Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) Movie Review

The Review Geek

07-07-2025

An absolute abomination
*Light spoilers ahead regarding characters and potential deaths!*
Everybody loves dinosaurs. There's something inherently fascinating and exciting about seeing a huge lumbering reptile dwarfing tiny humans (and preferably eating them). It's the same wonderous awe one would have seeing a huge shark at the aquarium.
Regardless of age, that wonder never really goes away. Unless you're watching Jurassic World: Rebirth of course, where that wonder turns from 'these dinosaurs are amazing!' to 'the level of ineptitude from these writers is amazing!'
Yes, we're now onto the seventh movie in this franchise, which doesn't look like slowing down any time soon (especially if you look at the early box office numbers). But to quote Ian Malcolm here, the writers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Jurassic World: Rebirth fails on almost every single level a competent movie can fail. It does manage to make up for its startling shortfalls though by treating its audience like a hyperactive cat running after a laser pointer. The dinosaurs are big and loud, the visuals are gorgeous to look at, and the action sequences are generally well choreographed.
To give credit to this movie, the CGI effects in general are actually quite impressive and there are a couple of decent moments when the characters stop talking (although they never say anything worth listening to, so no danger there) and the action picks up.
But before we dive into this one, a bit of context is necessary to understand what's happening. At the end of Jurassic World: Dominion, dinos are roaming free, marching off happily hand in hand (hoof to hoof?) into the animal kingdom where the hierarchy of life on this planet absolutely isn't going to be changed forever.
Rebirth realizes the silliness of this premise and while it does try to rectify this, it instead doubles down, somehow managing to make an even bigger mistake. Five years post-Dominion, dinosaurs have all but gone extinct… again. They're not doing well in suburban cities and most people are actually sick and tired of seeing them.
Thankfully (at least to the residents in this world), a lot of the dinos have suffered from a lack of oxygen in the atmosphere and have died out. However, it's apparently much stronger around the equatorial line of the planet.
Dinosaurs have all migrated over there, and largely remain in this area. Travel is strictly forbidden, although no word on how those who actually live in central Africa, parts of Asia or Central America navigate the logistical nightmare of relocating to other parts of the world, or co-exist with dinosaurs. Dobn't think too much about this, quick throw in the iconic John Williams musical score!
The movie is not interested in explaining the logistics of its world, nor why (despite museums constantly being busy and full of wide-eyed kids) these places are now al but abandoned and dying out too. Rebirth certainly doesn't expect its audience to ask questions like this though. It's the laser pointer treatment for us mere mortals, as we rocket through blistering action set pieces instead.
This flimsy background is where our story picks up, with a big money venture on the horizon. Zora Bennett, a monotone, confused character who flips from a stoic, cold-hearted mercenary who only loves money, to a sympathetic protector who loves family and won't leave anybody behind, is given a business opportunity.
Shady evil corporate man, Martin Krebs, enlists her for a super-duper secret mission (until it's not, but don't question this), intending to track down the three largest dinosaurs to extract their blood.
You see, pharma is big business and evil corporate man hopes to capitalize on this by creating the cure to heart disease. He wants to monopolize this treatment and make trillions in doing so. To do that, Krebs needs living (remember this, it'll be important later) blood samples from a Mosasaur, a Titanosaur and a Quetzalcoatlus. Joining them on this mission are a bunch of different people, including ship captain Ducan Kincaid, and Dr Henry Loomis.
However, they're also joined by chance by the Delgado family, who decide to take a sailboat and travel from Barbados to Cape Town to celebrate their eldest daughter Teresa's entry to NYU. Unfortunately, they're also onboard with one of the worst characters in the movie, Xavier Dobbs. This lazy layabout is rude and arrogant, constantly belittles their father and is supposed to be used for comedy relief but it's about as funny as Amy Schumer's stand-up.
The threads joining the A and B plots together are wafer thin, to tell you the truth. There's an unresolved, loosely defined revenge plot involving Teresa who falls overboard after Martin tries to stop her from calling for help… in restricted waters where no ships are allowed to travel to. When she tries to push him, she stumbles backwards and falls overboard. As a result, she wants revenge.
All of this is before mentioning a very, very loose thread connecting the start and end of the movie together. There's a brand new lab on this secret island that's creating mutant dinosaurs because people are bored of regular ol' dinos and nobody has learned anything from the past six movies.
Yes, I appreciate that's the point of the film, but when the entire lab is undermined by a stray Snickers wrapper, which initiates a lockdown procedure but not really because it opens all the contained lab doors instead and releases the freaks into the world, you're already skating on thin ice.
Unfortunately, none of the characters are particularly likable, and the only person who gets close to a defined arc is Henry. Unfortunately, there are so many characters wrestling for screen-time, with no actual reason for being here, that everybody just kinda blurs into the background.
And yes, while this may be a bit of a spoiler, there are very few deaths in this movie to keep things ticking along. This is one of the biggest problems with Rebirth because once you realize that the vast majority of characters have incredible plot armour (including a rubber dinghy which survives a T-rex chomping down on it and one character saved by a deus ex machina flying raptor) this lack of tension immediately sucks any sort of enjoyment out of this one.
It really is quite remarkable that Rebirth manages to make dinosaurs boring, and while we do get the obligatory 'wow these herbivores are cool!' sweeping shot with the dramatic music, it's completely undone by the script deciding to mix things up with mutant dinos.
This is before mentioning that the film completely forgets its main objective partway through the movie. Remember the 'living blood sample?', well the group decide to grab a sample from an egg instead, which is apparently just as good?
Not content with bad writing and terrible characters, Rebirth also decides to take the modern movie approach of repurposing memorable scenes from the previous movies. Just way worse. We get a lot of sequences from all the other Jurassic park movies, alongside a nod to Camp Cretaceous too.
The tense kitchen sequence with the raptors from Jurassic Park 1 is recontextualized into a poor-man's gas store fight with mutant raptors. The introduction to the Mosasaur throws in references to Jaws, while the introduction to the D-Rex feels like a poor man's intro to the Indominous Rex.
It may be for the best because that D must stand for doofus. The D-Rex not only looks silly, it also acts completely irrationally too. There's a moment near the end of the film where a character makes a heroic sacrifice for the team. It's a nice, bittersweet moment… only for it to be a big fake-out and the guy is absolutely fine.
How did this person survive? Why did the D-Rex leave them alone? How did he fire a flare without attracting attention? Don't worry about it, the movie is nearly over. Here's a lovely shot of dolphins instead – aww how cute!
The editing in this movie is absolutely atrocious because of this, giving us intentionally amusing sequences. We get a ninja stealthy T-Rex that manages to give jump scares and gigantic Titanosaurs managing to hide in long grass, to name but a few.
None of this is helped by the fact that a lot of the dialogue here like it was ripped right from NPCs in Oblivion. There are moments where characters literally spell out their motivations, humour that never lands, and awkward, contrived scenes where you can't quite tell if a character is being sincere or poking fun at them.
At one point, Kincaid tells Zora that 'this is the saddest story I've ever heard' and it's hard to tell, from their monotoned voice, if he's being serious or not because the previous 5 minutes had been all funny banter between them.
These flippant character traits also affect others too. The father of this family has a bad leg but there are times where the edited sequences show him walking around absolutely fine.
Rebirth is a movie that needed serious work in the editing room and it shows in the final product. Along with wonky ending, the bland characters and lacklustre story are just not executed particularly well.
Sure, the action sequences are fun, but they're meaningless because you don't care about anyone or their flimsy main quest.
When you compare this to the original, it's night and day how stark the quality differences are. This franchise will make bank, and it'll likely be a big hit this summer. However, much like The Minecraft Movie before it, that doesn't automatically make it a good story that will stand the test of time.
While Fallen Kingdom is perhaps the bottom of the barrel for this franchise, Rebirth doesn't make a particularly strong case to be anywhere near the best this series has to offer.