Jurassic World Rebirth Review: A Few Roaring Moments, A Rehashed Plot

Posted in: Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review, Universal | Tagged: jurassic world rebirth

Jurassic World Rebirth Review: A Few Roaring Moments, A Rehashed Plot

Jurassic World Rebirth is ultimately one of the better entries in the modern Jurassic World series of films, but that bar is so low we could stub our toes on it, so it's not saying much. 

Published Wed, 02 Jul 2025 19:02:03 -0500
by Kaitlyn Booth
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Article Summary

• Jurassic World Rebirth offers improved thrills and visuals, but sticks to a well-worn, familiar plot structure.
• Character development falls flat, making it hard to care about the human cast or feel real tension in key moments.
• Director Gareth Edwards shines with immersive island settings and standout dinosaur sequences, especially the Titanosaurus.
• The film revisits classic Jurassic Park elements, but fails to deliver fresh spectacle or make its new dino villain memorable.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a noticeable improvement from the previous entries in the franchise. While it has some truly thrilling moments, the tension of those moments is undercut by how little you care about the characters.

Director: Gareth Edwards
Summary: Five years post-Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), an expedition braves isolated equatorial regions to extract DNA from three massive prehistoric creatures for a groundbreaking medical breakthrough.

The magic of the first Jurassic Park film is one that studios have been trying to recapture for decades. Everything went right with that film, and because of the choices made by everyone involved, the film has aged beautifully. There have been many different sequels of varying quality, some of which have aged more poorly than others, but in the era of established IP and franchises, everyone knew that there would be more Jurassic films once Dominion wrapped up a couple of years ago, regardless of the critical reaction to the film. Jurassic World Rebirth is quite upfront about what it wants to be with its title, but there isn't much about the film that feels reborn. Perhaps "rehash" would have been a better word because this film follows story beats that we have seen so many times before, even if they are executed well.

The humans in the Jurassic films have always been a point of contention. They are either beloved characters that go on to become pop culture icons, or they are insanely frustrating for various reasons. The characters of Jurassic World Rebirth are somewhere in the middle to the latter. The set of characters on the mission to get the DNA has a few more brain cells between them, but they still make a bunch of the worst decisions you could make while in these circumstances. However, you aren't invested in any of them enough to care whether or not they are eaten by any of the dinosaurs they are in peril from, and that sucks almost all of the tension out of the scenes. That plot and the moral conflict several of the characters are going through doesn't feel sincere, as people go from being entirely motivated by money to selflessness in a matter of days.

The family in Jurassic World Rebirth is even worse. Once we saw a kid running around, people wondered how they were going to contrive a reason for this family to end up on this mission. While the story doesn't have to entirely contort itself to fit them in, all of their decisions are terrible. The scene involving a T-Rex and a raft is from the original book,  so writer David Koepp was excited to bring it to the big screen. Perhaps this situation as it plays out in the film would have an inch of tension if it just involved a bunch of kids, but there is a whole ass adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex right there, letting his teenage daughter make the worst possible decisions right in front of one of the greatest predators to walk the earth. It's hard to worry or care about these people when they show zero survival instincts.

So while the stakes are barely there, the scope couldn't be better. Director Gareth Edwards has done an excellent job of really making us feel like we're on this island with the characters. A lot of Jurassic World Rebirth was shot on location, and it makes all the difference in the world. We might be looking at dinosaurs that we know don't exist, but even when the VFX work gets a bit wonky, the locations really help blur the lines and make things work so seamlessly. The scene with the Titanosaurus specifically might be the best in the entire film. It's well executed in a lot of different ways, but even something as small as deciding to make a practical leg for Jonathan Bailey to touch with so many little details on it really makes all the difference in the world.

It means that even scenes like the one on the raft, even when it is so absurd and over the top that it becomes frustrating, are well directed technically. The only time when things began to fall apart a little is in the final act. We spend the entire film building up to the Distortus Rex, but due to the location and the lack of light, we don't get a lot of good looks at it. The production team went through this long process of designing this distorted and mutated thing, with the mutation part being very heavily pushed, but it only becomes relevant in the eleventh hour, and the D-Rex ends up feeling like a letdown. By contrast, scenes like the raft and the T-Rex, the field with the Titanosaurus, and the cliff with the Aquilops are all shot in bright sunlight. While horror works best when the monster is hidden, you can only hide a giant dinosaur so many times before it becomes almost distracting how little we actually see of it.

Jurassic World Rebirth is ultimately one of the better entries in the modern Jurassic World series of films, but that bar is so low we could stub our toes on it, so it's not saying much. It's back to basics, but the basics for the first film worked because we hadn't seen anything like Jurassic Park before, and the spectacle of the dinosaurs helped smooth over any bumps in the road. Much like humanity in this film, there is very little spectacle for people when it comes to dinosaurs on the big screen anymore, and trying to get by on what made Jurassic Park work isn't going to be enough to rise above just being okay.

Jurassic World Rebirth

Review by Kaitlyn Booth

6/10

Jurassic World Rebirth is a noticeable improvement from the previous entries. While it has some thrilling moments, the tension is undercut by how little you care about the characters.

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