JURASSIC WORLD : REBIRTH : Tuesday 8th July 2025

I saw the M Rated 'JURASSIC WORLD : REBIRTH' at my local multiplex earlier this week, and this American science fiction action film is Directed by Gareth Edwards whose previous feature film credits take in his Directorial debut in 2010 with 'Monsters' which he would follow up with 'Godzilla' in 2014, 'Rogue One : A Star Wars Story' in 2016, and 'The Creator' in 2023. This film is a standalone sequel to 2022's 'Jurassic World Dominion' the fourth 'Jurassic World' film and the seventh instalment overall in the 'Jurassic Park' franchise. The first six films in the series have grossed at the worldwide Box Office a total of US$6,076B against combined production budgets of US$1,143B - so long live the dinosaurs! The film was released in the US last week too, cost US$180M to produce, has so far grossed US$391M worldwide and has garnered mixed critical reviews.

The film opens seventeen years ago on the remote Atlantic Ocean island of Saint Hubert in a research laboratory owned and operated by InGen in which the scientists experiment on the creation of mutated dinosaurs. One such creation is a deformed six-limbed tyrannosaur called a  'Distortus Rex' that escapes containment, kills an employee and wreaks havoc, forcing the facility personnel to abandon the lab and flee the island leaving it deserted. We then fast forward seventeen years later and learn that the Earth's climate and ecology has proven largely inhospitable to sustain the de-extinct animals, and they are forced to reside in a band around the Equator, which is more akin to the climate in which their pre-historic ancestors lived and thrived. That area around the Equator is now marked as no-travel zones to anyone and everyone by international law.

Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), an executive at pharmaceutical giant ParkerGenix, recruits Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), an ex-military covert operative, to work with paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) on a top-secret mission to retrieve biomaterial samples from the three largest remaining prehistoric specimens, which hold the key to a new heart disease treatment. The kicker is that these three samples must be retrieved from live dinosaur specimens. In a bar in Suriname, Zora recruits her longtime friend Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) to lead the expedition, and to provide the boat and the crew to get them to the island. He brings boat driver LeClerc (Bechir Sylvain), mercenary Nina (Philippine Velge), and the security chief Bobby Atwater (Ed Skrein).

They set out to Saint Hubert Island to extract samples from the aquatic Mosasaurus, the land based Titanosaurus, and avian Quetzalcoatlus. They track the Mosasaurus, which has shipwrecked a family sailing in the mid-Atlantic Ocean in the no-travel zone - Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his older daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise) and her boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) and Reuben's younger daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda). Duncan is intent on rescuing the family which is in the opposite direction of the island much to the displeasure of Martin and Bobby. 

With the family safely on board, Zora successfully extracts a sample from the Mosasaur. However, it returns with a group of Spinosaurus and attacks the ship, killing Bobby and Nina in the process. Teresa in a state of panic tries to alert the Coast Guard with a May Day call but Martin attempts to prevent her from radioing, to protect the mission's utmost secrecy, then refuses to help her when she and the Delgado's fall overboard. The Mosasaur forces the ship aground, stranding the team on the island, with the family becoming separated from the original ship's crew. Now on foot and trudging through the jungle, Zora informs the remaining crew that she engaged a rescue helicopter to circle the island at sundown the next day.

Zora successfully extracts the second sample from a Titanosaurus and the third and final sample from a Quetzalcoatlus egg, by abseiling down a sheer rock wall to access its nest located in a cave. Dr. Henry and Zora become trapped inside the cave when the adult Quetzalcoatlus returns to its nest, but is distracted by  LeClerc who ultimately is devoured by the giant winged beast. 

Meanwhile, the Delgado's are stranded elsewhere and search for the 'village'. They encounter various dinosaurs along the way including an infant Aquilops, which Isabella adopts and names Dolores, a Dilophosaurus feeding on the corpse of a Parasaurolophus and a sleeping Tyrannosaurus Rex, which awakens and chases the Delgados down a fast flowing river in an inflatable raft.

The Delgado's and the expedition group reunite at the abandoned laboratory for their planned helicopter extraction. Teresa confronts Martin for attacking her on the boat, and leaving her at the mercy of the ocean and the Spinosaurs. The group questions Martin about the attack and he pulls a gun on them, steals the samples from Zora, cuffs the case to his hand and attempts to flee to the helipad. A pack of mutated raptor/pterosaur hybrids, dubbed 'Mutadons' descends on the survivors who by now have taken refuge in a network of underground tunnels that ultimately lead to the harbour, to escape.

The rescue helicopter arrives and circles for two minutes as instructed to do so by Zora, but sees no sign of life so begins to leave. Henry lights a flare, which is seen by the retreating helicopter and it doubles back, but is destroyed by the Distortus Rex, which then turns on Martin and devours him, as the sample case is flung away and lands close to Zora with Martin's arm still attached. The survivors come to a locked gate at the end of the underground tunnel, and discover a motor boat on the other side. 

The D. Rex awaits outside by the boat, and the raptor/pterosaur hybrids are stalking them in the tunnels. Isabella is the only survivor small enough to fit through the gate, and she unlocks it. The group load themselves onto the boat, while Duncan diverts the D. Rex away using a flare, but Zora fears for his life when the flare is extinguished in the near distance.

Zora, Henry, Reuben, Teresa, Xavier and Isabella narrowly escape the D. Rex in the boat when a flare beams out across the night sky. Duncan is still alive wading out through the water and Reuben turns the boat to retrieve him. With the boat now skimming across the ocean and with samples in hand, Henry asks Zora what her intentions are now that she has possession. Zora and Henry agree to distribute the new medication without a patent, making it open-source for the whole world to take full advantage of.

What Gareth Edwards has delivered here is a fairly formulaic by the numbers dino offering that does hark back in some ways to the original 'Jurassic Park' film, and yet it still treads almost the same path as the majority of instalments that have gone before. And that is that a bunch of guys and gals venture into largely unknown dino territory on some sort of expedition and the bad guys (and you know who they are from the get go) all get chomped on and spat out, and the good guys come back victorious ready for the next film in the series. So it is here, and the script writers have here pushed the boundaries of what might seem fair and reasonable to the average movie goer too. That said Scarlett Johansson delivers an admirable performance as do the principle cast, and Gareth Edwards knows how to ramp up the action set pieces, which I guess is the main reason why you go to see a movie that features prehistoric dinosaur versus human interaction writ large, and on that note 'Jurassic World : Rebirth' delivers.

'Jurassic World : Rebirth' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five claps.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-