Jurassic World Rebirth Remakes The Best Jurassic Park Sequel

This article contains spoilers for "Jurassic World Rebirth."

We're all familiar with the famous Ian Malcolm quote about being so preoccupied about whether someone could do something that they don't stop to think about whether or not they should. That hypothesis can be applied to all manner of IP-driven filmmaking with franchises that have stretched beyond their expiration dates, but it's especially prescient with "Jurassic Park." Universal has been chasing the high of Steven Spielberg's groundbreaking sci-fi adventure ever since it gave audiences the best glimpse of cinematic dinosaurs they'd ever seen. It's easy to understand why they would see it as a hot property to build an empire around. The film was not just a box office juggernaut, but it fundamentally changed how movies are made in terms of computer-generated imagery. That's a high bar to clear.

Over thirty years later, we're on the seventh installment in the "Jurassic" pantheon with "Jurassic World Rebirth," which also happens to be a reboot of sorts following the creatively disastrous "Dominion." The last one was handed one of the series' best ideas on a silver platter, and wasted it with a bloated and incredibly stupid legacy sequel that makes you feel sad for everyone involved, but it made a billion dollars, so the dinosaurs get to live to see another day.

"Rebirth" initially felt like a welcome reprieve from the "World" movies, opting to go back to basics and keep the dinosaurs contained to a single island. With Gareth Edwards directing on 35mm film stock in outdoor locations, along with bringing back David Koepp, all signs pointed to this being a step in the right direction. "Rebirth," sadly, further illustrated why this series needs to go extinct. /Film's Jeremy Mathai at least had some kinder words for the action sequences in his review, but I don't really have any patience left for these movies.

In addition to a terrible sense of pacing, a thinly written batch of human characters, and a colossal waste of the mutant dinosaur premise, "Rebirth" comes across as reheated leftovers. There's no soul to any of its prospects, moving full steam ahead with little to make it feel meaningful or — better yet — fun. The central plot of retrieving dino blood samples that may contain the cure to heart disease comes with its own set of problems, but at least the film features some semblance of momentum. It all comes to a grinding halt, however, when it has to share the film with the Delgado family, who end up getting stranded on the dreaded Ile Saint-Hubert (it's essentially Site C). Together, they must find a way to survive an island of dinosaurs until they can get themselves to safety. If that sounds familiar, that's because it pulls from the best "Jurassic Park" sequel.

"Jurassic Park" was one of those once in a lifetime miracles where a sequel could almost never recapture the same kind of magic. With that said, however, I'd argue the first three films make a solid trilogy. "The Lost World" leans into some of the meaner aspects of Crichton's novel, not to mention that it also features the best usage of a dinosaur loose in the general public in 20 minutes than "Dominion" could in 147. In some ways, "Rebirth" is a loose remake of "The Lost World" in that it also features a group of black ops mercenaries traveling to an abandoned island of dinosaurs to bring a piece of them back to the mainland. The key difference, however, is that they were the antagonists back in 1997 and heroes in 2025.

But where "Rebirth" feels most egregious in terms of recreating a previous "Jurassic" adventure is with the family survival subplot, which heavily echoes "Jurassic Park III." Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his youngest daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda), his eldest daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), and her slacker boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) spend a good amount of the film trying to stay together as a family and evade dinosaurs at every turn. It's not unlike the Kirby family of "Jurassic Park III." Posing as millionaires, they trick Alan Grant (Sam Neill) into coming with them to search for their son Eric (Trevor Morgan), who ended up getting stranded on Isla Sorna (Site B) after his boat crashed during a parasailing incident near the island.

Neither family is made up of particularly compelling characters, although the Kirbys get the slight edge because their whole adventure comes about with a mission in mind. They make things harder for Dr. Grant every step of the way, but every now and then, you get glimpses into the kind of marriage Amanda (Téa Leoni) and Paul (William H. Macy) once had, and the glue that could repair it. The Kirbys' rescue operation complements the subplot surrounding Billy (Alessandro Nivola) stealing raptor eggs, while cutting back to the Delgados in "Jurassic World Rebirth" makes what should be a simple mission movie feel long and incredibly overstuffed.

Sure, the Delgados get the best scene in the film with the raft chase ripped straight out of Crichton's original "Jurassic Park" novel, but it leaves no real impact. On top of that, it's a lesser adaptation of the river scene in "Jurassic Park III." One of these movies actually had a practical dinosaur to act against. 

There's also a part of "Rebirth" that wants to keep things simple and return to the "we've gotta survive on an island of dinosaurs" simplicity of "Jurassic Park III," but just ends up revealing how much more efficient and economical Joe Johnston's film is. That film may not have had Spielberg (at least not completely), nor a completed script upon starting production, but it had the decency of being a 90-minute creature feature that's fun and light on its feet. It thankfully never aspires to be the first movie. "Rebirth," meanwhile, feels interminably long and surprisingly self-serious for a summer blockbuster about trying to evade mutant dinosaurs. The many similarities get to the heart of an even bigger issue with the "Jurassic" series.

You can see moments in "Rebirth" where Edwards had plenty of opportunities to take a risk and actually present its characters with the possibility that they may actually die, whether it's Teresa hanging off of the boat, Xavier taking a piss with raptors about to descend on him, or Isabella underneath a capsized raft. But it's this installment, more than any other "Jurassic" entry, that proves this series has exhausted all of its best ideas and can only really recycle itself. It even rips off the "one character sacrificing themselves to a dino, yet ends up miraculously being found alive at the end" bit, with Mahershala Ali's Duncan.

There's an attempt on Edwards and Koepp's behalf to not just recapture the Spielberg charm of the '93 film, but of his other bodies of work. It didn't help rewatching a perfect film like "Jaws" on its 50th anniversary, only to see Zora trying to get a shot at a mosasaurus on the bow of a moving ship just like Quint (Robert Shaw). "Rebirth" is a remix of all the things we love about Spielberg, monster moviesm and "Jurassic Park," but with no discernible identity of its own. The big bad Distortus rex is little more than a Rancor grafted onto a Tyrannosaurus, while the mutadon's big sequence is just the "raptors in the kitchen" bit from the first film. And I wasn't remotely surprised that Rupert Friend's Martin would turn out to be an evil double crosser who gets eaten by a dinosaur, while the rest of the main cast make it out relatively unscathed.

These "Jurassic World" movies are simply allergic to change, which is a shame. The scope and grandeur Edwards demonstrated in 2014's "Godzilla" and even "Rogue One," to an extent, is the perfect place to take advantage of that, yet it is shockingly absent in "Rebirth." It's no accident these terrible "Jurassic World" movies all feature some variation of people not being interested in dinosaurs anymore, while directed by filmmakers that present these magnificent beasts in the most uninspired ways. There's clearly an appetite for dinosaur movies from the general public. I doubt the next good one will come from anything with "Jurassic" in the title until they come up with something fresh.

"Jurassic World Rebirth" is now playing in theaters nationwide.