I have a love/hate relationship with franchises. Sometimes they’re great, sometimes they are middling, and sometimes they make you wonder what it takes to get studios to stop beating a dead horse, or at the very least, treat it with some respect. Jurassic World Rebirth just hit Peacock, so let’s figure out which kind of franchise film it is. You would note, though, that previous sequels, both pre-Jurassic World and beyond, have been largely misses, with only The Lost World being the fairly dim, but comparatively bright spot in this laundry list of sequels.
We start 17 years ago at a secret laboratory facility where scientists are working on highly dangerous mutant dinosaur hybrids and everyone is wearing clean suits and there are very strict safety protocols that everyone is adhering to. Everyone except one guy who is eating a Snickers bar with the mask of his clean suit open. Rushing to get through the high security door, he is a bit careless with his Snickers wrapper. But I get it, you’re not you when you’re hungry. So he drops the wrapper, which under normal circumstances is a bit rude and careless. But in this highly sensitive facility, it’s, well, it shouldn’t be anything. However, it most certainly is something—the security doors, for some reason, have a vent in them and for some reason, this is a very, very crucial vent and it’s placed just above the floor, at perfect carelessly discarded trash level. It sucks the Snickers wrapper, formerly packed with peanuts that satisfy, into the vent which for this very crucial, very at-carelessly-discarded-trash-height design, causes a catastrophic failure for the entire containment system. But in a lab with literal monsters that have had insane levels of bloodlust baked into their DNA, the security protocols are airtight and closely monitored. Except they’re not and the system failure goes unnoticed for some time, allowing the mutated dinosaur to get loose. So now there’s a designer kaiju Xenomorph on the rampage and as you can imagine, this doesn’t bode very well for the people working there. All for the want of crunchy peanuts, gooey caramel, and chewy nougat draped in velvety chocolate. But as much as the product placement here is the main focus of the scene, it’s not about the hunger-defeating, delicious, nigh decadent candy bar, it never is. It’s about the Rancor getting loose and no Luke Skywalker to stop it. And the Rube Goldberg machine of incompetency masquerading as chaos theory that sets all these things in motion.
Warm up for your favorite beating stick, because we’ve got a dead horse here and it’s apparent from the very first scene.
Fast forward to today, we are introduced to Shady Corporate Guy, who has a name, Martin Krebs, but it’s unimportant because Jurassic World is that kind of franchise now. He’s played by Rupert Friend (The Death of Stalin, The Phoenician Scheme) who doesn’t have to work very hard to come off as the slimy archetype he’s meant to play, showing utter exasperation at the traffic jam being caused by North America’s oldest known dinosaur slowly dying in the street. You see, despite the fact in the last movie, the dinosaurs were everywhere and threatening to Planet of the Apes-style take over, in the time between Jurassic World: Dominion and now, it turns out that dinosaurs really suck at living around humans and humans are very bored of dinosaurs, so the ones that haven’t died due to our climate being extremely different from the one their biology is designed for have retreated to the equatorial band, which prompts all the governments in the world to get together, have a few laughs, and ban all travel to the area over safety concerns. How wonderfully cooperative and realistic of them. But as it turns out, Krebs works for Big Pharma and he needs Zora Bennett, a former special operative, to go to this forbidden zone to get DNA from the three biggest dinosaurs in existence to cure heart disease. Zora, played by Scarlet Johansson uncomfortably in the Chris Pratt role, is hesitant to agree, but thankfully, like all problems in this world, Krebs solves it by throwing money at her until she agrees. She does get a bit nervy when she finds out that she needs to collect the DNA from living dinosaurs while they’re still alive. Walking Dinosaur Fact Book, also named Dr. Henry Loomis, played by Jonathan Bailey (Bridgerton, Wicked), explains exactly why they need it and that’s mostly his role in this movie. There are some good moments of diegetic exposition, where informational videos play contextually in the background and make sense for the scene, but when they can’t do that, Loomis is able to jump in and give the audience everything they need to know without any characters ever needing to earn any knowledge.
They meet up with Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, True Detective), playing Duncan Kincaid, aka Tragic Backstory Boat Guy, an old friend of (also Tragic Backstory) Chris Pratt ScarJo, and they gather some red shirts and head into the forbidden zone. It’s then that we get a glimpse—and I say glimpse, but in reality it’s a long scene with a foregone conclusion—of the again, for some reason, Jurassic Park staple, the family going through a troubled time. This time it’s Reuben Delgado, played by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer), his two daughters, one very young and the other almost off to college, and the older one’s lazy, annoying boyfriend. The scene drives hard at how lazy he is and how much Reuben doesn’t like him and it takes forever to get to the point. As happy as I was to see Garcia-Rulfo getting a prominent role in a major blockbuster franchise, my excitement was tempered by how excruciatingly and unnecessarily long this scene is. Six or seven years into them arguing about how it’s boyfriend’s turn at the wheel, dinosaurs show up. Their little SS Minnow puts up a good fight, but eventually they capsize and call for help. Why it has been decided that every Jurassic Park movie needs to have divorced parents and their kids in it just because Lex and Tim’s parents were going through a divorce I’ll never know, but you have to know going in, if there’s a T-Rex skull in the logo of the movie, there’s going to be family drama in between the sharp teeth.
And then it goes pretty much in this fashion. Zora and her team face some struggles, the red shirts fulfill their destiny as cannon fodder, Shady Corporate Guy turns out to be shady and corporate, and some dinosaurs do some stuff. There are plenty of dinosaurs in this one and they’re mostly mutated hyper-predators. They eat some stuff, they show off their incredible stealth abilities, there’s a new Grogu in the form of baby aquilops Dolores, which is great for merchandising. I’m very excited for their new merchandising opportunities. Later rather than sooner, the series of fetch quests are more or less completed and the story starts in earnest; just in time for the credits to roll. Jurassic World: Rebirth isn’t the worst movie in the storied franchise, but it is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with it and a lot of things that are wrong with the movie industry today.
I talk often about not just the length of movies, but also the justification of that length. Movies don’t feel long because of the runtime; they feel long because the runtime isn’t justified by the story that movie is telling. I have seen the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy at least half a dozen times from start to finish and have not made a single complaint about the lengths of those films because they are filled with story that makes the runtime worth it. But the scene with the Delgado family really drives home how little story there is in this movie and how the film just doesn’t respect your time. There is a long argument between Reuben and the boyfriend and the payoff for that is a callback after they’re shipwrecked when the boyfriend offers to take watch so Reuben can get a little extra rest. Isn’t that wonderful? The character whose name I wasn’t able to learn showed the tiniest bit of character growth. That was worth the boredom from the earlier scene. The scene where Zora and Kincaid trade their sad stories could have been interesting, but it comes at a time before you care about the characters (not that it ever really comes). Zora has shown herself to be a cutthroat mercenary whose lines in the sand get blurred very easily by money. Characters need to do more than have had something sad happen to them before the movie started to make audiences care about the sad stuff that happened before the movie. At 2 hours and 13 minutes, by today’s blockbuster standards it’s actually not that long, but it’s boring, as even later action sequences start to fall flat. It is both boring for long stretches of time and overstuffed, but with nothing to show for it.
Another big problem is the characters. As you may have noticed, I’ve been mostly referring to characters rather cynically by the role they play in the film. Because that is what these characters have been reduced to; they’re not even stock characters, they’re plot devices and cannon fodder to up the stakes by bloodying up the cast. But if the characters don’t matter and the ones who die are made very obvious from the moment they grace the screen, it doesn’t actually raise the stakes; it creates predictability. This is pretty standard fare for older action films and modern ones that aren’t concerned with storytelling. And you may say that Jurassic World is a modern action film that isn’t much concerned with storytelling and that would be a fair assessment. So it should be enough to go into the film and just enjoy watching the big lizards chomp down on some cocky guys in tactical gear and have a good time for two hours. And it would be fine if it were entertaining enough for that to be something that you could really do, which it isn’t, and if Jurassic Park hadn’t already set such high standards for what these films are supposed to be. Ian Malcolm wasn’t a stock character. Robert Muldoon wasn’t a stock character. Neither Nedry nor Arnold were either. When those characters were in peril or something happened to them, it mattered because you cared (maybe a bit less with Nedry). Another problem is the monumental level of stupidity these characters exhibit. Many times after the shipwreck, the Delgado family happily traipses through the jungle talking and making jokes, never letting on that they have any idea that they’re in danger until its saliva is dripping on their shoulders. And they should be wildly aware of the danger they face, having been attacked twice by dinosaurs just earlier that day.
There’s putting on a brave face and there’s being so oblivious to the scenario in the film that you appear to be actors on a stage and not characters in a story. The ability to suspend disbelief is tantamount to a movie like this working and when not even the characters seem to be into what’s going on, it’s hard to get invested in this silly dinosaur kaiju movie. There’s also an outstanding level of incompetency here that is coming from people who are supposed to be at the top of their game. As Zora and Tragic Backstory Boat Guy come in at a multimillion dollar booking fee for this job, you’d expect some amount of core competency designed at keeping people alive on this mission. For example, when taking a boat to a forbidden zone to gather live DNA from a seafaring dinosaur that eclipses the size of an orca (and the Orca) in the form of a mosasaurus, I would ensure that mission critical equipment were stowed with some sort of flotation device. And yet, when the inevitable shipwrecking occurs, Zora and Walking Dinosaur Fact Book scramble to tie life jackets to equipment so they are able to float. So when they do find themselves on a deserted beach, they have lost much of that equipment, including any weapons they could use to defend themselves. I guess $10,000,000 doesn’t buy much anymore these days, such is the plight the shrinking middle class. Eggs are expensive, gas is expensive, and mercenaries under $25 million just aren’t what they used to be.
The moral dilemmas that are presented in this film are so black and white that anyone on the opposite side of them looks cartoonishly villainous. You want them to get comeuppance and they do, because among the many things that the dinosaurs are in this movie, they are and have been for several installments in this franchise now, instant karma machines. When you don’t like someone in one of these movies it’s because they are one dimensionally evil and you get megadoses of poetic justice; it was silly in The Lost World when the baby tyrannosaur gets revenge on Hammond’s nephew and it’s only spiraled out of control since then, with every villain getting nearly instantaneous death by the adjudicators in these films, the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs started as a moral quandary about cloning and intellectual property and animal rights and then positioned the dinosaurs as antagonists to our heroes just trying to survive. Now the dinosaurs are both mindless killing machines and deliverers of swift justice. They get to be everything.
And that brings me to the next big problem in this movie, fidelity. At any given moment, the dinosaurs are simply whatever the film needs them to be. Remember the iconic moment in Jurassic Park when the water in the cup ripples from the tyrannosaur’s distant footsteps? And how that motif was carried through several of the movies? Well, turns out the older T-Rexes were just heavy footed, because there are several moments in this film where giant, multi-ton lizards sneak up silently on our protagonists like ninjas in the night. One T-Rex even pulls a Jason Bourne, disappearing impossibly fast as he’s briefly obscured by traffic. The quetzalcoatlus is the largest flying being to ever exist, described as the size of an F16 by the film itself, but it silently flies past someone multiple times who is none wiser. I’m not an expert at being hunted by giant predators or fighter jets, but I would like to think that if in a situation where I’m expecting a fighter jet sized predator to fly up to my position and eat me that I would be enough on the lookout to maybe notice the giant creature cutting through the air.
And the big bad, the D-Rex is simply the Alien Xenomorph mixed with Godzilla and is so big that it can’t ever be shown completely in shot and yet can silently move through a foggy night. They also have incredible senses of smell except when someone is hiding just around the corner from them or their olfactory sense is being overwhelmed by the powerful and lasting freshness coming from Loomis’s mouth because of the number Altoids he eats (and he chomps down on them like a T-Rex on a mercenary, which is wild to me; do you all bite your mints?). Although, it makes sense when you think about it. After all, Altoids are the mints so strong they come in a metal box. As much as some of the action can be genuinely exciting (the first sequence with the mosasaur especially), a lot of it is hampered by questionable CGI and green screening that made things look oddly out of perspective. It’s not Legolas on the cave troll bad, but it is noticeable for a movie in 2025.
Like I said this isn’t the worst movie in the franchise; it actually might be one of the best. Which is a scathing indictment of the Jurassic Park movies. The worst part about all of this is that movies like this are why studios think they can drip feed us AI slop because it can’t be that much worse than this when Rebirth made $868 million worldwide and only cost a reported $180 million (a little more than half of Netflix’s Electric State). Why put any effort into these films at all when they’re making this much money off them? I know Gareth Edwards is capable of making better movies because he has. In fact he made this movie better when he wrote and directed it himself and did the special effects on his bedroom floor with a laptop in 2010. The movie is called Monsters and it’s about invading aliens surviving in an equatorial forbidden zone that no one is allowed to go and the man tasked with going in to get his boss’s daughter out of the quarantine zone safely. Does that seem familiar to the plot of this movie? The main difference being that Monsters was a $500,000 indie that was actually good and offered character development and emotional payoff. This is that movie with dinosaurs instead of aliens, a Big Pharma subplot instead characters, and 360 times the budget.
Jurassic Park is both possibly the best blockbuster film of all time and one of the best horror movies of all time. Jurassic World doesn’t continue on in that tradition nor does it iterate on it, simply borrows bits and pieces from better movies and shoehorns them in and winks at the audience hoping that being slyly self aware about its lack creativity will excuse the lack of creativity. It doesn’t. It makes it feel worse because we’re getting a movie they know is bad and know will make money and we continue feed our dollars into the machine that pumps out subpar film after subpar film. It struggles to clear the lowest bar of entertainment value and it’s shocking that it’s still better than at least half of the Jurassic Park movies. I wish I could offer a better alternative to Rebirth other than watching Jurassic Park again, but since Monsters doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere, I’m coming up empty here. If you have Peacock and you still want to watch it, go for it. I do sincerely hope you enjoy it better than I did. Or you could watch Cocaine Bear, also on Peacock, which is a movie that is actually, you know, as fun as it is silly and as silly as Jurassic World has become.
