced mighty performances from Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and co with still-revelatory dinosaur effects, and had a megafauna-sized heart.

Jurassic lightning

Jurassic Park’s lightning in a genetic bottle has never been replicated. Sure, each successor has banked a tonne – the last three over a billion US each – but they’ve nowhere near the same cultural impact.

Watch the Jurassic World Rebirth trailer.

As Goldblum’s much-meme-ified Dr Ian Malcolm succinctly puts it, when it comes to sequel-ising genius: ‘Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.’

The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) relocated the action from the original’s trashed Isla Nublar theme park to sister Island Sorna, where the main cloning laboratory was based. Despite containing a nifty literal cliffhanger, the film jumped the megalodon when it brought a rampaging Tyrannosaurus to San Diego.

Fizzling out with a lacklustre finale in 2001, the franchise was fossilised in amber for almost 15 years until Jurassic World reanimated the adventure with Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt at the fore. But the new trilogy was off to a wobbly start, credibility-wise. Why on earth would anyone in their right mind queue up for tickets to another mass death-dealing park on Nublar? The least said about Howard’s ops-manager Claire feeding a raptor DNA-mutated Rex in heels, the better.

Disproving the thesis that bigger is better, the second trilogy slumped even further into irrelevance with 2022’s snoozy Jurassic World Dominion. Despite the promise of splicing the original and new ensembles together in a world now populated by free-ranging dinosaurs, confronting them with a plague of (checks notes) locusts asexually birthed a disastrously dull movie. Whatever next? Attack of the millennia-ensconced ammonites?

Jurassic word salad

Jurassic World Rebirth – an inexplicable word salad title saddling the franchise to the vastly inferior trilogy – promisingly recruited Monsters and Godzilla director Gareth Edwards alongside original Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp. The latter borrows the plot from his spin on HG Wells’ War of the Worlds, with the once-proliferating dinosaurs largely succumbing to our snotty-nosed bugs and intemperate climate crisis.

Life finds a way, with a rump prospering in a band around the equator largely unbothered by humans, thanks to a loosely patrolled quarantine. For reasons that are never entirely clear, despite armies of geneticists poring over cloned DNA for decades, the latest in a long line of evil corporations has only just discovered a really big deal.

A thickshake made from the blood of the biggest beasts – the aquatic Mosasaurus, aerial-inclined Quetzalcoatlus and land-based Titanosaurus – can apparently cure cancer. This discovery prompts The Phoenician Scheme actor Rupert Friend’s treacherous suit, Martin, to pressgang Scarlett Johansson’s increasingly reluctant mercenary for hire, Zora, into one last big-bucks gig.

Recruiting Mahershala Ali’s salty sailor Duncan, they set sail for the equator towards yet another abandoned research island, with Wicked star Jonathan Bailey’s boffin Dr Loomis – nice Halloween nod – along for the ride, so he can identify the dinos.

After a sluggish start, a tense-enough high-seas encounter with the Mosasaur and mates leans more The Meg than Jaws, drag-netting in the franchise-mandatory kids. Reuben, played by Murder on the Orient Express actor Manuel Garcia-Rulf, is a sweet dad. Still, you have to wonder at his risk analysis, sailing this far out with young guns in a dino-infested, militarily controlled zone.

Fresh Off the Boat (literally, post-Mosasaur attack) star Luna Blaise is his eldest daughter, Teresa, with newcomer Audrina Miranda as her younger sister, Isabella. Teresa’s goofy, dope-smoking bae Xavier (David Iacono from The Summer I Turned Pretty) tags along, too.

Like Duncan’s crew, they’re likeable enough but entirely forgettable, with none of the associated panic for their survival easily accrued by Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazzelloa in the original. Johannson’s as engaging a screen presence as ever, but a half-hearted attempt at romance between her and Bailey’s fails to convince. They fare better than Ali, who is fully wasted.

Jurassic bites

Jurassic World Rebirth has nowhere near the bite of the original, which elicited more tension from a trembling water glass than anything you’ll witness here. Even compared to Edwards’ Godzilla, which went way bigger without sacrificing intimate character crises, the film feels flatter than a Rex-stomped jeep.

Bailey nets arguably the best adventure sequence, with a paragliding Quetzalcoatlus showdown. However, as with almost all the sequels, it’s hampered by an over-reliance on weightless CGI, which swamps the practical effects and location work in Malta and Thailand. We never really feel as if we, let alone the characters, are there, rather than swinging around a soundstage.

What is there is a risible amount of product placement, from Dr Peppers to Doritos. Did Snickers pay more, or less, for one of their instantly recognisable wrappers to instigate the opening flashback catastrophe, one wonders?

Said brouhaha unleashes an even less interesting variation on the T. rex held back for the finale, mutations of which have become the series’ albatross to bear. A more moderately sized one is entertaining, however, in an earlier, breathless river chase lifted from the original novel. Though why is an inflatable raft near-indestructible when snapped in its maw? Another ad for a brand I didn’t catch, perhaps?

Koepp’s eye for character detail has dulled, with backstory clunkily inserted, like Zora’s dashed-offscreen tragedy, and Edwards can’t seem to muster the epic scale he once achieved on next to no budget with Monsters. A pleasant enough diversion, it’s no asteroid-induced, extinction-level disaster, but each beat feels defrosted, rather than fresh.

Let’s call it an amber alert and maybe give it another 15-year rest.

Jurassic World Rebirth is in Australian cinemas from 3 July 2025.

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