With a title and a premise that are neither original nor awe-inspiring enough to lure people out to the movies, Jurassic World Rebirth willingly sets out to do what other sequels do by necessity: return to its roots.

Steven Spielberg, the director of the first two Jurassic Park movies, had brought back screenwriter David Koepp (the first Mission: Impossible, Toby Maguire’s Spider-Man) to write what is a back-to-basics film. Work on Rebirth began immediately after Jurassic World: Dominion’s release, in secret according to Koepp’s interview with the publication IndieWire.

Koepp’s creative ink had dried up before the third Jurassic Park movie, so the gap — and a revisit of the first two books by screenwriter-producer-novelist Michael Crichton (the creator of the franchise) — became a welcome break from the over-expanded world of the last three Jurassic World movies.

Koepp’s screenplay, directed by the very able Gareth Edwards (Monsters, The Creator, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, 2014’s Godzilla), takes new characters to an abandoned island facility on Ile Saint-Hubert in the Atlantic Ocean, where dinosaurs roam. Mother nature, we learn, is slowly making dinosaurs extinct again, so time is of the essence for pharmaceutical companies.

Jurassic World: Rebirth doesn’t do anything novel but it also doesn’t stop the simple escapist fun the story and direction offers

Zora Bennet (Scarlett Johannsson), an ex-military covert operative, is hired by an unmistakably evil executive of a pharmaceutical company (Rupert Friend). He wants Zora to lead an expedition to extract DNA from three dino species that can lead to medicine to cure heart diseases (this is a legit reason, medical science assumes, that led to longer dinosaur lifespans).

Taking along the token palaeontologist (Jonathan Bailey), Zora gets a team ready (Mahershala Ali and Ek Skrein amongst others) to do her well-paying job, but finds a father, his two daughters, and one daughter’s boyfriend (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, Audrina Miranda and David Iacono) in a boat in these dangerous waters. The rest of the movie is as one expects, yet somehow better.

Koepp’s tone and his humour is complemented by Edwards’ approach. The characters are throwaway, but they serve the story. After the last three movies, the creative playground had gotten too big for what was basically always a one-line B-movie idea. The creative juices had mostly dried up by the third movie, and the following three movies only had a few novel twists and likeable characters here and there (like Chris Pratt’s character and his female raptor Blue).

Rebirth doesn’t plan on doing anything novel, and even when it does — the new big, bad dinosaur is a six-armed mutation named D-Rex that looks like a giant reject from the Alien movies — it doesn’t stop the simple escapist fun the story and direction offers.

Released by Universal and HKC, Jurassic World Rebirth is rated U, and is suitable for audiences of all ages who are still into seeing dinosaurs on the big screen

Published in Dawn, ICON, July 13th, 2025