Jurassic World Rebirth review: Taking it back to the original
Jurassic Park is my favourite film of all time, and I will always show up for the sequels, even if it’s been a case of diminishing returns of late. Although I think it has come back too soon, I had every faith in Gareth Edwards as the new director, and he didn’t let me down with Jurassic World Rebirth.
Set five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, Rebirth follows Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), two covert operatives who head to an abandoned island that was once the home of InGen’s experimental dinosaur lab. Teaming up with palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and big pharma businessman Martin (Rupert Friend), they must extract biomaterials from three living dinosaurs to help develop a revolutionary drug for humans – and make it out alive.
This film is a love letter to the original Jurassic Park and the legacy of its director, Steven Spielberg. Edwards has done his best to channel his inner Spielberg, and there are many nods to JP and Spielberg films like Jaws and Indiana Jones. But where is the line between paying homage and borrowing too much? As a JP diehard, I probably noticed more Easter eggs than your average person, but I thought there were slightly too many. It’s unnecessary!
The start is a bit shaky, and it took me a while to get into it, but it really gets going once we reach the island. There are some silly and improbable moments, some obvious green screen use, and too many characters, but it makes up for this with its sheer entertainment value, funny moments and action setpieces. The dinosaur encounters are genuinely thrilling and exciting. The standout is the brilliant T-Rex sequence, which I enjoyed from start to finish.
I wish the film had really explored the abandoned facility and delved into InGen’s experiments and mutations. The main story of collecting dinosaur blood is perfectly fine, but it could have been so much more given the setting. Edwards chooses to tell a classic Jurassic story instead of trying to do anything new or reinvent the wheel. He presents a different angle and a fresh set of characters, but it still feels like we’ve been here before.
Jurassic World Rebirth takes the franchise back to its origins and brings us another entertaining blockbuster with likeable leads and exciting dinos. It’s a vast improvement upon Dominion and the best one since Jurassic World.
In cinemas from Wednesday 2nd July