Jurassic World Rebirth: A Franchise Running on Fumes and Nostalgia

The seventh Jurassic film knows exactly what made the original great, which only makes its inability to recapture it more frustrating.

By MIGUEL MATEO | JULY 2, 2025

By this point, the magic and awe that once defined the Jurassic Park franchise has mostly drained away, and Jurassic World Rebirth doesn't reverse that trend so much as manage the decline. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard's trilogy at least clawed back some of that wonder in its first installment before collapsing into the worst entry the series has produced. Rebirth isn't that low point. It's a more competent film than Dominion on nearly every level. But competence isn't the same as charisma, and charisma is exactly what this movie is missing at its center.

The cast isn't the problem on paper. Scarlett Johansson is reliably strong in nearly anything she's handed, but her particular strengths, that controlled, watchful intensity, never quite fit the register this movie needs from its lead. She's playing it straight in a film that could use someone willing to have more fun with the premise. Jonathan Bailey fares even worse. His character is sketched in just enough to move the plot along and never given a reason to matter beyond that. Mahershala Ali and the rest of the ensemble round out a cast that's talented across the board and almost entirely forgettable in execution, which says less about the actors than about a script that doesn't know what to do with any of them.

What Rebirth does have is reverence, maybe too much of it. Gareth Edwards and company clearly understand what made Spielberg's original film work, and the movie keeps reaching for that feeling through direct homage: specific shots, blocking, even music cues lifted close enough to the 1993 film that it stops feeling like tribute and starts feeling like imitation. There's a difference between invoking the original's spirit and recreating its greatest hits, and Rebirth leans hard on the latter, especially in its back half.

None of this makes the film unwatchable. It's a perfectly serviceable creature feature, better constructed than several of its predecessors, and free of the worst excesses that sank Dominion. But "better than the worst one" is a low bar for a franchise that once redefined what a blockbuster could look like, and Rebirth never finds a lead performance or an original idea strong enough to clear it.

Rating: ★★ out of ★★★★★