Semi-spoileriffic first thoughts on Jurassic World Rebirth

I say “semi-spoileriffic” because I’m not going to go out of my way to give away any plot points or creature details you couldn’t get from watching the trailers and TV spots, but if you want to keep yourself pure as the driven snow, you might want to save this post for later.

I don’t know that I’ve ever done a movie review on this blog. It’s not really our thing here. Plus, no previous Jurassic World movie has interested me very much. I mean, of course I saw them all, because dinosaurs. In the introduction to his story collection “Dinosaur Tales”, Ray Bradbury describes going with his friend Ray Harryhausen and their spouses to see a production of the opera Siegfried, for no better reason than to catch a glimpse of the dragon Fafnir. I can relate.

Jurassic World Rebirth has interested me, in part because Aquilops is in it, but also because I’ve been holding out hope that it might be decent. Stephen King once wrote in an essay that he knew that almost all horror movies were going to be poorly-written, clumsily-executed cliche-fests, but he kept going because one in a hundred bottled the lightning and made him genuinely feel something. That was approximately my hope here. David Koepp coming back to write the screenplay was a big point in the movie’s favor, as was Gareth Edwards in the director’s chair. Hence my cautious optimism.

So how’d it work out?

I liked it! It’s not perfect, but I think it does a lot of things better than any other Jurassic World movie, and in my opinion it’s easily the best Jurassic Park/World movie since the original. I’ll do my best to tease out the bits that I think are objectively good from the bits where the movie was pushing my specific buttons.

Things I think are objectively good about the movie:

Sense of wonder — there are some scenes that read as very explicit homages to thematically similar scenes in the original Jurassic Park, that emphasize the sheer amazingness of dinosaurs as living animals, and as metaphors for the grandeur of nature. Of course, every Jurassic franchise film has Dinosaurs Getting Out And That Being a Problem, but the last three movies made the dinosaurs a little too contained, a little too controlled, a little too commodified. Which leads me to:

Basic scenario — I’m on the fence about whether this point is an objective or a subjective one. Personally, if I’m going to see what is basically a monster movie about big wild animals, a small team on the ground in the unknown surrounded by monsters is much more interesting and compelling than putting the monsters in a human environment. It’s why Kong: Skull Island is my favorite Monsterverse movie (Godzilla: King of the Monsters is second, mostly because it gives us so many interesting environments that aren’t cities). But I think the scenario of putting people into a wild environment just makes more sense for dinosaurs. None of these movies exist in a vacuum, and if we’re going to put monsters in a human environment, we might as well go the whole distance and have Godzilla or Pacific Rim. As soon as the humans were stranded on the island, outnumbered, outgunned, clearly the underdogs, I was like, “Hell yeah, let’s roll.”

Moral compass — I’m not going to lean on this one too heavily, because it’s not a huge part of the movie, but Jurassic World Rebirth is About Something in a way that most of the other movies after the original have not been. I mean, they’re all sorta about Greed is Bad and Kills People, but mostly not in a very interesting or inspiring way. There are at least a couple of moments in this movie where OA advocates might do a fist-pump, and Elsevier execs might squirm in their seats, and I’ll take it. It was also nice to see science presented as an altruistic endeavor. Obviously scientists are human and science is a human endeavor, with all the imperfections that implies, but the motivation to learn and to share is the beating heart of science, and it’s nice to see some love for the better angels.

Characters — Others may disagree, and that’s fine, but I thought for a movie that had to cover a lot of ground, literally and metaphorically, and put the dinosaurs front and center, Jurassic World Rebirth did a decent job of sketching its main characters and giving them each a motivation and a chance to learn or grow at least a little. I got more out of it than any of the previous sequels, anyway.

Some things I wasn’t so wild about:

Unconvincing rationale — Look, I get it, there’s going to be some hand-wavy not-quite-science because it’s a sci-fi movie and not a documentary. And to be fair, the movie at least takes a stab at justifying the collection of living tissue. But if the company that inherited the InGen IP had all the critters’ genomes and the ability to translate them into embryos, it’s not obvious why they couldn’t just culture some titanosaur heart muscle in vitro and call it a day. Maybe this is just a Tolkien’s eagles thing, but it feels like something that Jim Cameron would have sewn up a little tighter (say what you will about his movies, but their information hygiene is usually hermetic).

Mutant dinosaurs — Oh boy, do I have Thoughts about this. Starting with Indominus rex in Jurassic World, these movies have pushed the line that the public would get bored of regular dinosaurs, so InGen (or whoever) had to keep making up new dinosaurs. But there’s an elision here between the fiction and the metafiction. There is 100% a company that keeps making up new dinosaurs because their execs think regular dinosaurs are too vanilla to keep the public’s interest, but it isn’t InGen, it’s Universal. That really irritates me, because it says to me that the folks in charge don’t believe in the mission. So what if they just…didn’t? I think the previous Jurassic World movies would have done just fine without mutant dinosaurs, and I think that in part because their mutant dinosaurs were so boring. Indominus rex is morphologically just a big allosauroid, to the extent that some people were using their I. rex figures as Saurophaganax stand-ins in their head canon (I discovered while working on the Allosaurus anax project). Indoraptor is just a slightly bigger, slightly smarter, still feather-less dromaeosaur. Big whoop. I’ll say this for Jurassic World Rebirth: the mutadons and D. rex are at least actually weird enough to be believable as mutants. Even if plot-wise you could swap them for ‘vanilla’ raptors and tyrannosaurs and everything would still work.

Bad nomenclature — Okay, this is an inside-baseball thing to grump about, but hey, the name of the blog is a clue to the background geekiness level around here. Titanosaurus hasn’t been a valid genus for a minute. Why not call the super-gigantic titanosaurs in the movie Argentinosaurus or Patagotitan or Sauroposeidon (he suggested modestly)? Also, we don’t have to guess what the head of Quetzalcoatlus looked like, we know pretty much the whole thing from Q. langstoni. If the moviemakers wanted to have their big pterosaur look like not-Quetz, that’s cool, but then why call it Quetz? Call it Hatzegopteryx or Arambourgiana or one of the other big azhdarchids for which complete skulls are not yet known, they’re all equally unpronounceable to civilians. Or just make it look like actual Quetz, it will still be sufficiently terrifying with the crest in the right place.

Reasonably predictable — You’ll figure out right away who’s going to live, who’s going to die, who’s going to have a heel turn, and who will be redeemed, based solely on the prominence and likeability of the actors playing them. Part of me would have loved to see the movie go a little harder — it’s directed by Gareth “I nuked the Rogue One cast from orbit” Edwards, after all. But even my shriveled little heart smiled at the happy ending, so there’s that.

And finally, so I can end on a positive note, here are some things that really worked for me, but which might not work for everyone.

The movie had a lot of bits that were unexpectedly resonant for me. I’ve seen a blue whale up close on a whale-watching trip, and it was one of those moments, like my first time peering down into the Grand Canyon, where my brain just couldn’t fully process what I was seeing. I saw the blue whale, but I had a hard time believing it, even after living for decades with the intellectual knowledge of how big they are, and even after seeing grays and humpbacks on previous trips. One shot in the mosasaur chase brought that blue whale encounter roaring back into my mind. Another example: there’s a point fairly early on when the team has its first real success, and for a minute or two everyone is happy is that they’ve pulled off something logistically challenging. I thought, “Yeah, that’s exactly what it feels like when we get a big jacket out of the field in one piece”. Everyone’s happy, everyone’s relieved, fingers and toes (and hooves) are all accounted for, and the specimen we came for is safe.

The paleontologist in the movie, Dr. Henry Loomis, played by Jonathan Bailey, is a very believable combination of basically competent, starry-eyed, and thoroughly geeky. At one point Mahershala Ali’s character laughs out loud and says, “You’re so weird!” in response to something Loomis just said. That made me laugh out loud, because what Loomis said is something that I have heard my paleontologist friends say more than once. I think most paleontologists would like to see themselves as Alan Grant or Ellie Sattler, but in truth most of us have a stripe of Ross Geller a mile wide. Bailey hits that balance with uncanny precision. Of all of the depictions of paleontologists in pop culture, Henry Loomis is the one that made me nod and smile in recognition the most. Not just, “I’d go to the field with that guy”, but “I’ve been to the field with that guy”.

Speaking of, I also laughed out loud at several other points in the movie, which is for me a big deal. A movie like this doesn’t need to be a wall-to-wall quip-fest, and this one is not, but a few well-earned chuckles make the whole thing a lot more enjoyable.

Finally, even after watching a million trailers and promo videos, I got misty-eyed when Dolores the Aquilops first appeared. That was surprisingly moving for me, to see ‘my’ little dinosaur up there on the big screen. I shed a happy tear at one other point in the movie, which will be completely obvious to anyone who’s seen it, so I won’t belabor it here. It’s a big moment for one of the characters, and it made me think, “Yeah, that’s my dream, too.”

Given that, you’d better take this whole post with an evaporated ocean of salt, because my objectivity has been compromised.

So anyway, I liked it, a lot, and I’m gonna see it again. You?

Source: https://svpow.com/2025/07/03/semi-spoileriffic-first-thoughts-on-jurassic-world-rebirth/