‘Jurassic World: Rebirth’ Feels Engineered for Dino Carnage and Nothing Else
The latest Jurassic World movie is terrified of having a conflict that isn’t “dinosaur wants to eat person.”
The most charitable reading I have of Jurassic World: Rebirth is that the producers wanted to make something like one of the classic Godzilla sequels: big monsters, minor human characters. They brought on Gareth Edwards, who helmed the 2014 Godzilla reboot, to direct, and then brought back David Koepp, who worked on the screenplays for Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and perhaps this is the film everyone wanted: big old dinosaurs, completely forgettable humans. Still, that’s an odd decision for a franchise that launched not only because of dinosaur mayhem, but because it had memorable characters. The producers must agree, considering they kept bringing back the original cast as recently as the previous movie, Jurassic World: Dominion. The question I kept having during Jurassic World: Rebirth is “Why is this movie so anti-character? What would be the harm in having a human conflict and growth amid this dinosaur chaos?”
Perhaps the answer lies in the box office data for the Jurassic World movies. Each of the last three films grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, but the data also shows that the worldwide gross was almost double the domestic gross. Studio thinking goes that elements such as character and plot don’t travel to a global audience (this is ridiculous, but one should never look to studio executives for wisdom), and that the only thing that can travel is spectacle. The script for Rebirth feels designed to keep the plot as basic as possible and to studiously avoid character development, growth, or anything that would give the film a personality beyond “Dinosaurs go rawr.”
The film at least gives audiences the benefit of a fresh start, ditching the characters of the previous Jurassic World trilogy as well as its outcome. In those movies, dinosaurs finally got off the island and into the larger world, but now Rebirth tells us that five years later, they’re dying off due to their inability to survive in our climate. Moreover, people have largely lost interest in these magnificent creatures. They now largely live around the equator, and that’s where pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) wants to go so he can harvest some blood from the biggest dinos as part of a project to treat heart disease. He recruits mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) to lead the team, dinosaur expert Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) to go on the expedition. On the way (the way being the middle of the ocean), they cross paths with Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Bella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise), and Teresa’s idiot boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono). They were stranded when dinos capsized their boat, but the family’s rescue is short-lived when another dinosaur attack splits the groups again, and they’re separated on an island where InGen (the evil company behind the whole Jurassic series) was doing experiments to create hybrid dinosaurs.
The re-splitting of the groups is by far the strangest decision not only in Rebirth, but for blockbusters in recent memory. The sensible thing to do would be to mix the groups, thus forcing characters out of their element and causing them to grow by being around new people. Instead, their meeting only functions as a way of getting Reuben’s party to the island because I suppose at some point someone decided the story wasn’t big enough if only the mercenary group or only the family was on the island. And I agree, but it’s still baffling to then keep these groups contained in their original form as if the cross-pollination might risk making a single character more than their broadest possible description. It’s one thing to see a movie with one-dimensional characters, but I’ve rarely seen a major Hollywood film actively avoid adding any texture or nuance.
I’m almost stunned at how dull everyone is in this movie. I had to keep reminding myself that Scarlett Johansson played a superhero for over a decade because she appears so unbelievable as a hardened mercenary and ill-suited to the action genre in general. But that may also be because Zora has no personality. We’re told (almost everything here is told rather than shown; these movies love bland exposition) that she lost her partner on her last job and that her work keeps her so busy she missed her mother’s funeral. But none of that seems to create doubt or shading for Zora. Furthermore, she doesn’t seem to be able to think for herself. When Krebs tells her this work will save lives, she’s on board. When Loomis later tells Zora they should just “open source” the work so that the pharmaceutical company won’t make a prohibitively expensive product, it’s like this supposedly jaded veteran had never considered how companies operate before.
Speaking of Loomis, no disrespect to Jonathan Bailey, but putting glasses on a handsome man does not automatically make them nerdy. I understand we’re operating under a suspension of disbelief where gorgeous people like Johansson, Bailey, and Ali have unglamorous jobs, but I never for a second bought Bailey as a dorky scientist. Compare him to Jurassic Park’s Ian Malcolm, who’s also a scientist and a nerd, but his sex appeal comes from Jeff Goldblum making choices and adding personality to the character. It’s bizarre that in 2025, we’re still coding “wearing glasses” as “intellectual,” and the film then makes Loomis far too capable and heroic to make him feel out of his element.
To say that the characters here are an afterthought would be generous because there’s really no thought to them at all. They’re plot delivery vehicles, and the plot is extremely straightforward: collect dinosaur blood from three different dinos and get off the island without being eaten. Everything around that is just trying to remix beats from previous movies. We have a scene of characters marveling at large herbivores. We have one scene where a child is threatened by a T-Rex. The script even repeats a scene from Edwards’ Godzilla where a well-funded but clearly off-the-books laboratory has a containment breach, and a person standing at the door gets eaten by a monster we’ll see later. It’s so strange to see Edwards do a callback to his own 11-year-old movie, and also do it worse because this time the characters in the prologue have no bearing on the plot. It’s all a way to showcase the “D-Rex,” a genetically engineered dinosaur that’s just a crappy-looking monster (he kind of looks like a bigger, dumber version of the rancor from Return of the Jedi).
The film gets slightly meta when Krebs explains that the purpose of the D-Rex and its ilk was as “engineered entertainments,” as people lost interest in the original dinosaurs and needed something new. But the subtext of such engineering is that InGen was doing more, and Jurassic World: Rebirth is so much less than the original movie. It doesn’t have interesting characters. The set pieces, while entertaining, lack even a modicum of tension. Despite its opening critique of how humanity lost interest in dinosaurs, there’s no subtext here about man’s hubris or anything else, for that matter. Jurassic World: Rebirth wasn’t engineered to be bigger and better. It was engineered so that it wouldn’t risk confusing a single person in the world, as if people are now allergic to emotions, conflicts, and ideas. For the filmmakers behind Rebirth, the world is too small for those things. It can only contain CGI dinosaurs.