Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

PG-13 for very scary dinosaurs.  There's some gore.  After all, dinosaurs, in these movies, tend to eat people.  Gareth Edwards isn't exactly afraid to show when someone gets eating by some of these animals.  Most of it is jump scares, which I absolutely adore.  But, again, when people get eaten, there is some gore.  But that's really about it.  There's some mild swearing and that's as far as this franchise will really go.

DIRECTOR:  Gareth Edwards

I didn't expect to like this.  I really didn't.

Before I go full bore into this, be aware that I'm writing under the umbrella of procrastination.  In a perfect world, I get two blogs done and then I can be free of all responsibilties before I go on a trip to Seattle.  Although, even that's not true because I'll be finishing another movie today and have to write that one incredibly quickly.  These are problems that I have. But what I should be writing about is the fact that there's a Jurassic Park sequel that is low key pretty darned good and I'm not quite sure why.

One of the things that I need to hold myself accountable to is the notion that I like too many things.  As part of that whole identity is the fact that I am very forgiving of Jurassic Park movies.  But intellectually, I know that they are plenty flawed.  Many of these movies lack any of the true greatness that the original film presented.  The only one that I outright didn't like was Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.  I even really liked Jurassic Park: Dominion.  But at least with each movie, there's a reason that I liked it more or less.  On paper, Jurassic World: Rebirth spits in the face of innovation.  It lacks any original notes.  It follows so many rules that it is barely a film.  These characters are almost archetypes more than they are real people.  (I'm sorry that I'm dogging on this movie so much.  I'm trying to make a point that this film works despite the fact that it has no reason to.  I'm probably wrong about everything that I just wrote.)

Yet, there's something incredibly fun in the movie.  I threw a lot of accusations around in that last paragraph.  My hopes are that, while analyzing why things didn't work, I might have an epiphany on why it's okay.  We're on this journey of discovery together.  For all I know, sometimes absolute trash is the best thing out there.  Let's look at this from a perspective of plot first.  I've always stated that, the reason that the first Jurassic Park movie works so well is that it is often misinterpreted as simply a sci-fi disaster movie.  I have always stated that the first movie is actually an industrial thriller with dinosaurs.  Now, I'm not the only one who has picked up on this idea.  Many of the sequels, in an attempt to recapture that spark that Michael Crichton put in his original novel, have somehow tried weaving in some kind of corporate inGen nonsense.  But in the way that Crichton had made inGen a fully fleshed out corporate stand-in, the other movies tended to get a little maniacal with inGen.  I'm pretty sure that Rebirth only really mentions inGen once.  Instead, we have a nameless stand-in for EvilCo in this one, which is fine.  The issue that the other movies didn't really know what to do with their corporate villains.  There was always this threat that dinosaurs were going to be used for military advancement. As silly as the mission is in Rebirth, I might kind of like that Rebirth returns to the the original movie's mission statement that what corporations deem as altruism is actually greed and hubris.

Yeah!  That's what this movie does.  InGen, once they were exposed for being greedy turds in the first two films, became big and evil.  We get early on in Rebirth that this corporation that these mercenaries are working for are gross, mainly because they are working with mercenaries to do something illegal.  But what is thematically symmetrical with the original film is that it is hard to fight against what they hope to achieve.  With the case of the park, it is an attempt to reverse extinction and stimulate intellectual curiosity.  WIth the case of Rebirth, these characters are here because they are creating some kind of miracle heart cure.  Now, Edwards and Rebirth don't shy away from the fact that these guys aren't saints.  We have the slimy corporate stooge, who is more than happy to let innocent children die in exchange for this miracle drug and the profits that follow it. I'll even accuse the movie of being a little lazy in terms of trusting its audience.  While we had Ian Malcolm vocalizing the dubious nature of his corporate benefactor in the original films, the other characters were forced to mire through a grey area before coming to the conclusion that the Park was moral net zero.  Rebirth just says it.  It says, "We should be open sourcing this medications and screw the corporations."  Yeah, I know.  It's lazy.  But I love it.

Okay, this is going to be more of an uphill battle:  the characters.  I love ScarJo.  I love Mahershala Ali.  Those aren't the characters.  Those...are the actors.  And I'll even give them points.  The actors are doing a fine job with the characters...who are kind of shallow.  Zora Bennett is hard to like.  I'm sorry.   I know that we're trying to get her from A to B and show growth of a character.  But she's a character that starts the movie with absolutely no integrity.  She says she's not going to take part in this little island expedition.  She has no reason to.  But then she's offered a check and that changes her mind.  That's a pretty rough start.  Again, I get it.  You have to have your protagonist grow.  When Loomis offers that they take the samples and open source them, I don't know what changes her mind.  Besides hating Krebs, I don't know what her motivation would be.  Honestly, Loomis doesn't press her very hard.  He just offers to it to her with a hope that she's a good person.  And guess what?  She automatically is a good person.  Part of it is that the movie doesn't really know who Zora is. Because of Kincaid as her foil, she's on Team Save the Family.  That doesn't tie directly into the motivation to get 10 million dollars, does it?  Like, I'm really glad she open sourced that medication.  It's a very optimistic take on what humanity is all about.  But it also doesn't really make sense with her character because there isn't really a direct tie between surviving on a Jurassic Park island and turning over medication to people for free.

And I'll be honest...there is stuff in this movie that straight up annoys me.  I don't love the fact that we're playing in the waters of hybrid dinosaurs again.  Do I think that the D-Rex is creepy as crap?  Yes.  I love that.  It is more kaiju than dinosaur. It's got four arms and a big ol' misshapen head.  I like that it has more eldrich energy than the Indominous Rex.  Is it stupid?  Yeah, absolutely.  Is it also scary?  Totally.  I also really hate that Kincaid immediately survives.  That whole sacrifice scene was great.  It also doesn't make sense that the D-Rex is just that incompetent at hunting down Kincaid.  So we're left with a, "That scene was for nothing and I don't even know how he escaped that super dinosaur."  That's not a great conclusion for a movie that asks me to trust it when it comes to taking me on a journey.

But now I can tell you what absolutely what does work!  Gareth Edwards made an incredibly stressful survival movie.  I know.  I just said that this was another corporate espionage movie.  But Gareth Edwards has a thing about anxiety when it comes to massive things attacking people.  I don't love everything that Edwards does.  But he's got Rogue One under his belt and I think he has one of the better Godzilla reboots under his belt too.  But even more than that, Jurassic World: Rebirth does something that I haven't seen in a long time...

...it made a T-Rex a full on bad guy.

Even the first movie tempered the T-Rex out a bit.  As scary as that initial T-Rex scene was, the T-Rex comes in as the hero at the end of the first one.  Then it does it in the second one. And the third.  All the Jurassic Park movies and their sequels plays with the notion that we're supposed to sympathethize with the T-Rex.  Not Rebirth.  The T-Rex finally delivered on the promise that it was going to wreck you.  And I'll tell you what?  It did a scene from Jurassic Park better than Jurassic Park did.  The teeth scratching at the raft was scary as heck.  I don't know the tensile strength of a rubber boat, but I don't even care because I was horrified by that whole raft sequence.  Also, what was she doing dragging that thing?  She opened it right by the T-Rex too?  (Note: I kept thinking of Siegfried and Joy from Instagram Reels when the T-Rex was gone behind the curtain.)  That whole sequence made the movie.

Maybe it's just that I wanted to have fun with this movie.  Maybe because I'm an easy sell or I just like feeling a good scared. But Jurassic World: Rebirth, as dumb as it can be at times, might be the second best Jurassic Park movie.