- Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali
- July 2nd 2025
- 133
- Gareth Edwards
Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey team up to extract biomaterials from living dinosaurs on a forbidden island.
The Chris Pratt-starring Jurassic World trilogy only concluded with Dominion three years ago, but the franchise is already back with a new story and a fresh set of characters.
Set five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, Gareth Edwards’s instalment stars Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali as Zora Bennett and Duncan Kincaid, two covert operatives who are hired to gain access to a forbidden island that used to be an InGen research facility.
Alongside palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and pharmaceutical businessman Martin (Rupert Friend), they must extract biomaterials from three of the biggest living dinosaurs to create a revolutionary drug for humans. And then make it off the island in one piece!
Jurassic World Rebirth, as the title suggests, takes the franchise back to its roots, bringing us a film that feels somewhat retro and more in keeping with Steven Spielberg’s 1993 original.
Edwards channels his inner Spielberg and peppers nods to Jurassic Park as well as Spielberg classics like Jaws and Indiana Jones throughout the film.
However, there are so many references in here that you start to wonder if it crosses the line between paying homage and copying too many ideas. Rebirth did not need to feature quite that many!
It takes a while to get going because it needs to set up the new world and establish our new band of characters, but it hits the gas once the team – and a family of civilians – encounter a Mosasaurus before reaching the island.
There are too many characters, and the green screen use is more obvious than it should be, but Rebirth easily makes up for these with brilliantly thrilling dinosaur sequences, particularly the outstanding T Rex encounter.
The dinosaurs frustratingly took a backseat in Dominion, so Edwards corrects that mistake and puts them front and centre again.
However, given the setting, it feels like a missed opportunity not to explore the research lab and more of InGen’s experiments and mutations.
It also feels like a story we’ve sort of seen before, albeit with a different angle and new characters, but hopefully, this is simply a launchpad for the franchise to evolve in a more intriguing direction in later films.
Jurassic World Rebirth is an entertaining and surprisingly funny blockbuster that presses the reset button on the franchise and takes it back to its roots.
In cinemas from Wednesday 2nd July.
By Hannah Wales.
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