Jurassic World: Rebirth is a challenging movie to discuss, in no small part because only hours after the credits rolled, my memory of the film-going experience had all but faded. It’s not a bad movie—I might have preferred that. Instead, Jurassic World: Rebirth is so perfectly average that it becomes background noise in a theatre where it’s the only thing to pay attention to.
What makes Jurassic World: Rebirth so frustrating is that it’s chronically close to being fun, but it shoves a stick in its spokes every time something interesting is about to happen. Gareth Edwards knows how to craft a great monster movie, and he clearly had a vision for steering the franchise into uncharted waters. But for whatever reason—likely studio notes—the film stays anchored in the shallow end, never committing to a tone, a theme or even a single cast of characters. The result is a horror movie without scares, a thriller without thrills, a comedy without jokes—and worst of all, a B-movie that insists on being sincere.
Jurassic World: Rebirth takes place five years after the events of Jurassic World: Dominion. Modern Earth has proven largely inhospitable to Jurassic life, with climate change all but wiping out the dinosaur threat. The few that remain live in isolation in equatorial zones, protected by international law. As the second age of dinosaurs draws to a close, life is gradually returning to normal, and public sentiment has shifted from fear and awe of dinosaurs to apathy and annoyance.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth is so perfectly average that it becomes background noise in a theatre where it’s the only thing to pay attention to.”
For pharmaceutical companies that failed to secure dinosaur blood during the Jurassic era, natural healing itself is a disaster. Fortunately, if you know the right people—and treat international law more as an international suggestion—dino DNA is only a boat ride and a dart gun away.
Enter our team of mercenary heroes led by Zora Bennet (Scarlett Johansson), Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and a few nameless others who will certainly not be eaten by anything. Their mission: escort dinosaur nerd Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) on a high-risk fetch quest for blood samples from three of the world’s most enormous surviving dinosaurs.
Needless to say, things don’t go according to plan, and the mission is thrown into chaos when their story is interrupted by a family of lost sailors who have blown in from an entirely different script.
There are immutable cosmic laws that govern the Jurassic universe. Chief among them: once a story introduces a child, it must put the child in danger. Our merc squad was unaware of this law, and unfortunately, the family of sailors included a child. With the covenant broken, punishment was swift—the universe immediately forced the mercenaries to crash their boat onto the shores of a dinosaur-infested island.
After landing, circumstances separate the family and the mercenaries, and the movie splits into two B-plots searching for an A. The main characters from each group drift from set piece to set piece, trying to look scared as things happen around them, but rarely to them. And lest you think I’m just being wryly bitter, let me explain: the plot armour on each named character is so thick it drains all tension from every dino encounter.
Despite lacking tension or any meaningful stakes, there’s still fun to be found in the action scenes. Still, it all comes down to losing yourself in the spectacle, which can be hard if your brain does the unthinkable and tries to connect the current scene to a larger story.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth takes a spreadsheet of proven story beats and arranges them algorithmically to appeal to as many people as possible.”
The tonal whiplash is relentless. Wisecracks and attempts at establishing emotional depth are only seconds apart, neither lingering long enough to give depth or personality to a character or weight to a scene. For example, a quiet bonding moment between a father and his daughter’s boyfriend is immediately followed by a suspense scene in which the boyfriend is stalked by raptors, only for the tension to fizzle. The action that follows doesn’t involve him at all—it happens around him while he’s trying to take a piss. Then, without pause, the movie cuts to the next scene.
Every section of the movie follows a similar pattern, but the tonal muddiness extends to the story as a whole. The mission’s overarching goal is somehow to cure heart disease, restore funding to museums, process the emotional trauma of war and confront the corrosive intentions of pharmaceutical companies—all within a story that begins with a mutant-making lab self-destructing because some slob dropped a Snickers wrapper into an air vent. By trying to be everywhere at once, the film ends up going nowhere, settling into a kind of cognitive dial tone that’s not just hard to enjoy, but hard to remember.
Jurassic World: Rebirth follows in the footsteps of many modern blockbusters. It takes a spreadsheet of proven story beats and arranges them algorithmically to appeal to as many people as possible. And to that end, it’s passable.
If you choose to see Jurassic World: Rebirth, you won’t have a bad time—you’ll have exactly two and a half laughs, enjoy some dinosaurs and leave the air-conditioned theatre in the same mood you entered it, having forgotten the whole thing by the time your dino-footprint-shaped popcorn bucket is empty.
