It's a sin to kill a dinosaur!!!
Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)
If nothing else, Jurassic World Rebirth is a lot of fun. Summer is best when there’s a Jurassic blockbuster in theaters. I’ve stopped expecting high quality from this franchise, just seeing the dinosaurs is enough for me.
But this latest installment is an improvement on its predecessors. This is my ranking of the films:
Notice how none of the other Jurassic World movies are included? Exactly! But oh, how I loved the reunion between Alan and Ellie in Dominion.
Someone posed the question of where the series can go from here. I envision a film where the park is re-opened but run entirely on AI and the subsequent disaster. AI is destroying our planet, of course it would destroy cloned prehistoric animals. The owner would be an obscenely wealthy, obnoxious, and stupid tech bro like Elon Musk. If he ever made a real life Jurassic Park, I would free the dinosaurs and shut it down immediately.
Anyway, I don’t care about whatever new movie they have in mind. The TV series that is more faithful to Michael Crichton’s novel with no resemblance to the 1993 masterpiece is my priority. I’m working on an outline; I have sticky notes placed in certain chapters!
Now eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs in your dinosaur movie, right?
The mosasaur got a lot of screentime in Rebirth. She’s quite the diva, twirling in midair. We see you, queen. But mosasaur was not a dinosaur. Neither was quetzalcoatlus, although that one is understandable because it just looks like a giant bird. It was only a few years ago that I learned pterodactyls weren’t dinosaurs either.
But why would one of the film’s main characters, Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey3), a paleontologist who studied under Alan Grant himself, call those two animals dinosaurs? And why does a humongous fish, no matter how breathtaking of an Olympic swimmer she is, occupy so much of the dinosaur movie?
I guess the idea of dinosaurs in the ocean is vastly appealing, but T-Rex could swim, so.
Well, Spielberg he ain’t, but he’s not too shabby
Gareth Edwards wanted this film to be an homage to the original and he did succeed, somewhat. The most overt example is Henry’s awe when he sees the titanosaurs. I’ll forever be jealous of everyone who got to watch Jurassic Park in theaters for the first time, hearing John Williams’ majestic score as Alan approaches the brachiosaurus. But this scene in Rebirth? This was my chance to know what it felt like. Yeah I’m a thug, but not with that scene! I’m fighting back tears as I write this.
The film also nods to the original in the dual storylines. We follow one group of scientists and a father with his kids.
I’ve critiziced these newer movies for being all about scale and spectacle, but Edwards took note. The dinosaurs are inside tight, enclosed spaces. It brought me back to the velociraptors in the kitchen.
Rebirth also gives its characters weighty back stories, but I really didn’t care…it just goes to show how exceptional Spielberg’s film is, that all the characters we meet are so compelling and fully realized from the moment they appear. We don’t need to know about their personal tragedies to care or root for them. I will say though, that Mahershala Ali is one of the most charismatic actors to grace our screens, and I loved him in this. And he survived!
Long live the queen
The absolute best scene in Rebirth is the one predictably with T-Rex. It’s actually the most brilliant in all the Jurassic World films. The other one that’s also excellent is in Dominion, with my favorite dinosaur, therizinosaurus.
In Rebirth, the family whose boat was capsized by the Champion Diver mosasaur are now fighting for their lives on an island where dinosaurs live in relative peace away from human meddling. The family is Reuben Delgado and his two daughters Teresa and Isabella, along with Teresa’s comic relief bozo boyfriend, Xavier. They traipse through the jungle with a baby aquilops in tow that Isabella names Dolores,4 and end up at a river. Teresa ventures forth to find a raft, and who should be taking a cat nap on the riverbank? Why, Miss Rexy! Her movements are incredibly lifelike, she looks so much like a regular animal. Props to the visual effects department for their wizardry in her movements. She’s not just a million year old eating and killing machine.
As Teresa hoists the raft onto the pier, the sleeping giant is momentarily hidden by the raft. When it falls over noisily, Rexy is gone. False alarm: she’s gone over to the other side of the embankment to drink water, her idiotically tiny arms just hovering. Eventually the family does get her attention, and what ensues is a heart pounding chase. Isabella is trapped beneath the raft and Rexy roars in her distinctive way trying to chomp on her. The family does escape, with Rexy roaring yet again in rage. But after narrowly escaping, the raft sails over their heads and lands perfectly on the water before them.
It’s a masterful scene. It works as a standalone even. The plot of the film, with its noble overtures, doesn’t even matter.
Jurassic World Rebirth grossed over $300 million at the box office. Not surprising. I’m part of the problem. They keep making these movies because audiences will pay. I can criticize their lack of merit all day long, but I’ll still be there in the theater because I can’t get enough of these dinos. In the movie’s universe, nobody cares about dinosaurs. Isabella even remarks that she hates them and wish they’d never been brought back from extinction.
What’s really ironic and quite sad are all the animals we still have with us who are on the verge of being wiped out. I wouldn’t want the non-avian dinosaurs to come back. Dinosaurs just don’t fit in our world today, which is becoming increasingly inhospitable to wildlife and vulnerable people.
But it’s nice to see them in that other world. To imagine that they could still live in ours.
I don’t consider it part of the Jurassic World franchise, nor its two sequels, but for the sake of the list.
Everyone’s wrong about this one.
Enough with the slutty little glasses!! You people are worse than corporations that hop on meme trends.
She was so adorable…protect Delores at all costs.