Jurassic Park Rebirth (2025, directed by Gareth Edwards) is yet another symptom of Hollywood’s addiction to intellectual property in anticipation of the summer blockbuster season. It is another Fabergé egg—snazzy on the outside, but ultimately hollow.
No matter what they do, they can never recapture the majesty and awe generated by the original Jurassic Park film, directed by Steven Spielberg in the 1990s. That film was measured and knew well how to play upon the cast’s presence. This time around, it feels like you’re watching a middling video game, with characters merely being led around to be killed and to progress to the next stage. The story is merely a premise for an eventual theme park ride.
All the sequels have a complication involving getting something from the dinosaurs. Always something extractive—for profit and science. This is Frankenstein, but with reptiles.
Jurassic Park Rebirth sticks to the following tropes in a dinosaur film: There’s always a child involved because of parental idiocy. There’s always a willful, surly teenager. There’s always a militaristic figure getting his gears going with weaponry. There’s always a white man tied to greedy capitalism, disguised as scientific research and progress. There’s always a metal suitcase with canisters. There is nothing new.
Even the creatures look so tired. The graphics are astounding. The way they depicted the flapping flesh of a T. rex when it roars may be a subtle detail easily overlooked, but Jurassic Park Rebirth is elevated by its graphics team. Director Gareth Edwards has made some remarkable science fiction movies like Monsters (2010), Godzilla (2014), Rogue One (2016), and The Creator (2023). This one is a horrible miss—it’s a cynical entry in the franchise made for the sake of relevance.
This film achieved the unthinkable: it made Jonathan Bailey charmless and about as crucial as a tarsier in a dinosaur movie. He always has this shocked look behind his spectacles. The plumage of certain airborne dinosaurs had a greater range of motion than Scarlett Johansson—which is surprising, considering she’s a credible actress. They also mishandled Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali as a ship captain. These are all one-dimensional characters, existing only to serve as plot points for action and dinosaur chase sequences.
Even the dinosaurs in this iteration needed some gussying up, so they played the mutation card. They produced even more outrageous hybrids. It worked in the earlier versions when they needed some contemporary frog DNA to augment extinct dinosaur DNA. Now, the dinosaurs look like they stepped out of a child’s crayon drawings—raptor heads, bat wings. The main dinosaur resembles the lovechild of a beluga whale, an iguana, a T. rex, and a Florida alligator. This is like the creation of a toy designer on crack.
There’s a scene that I suspect was meant to be an emotional moment—where a scientist encounters dinosaurs up close. That scene belongs in the category of “so stupid, it’s good” filmmaking, especially when you have a eureka moment while dinosaurs are engaging in foreplay with their prehensile tails. It really should be called “Jurassic Park Stillbirth.”
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social
