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The original Jurassic Park is an evergreen classic—one that is now rightfully a multi-generational favorite; the Steven Spielberg-directed film gets shared between branches of the family tree. Yet, after several sequels and depreciating critical Jurassic World returns, the team of Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One), writer David Koepp (Spider-Man), Mahershala Ali, and Scarlett Johansson seemed as capable as any at achieving it, and doing exactly what the title of their project promised: a rebirth for Jurassic Park.
So when the first wave of negative reviews for Jurassic World Rebirth, I dismissed them as typical cynicism — critics turning their noses toward legacy sequels. I bought my ticket, determined to prove the 52% Rotten Tomatoes score wrong. Two hours later, I walked out of the theater completely deflated, understanding exactly why this $180 million movie is entering its franchise into one of the most maligned moments in its history.
10 The Movie Opens by Announcing Its Own Irrelevance
Don't Worry, Jurassic World is Bored With its Rebirth, Too
In an audacious moment, perhaps meant to meta-textually wring the audience under its protective arm, Jurassic World Rebirth opens with a text crawl explaining that 32 years after Jurassic Park, «interest has waned» in dinosaurs. Rebirth isn’t strong enough to protect itself, though. Waning interest could be cheeky world-building for a better movie, perhaps, but Rebirth uses its runtime to affirm it as its thesis. This wasn’t set up; it was David Koepp capitulating. The film is essentially announcing that it knows dinosaurs aren’t exciting anymore and then proceeds to prove itself right.
Folks might’ve spotted a now-notorious New York traffic scene during Jurassic World Rebirth‘s massive marketing campaign. The scene, like the sneak peeks, shows dinos blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. In a vacuum—or the umpteenth round of concept art deliverables—this could be intriguing, but it’s this scene that crystallized the mundanity of Rebirth‘s premise. A dinosaur loose in New York City, but not inspiring awe or terror, no sense of wonder, no primal fear—just mundane inconvenience. The miraculous and maliciousness Spielberg first imbued his creatures with is precisely why Jurassic Park works. Rebirth opens by telling us that dinosaurs are actually neither of those things—they’re just traffic problems.
9 The Mission Premise Is Like a Tourist Trap
Jurassic World Rebirth: Got Your Money Already, Now Watch the Dinosaurs
The entire conceit of Jurassic World revolves around dinosaur blood being the cure for something even more predatory than dinosaurs themselves: heart disease. Because it’s so ludicrous that any scientist would greenlight the expedition, the film tries to position the creatures as the cure for folks back home as justification.
It’s one of those act-one charges that keep audiences waiting for the film to elaborate on itself. But where the original Jurassic Park took its pseudo-science seriously by simply setting scenes and conversations in and around it, Rebirth leaves its paper-thin premise early on, writing on the wall about how very little would follow. When Zora’s mother, dying of heart disease, gets mentioned once and never brought up again, it’s clear the screenplay is just going through the motions.
8 Gareth Edwards Completely Abandons His Greatest Strength
A Creature Feature Veteran Can't Pull off Jurassic World Rebirth
Gareth Edwards gave Star Wars a shot in the arm with Rogue One. He gave America its first halfway-decent Godzilla in ages. He had all the fixings of a Jurassic franchise fixer-upper. The opening laboratory sequence is a proof-of-concept. The scene has a creepy Universal monster movie atmosphere, completely ditching John Williams’ classic score and setting the stage for something legitimately, dreadfully new. The fresh angle the franchise needed.
Then the title card appears, and suddenly audiences get crate-shipped back to the same sequel fare the franchise has already tried and failed to reproduce. Mercenaries and families are trapped on the dinosaur island, everybody. Can you believe it? The whiplash from the chilling opening to the subsequent paint-by-numbers disaster piece felt like watching two different directors. Edwards built his reputation on patient, atmospheric creature features—even his Darth Vader in Rogue One fits that mold. But Rebirth abandons all that restraint for generic action beats. The Distortus rex, which should be Edwards’ signature monster, is a far cry from raptors in the laboratory. Instead of a slow, creeping build, Distortus gets randomly deployed simply because the plot demands a scare. It’s a Jurassic Park table setting for a meal with Fast and Furious nutritional value.
7 The Delgado Family Subplot Exists in a Different Movie
The rescue of the stranded family feels like studio notes made manifest. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and his daughters aren’t bad actors, but their entire storyline is a leftover skin tag on the T-Rex skeleton that is the rest of Jurassic World Rebirth. They’re having a family reconciliation drama while Zora’s team is conducting corporate espionage.
It’s okay to have seemingly disparate parts. It’s even encouraged, so long as they wind up not so different after all. But these particular players don’t seem all that interested in intertwining. Worse, the Delgados’ survival isn’t thanks to the mercs, at least not in any meaningful way. That’s a missed opportunity to inject some much-needed Spielbergian charm. The movie could have been about a military team on a covert mission, about a family stranded on a dinosaur island, or about how these two forces become unlikely assets to each other. Jurassic World Rebirth opts instead for them to be parallel sets of twiddling thumbs.
6 The New Jurassic Movie Makes No Effort to Make Dinosaurs Feel Special
The Movie Breaks Its Own Most Important Scene
The Titanosaur encounter— a clear homage, meant to recreate Grant and Ellie’s first dinosaur sighting in Jurassic Park. Some might say it’s nostalgia slop—mindless fan service. Others might appreciate exactly these types of tipped caps. But paranoid to be perceived as either, Edwards cuts away from Zora’s perspective of the creature just as she beholds it, cutting to a wide shot.
It’s a distillation of everything wrong with modern blockbusters. Pastiche can’t play with such fundamental misinterpretation. The Grant/Ellie moment worked because they were audience surrogates, experiencing dinosaurs through awestruck human eyes. Edwards gives us a pretty postcard shot of his Jurassic World.
5 The Monsters Literally Change Size Between Scenes
When Your Star Monster Has an Identity Crisis
It’s not canonical, but the Distortus rex appears to be a shapeshifter. Depending on where in the movie you wake up, sometimes it’s massive enough to tower over buildings like King Kong; other times it’s scaled down for intimate chase scenes like early-franchise fodder.
The Mutadons suffer a similar fate. Their proportions are inconsistent but don’t worry, they are also rendered terribly. Details like these get lost in properties so thoroughly put through the Hollywood meat grinder. This is the exact type of thing Spielberg’s team obsessively maintained for believability. Here, creatures exist at whatever size the current scene requires.
4 Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali Are Criminally Wasted
Movie Stars Brace Themselves for an Asteroid-Level Failure
Both actors are phenomenally talented, but Zora Bennett and Duncan Kincaid are just generic action hero archetypes with no defining characteristics beyond professional competence. Johansson has one character trait—her mother died of heart disease—which is mentioned embarrassingly few times, never once a North Star in her decision-making.
Watching Ali try to inject into a stock character — «loyal mercenary who cares about kids» — is woeful. The script gives him nothing to work with except reaction shots and exposition delivery. Duncan «sacrifices» himself to distract the Distortus rex; it should be a powerful moment, but it’s merely a tally mark. Another cliché to add to the Jurassic World Rebirth‘s impressive (or, unimpressive) trope counter. The fact that he survives this «sacrifice» feels even more dishonest.
3 Jurassic World Rebirth Abandons Every Interesting Idea It Sets Up
Corporate Greed Gets a Little-Needed Victory
Jurassic World Rebirth neglected what could have been genuinely compelling social commentary at the silver lining of its «interest has waned,» establishing the premise. If dinosaurs are headed toward a second extinction, it begs some interesting questions: What happens when miracles become mundane? How does society process the loss of wonder in their lives? It’s fair play for a juicy allegory, left bone dry.
Similarly, almost awesome was the «Ile Saint-Hubert as a dumping ground for failed experiments» concept. It could have been fascinating. A place where corporate ambition created horrors too disturbing even for profit-driven theme parks is a rich backdrop for a story exploring capitalism’s willingness to monetize anything. Instead, it seems as if neither potential plot was given its full attention.
2 The Jurassic World Rebirth Ending Makes the Protagonists Into Villains
Zora's Decisions Could Prove Catastrophic
Jurassic World movies now have yet another impossible task, which is to enticingly promise more movies. Such a conundrum makes it so that any contrived, Rube Goldberg machine that gets the franchise to justify its perpetual existence is maddening.
Zora’s decision to release the dinosaur DNA «open-source» to «everyone» is presented as heroic, but how can she be heroic when audiences are keen enough to know it’s a deliberately irresponsible choice to beget more Jurassic World? The movie just spent two hours showing what happens when corporations experiment, as did three decades of other Jurassic entries. Zora democratizing dangerous dinosaur technology is so transparently setting up a global catastrophe.
1 The Jurassic World Movies Need a Rebirth of 1993's Practical Effects
Let's Address the CGI Elephant in the Room
This is the most nauseating failure of them all. One of the big sells for Jurassic World Rebirth was its brushing off of the original book’s river chase sequence for this installment. Remembered as one of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton’s biggest frights left out of Jurassic Park, the hype was real. Yet, watching it unfold only brought a singular incessant thought: how much more convincing Stan Winston’s animatronics were thirty-two years ago. Like the rest of their Jurassic World predecessors, the digital dinosaurs in Rebirth have no weight, no presence, and no sense of occupying real space.
In such a specially affected (they call it SFX) Jurassic World, and with the unhelpful hand of Koepp’s screenplay, even intimate moments between humans feel disconnected. The extra layer—buying into their connections with dinosaurs is just a bridge too far for viewers. All these moments manage to accomplish is nostalgia for three-decade-old puppets.
