Dinosaurs chase humans in the jungle for the seventh time in Gareth Edwards’ Jurassic World: Rebirth.

Stephen Spielberg’s Jurassic Park is widely regarded as one of the best blockbusters of all time and easily earns its place as a classic. Since then, it has been diminishing returns for a franchise that is constantly trying to recapture the magic of its originator, Jurassic World most egregiously baiting the nostalgia of the viewer in an effort to convince that it’s in the same league. Jurassic World: Dominion cynically brings back much of the cast of the original to attempt something similar. The unfortunate truth of the sequels is that none of them attempt to stray too far from the high-level formula of the original which makes for a series of tediously repetitive experiences.

This installment centers on a suspiciously large group sent on a glorified fetch quest: obtain dinosaur blood samples that might help cure heart disease and extend human life. Leading the mission is Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a no-nonsense mercenary motivated by money, with the loss of her mother to a heart condition sprinkled in as an shallow attempt at character depth.

She’s joined by Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a paleontologist with surprisingly robust survival skills for someone who works in a museum. Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), Zora’s old friend and certified badass, captains the boat to the island. Their benefactor, Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), is a shifty businessman hoping to exploit the dinosaurs for profit and hiding obvious ulterior motives. Around them swarm half-baked side characters: Duncan’s barely differentiated crew and a random family rescued mid-movie after a dinosaur attack. The latter adds nothing but runtime. Each cutaway to their tangential subplot kneecaps the pacing and amplifies how bloated things get.

Characterisation is the film’s biggest failing. Even judged as a monster movie rather than a franchise entry, Rebirth fails to give us anyone worth caring about. The first half drags through exposition-heavy conversations where characters effectively read their own Wikipedia entries and trade tragic backstories. None of it building towards real emotional engagement. Despite the charisma of Johansson, Ali, and Bailey, the cast can’t inject life into what’s barely on the page.

Edwards does what he does best: visuals. His command of scale shines occasionally, and the choice to shoot on location adds much-needed authenticity. The jungle is believably hostile. Yet many set pieces are staggeringly uninspired. The once-terrifying T-Rex is rendered all but toothless as it lumbers around instead of making a meal out of what should be easy targets, a rappelling sequence to a winged dinosaur nest is shockingly bereft of tension, a poor imitation of an iconic sequence in the original Jurassic Park makes no attempt to hide the influence and the lab-bred abomination teased early on arrives so dimly lit it’s almost invisible and has all the terror of a minor inconvenience. One standout moment where the T-Rex’s teeth leave marks in a rubber life raft hints at something more tactile and feral. But that’s an anomaly.

The dinosaurs themselves lack identity. One of the original Jurassic Park’s core strengths was its treatment of these creatures as actual animals with behaviours and instincts. Here, they’re just interchangeable monsters differentiated only by size, despite Loomis supposedly being a behaviour expert. The film never explores what that might mean.

Worse still, the film has no clear theme. Being chased in the jungle by dinosaurs can be fun, but here, it’s just noise. Attempts to gesture toward bigger issues like greedy corporations, class disparity in medical access feel like late-stage rewrites inserted to trick audiences into thinking there’s substance. It’s all buzzwords and zero follow-through. That illusion of depth shatters to reveal the dull, lifeless and unimaginative content sludge behind the curtain.

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Verdict

A dull, lifeless and unimaginative continuation of a tired franchise that should have gone extinct long ago.

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