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Gareth Edwards Brings His Sense of Scale and Weight to Jurassic World Rebirth

By Jesse Hassenger  |  June 30, 2025 | 12:00pm
Movies Reviews gareth edwards
Gareth Edwards Brings His Sense of Scale and Weight to Jurassic World Rebirth
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“Ooh, ahh. That’s how it always starts. But then later there’s running, and screaming.” So spoke Ian Malcoln (Jeff Goldblum) in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, nailing the ethos of Jurassic Park series back before it became a multi-decade, seven-entry franchise. The first Steven Spielberg-directed film did indeed do its fair share of ooh-ing and ahh-ing before the running and the screaming, and it’s hard to say whether a consensus has formed on whether it’s wise or even possible to maintain that ratio after one go. Some lamented that The Lost World’s ooh-and-ahh felt obligatory (hence the Goldblum crack); others were put off by the more businesslike 90-minute run-through of Jurassic Park III, which basically said: yeah, yeah, dinosaurs, let’s get to it. The 2015 legacy sequel Jurassic World went so far as to make growing public indifference to the marvels of recreated dinosaurs part of its text, though the people in the movie are growing less impressed with the real thing, not an increasingly crowded field of special effects movies.

And so, after a full trilogy of progressively weirder Jurassic World movies, we arrive now at Jurassic World Rebirth, which attempts to re-establish both the wonder and the terror of these prehistoric beasts. It might seem like (and might be) a cynical gesture of fandom reclamation, but at least the movie puts its money where its jaws are by hiring Gareth Edwards, a director who operates almost exclusively in the terror/wonder binary. His previous forays into big-budget franchise filmmaking, Godzilla (2014) and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, were both surprisingly tactile and weighty for blockbuster entertainment (at least visually speaking), and he aims to do something similar here with the familiar dino-encounter routine.

At first, it still seems very familiar; Jurassic World Rebirth is basically Jurassic Park III on steroids, inching the world back toward status quo after previous entries unleashed dinosaurs on the entire planet. Now they’ve retreated mostly to quarantined equatorial areas, with humans forbidden from entering these barely-policed zones. That’s where Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) is hired to go, along with fellow mercenary Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), and some other team members, alongside pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), who is paying them all a lot of money for the mission. In a quest that could be described as gamified, they’re traveling to a human-free dino island to extract blood samples from the three biggest dinosaurs around, in hopes of synthesizing a revolutionary anti-heart-disease drug. You can hear the faint echoes of executive-suite negotiations in the decision of what the drug will combat: Heart disease! No one will be against that, right? (Even so: Probably best if you roll that superdrug out in Europe, away from RFK Jr.’s prying eyes.)

Presumably at least in part as a gesture of goodwill (as well as a nod to the fact that this movie came together unusually quickly), the movie retains the screenwriting services of original Jurassic Park and Lost World adapter David Koepp. He’s both thankfully expedient and a little rusty; some of the movie’s opening exposition repeats itself, raising suspicion of a Netflix-era mandate that plot points must be restated and underlined for those half-watching while folding laundry. There’s also a drawn-out exchange between longtime friends Zora and Duncan that feels like an improv exercise where neither actor is allowed to end the scene, only pile on Emotionally Potent Motivating Backstory. The movie is much more fun when Zora insists she’s in it for the money, and leaves the ooh and ahh to Dr. Loomis.

That’s largely how Jurassic World Rebirth is allowed to play out and, as it happens, the two leads are quite cute together – the rare Jurassic Park near-coupling that’s cheerfully flirtatious rather than remarriage-coded. (Their lips don’t actually touch, of course, because summer blockbusters have unofficially adopted the Hays Code.) Johansson is essentially playing a smilier, less deadpan version of her Black Widow character from Marvel, and if there isn’t much surprise to her character, she still cuts a fine action-hero figure.

There are further complications involving a family that crosses paths with the mercenaries when they sail into forbidden waters, and the nature of the island itself, which in keeping with the movie’s underlining feels like it’s revealed at least three times: It’s an abandoned facility where the park scientists tinkered with experimental recombinations of various dinos, resulting in at least one truly fearsome variant best left discovered in the film itself (though he does pop up in the trailers). These subplots have matching purposes: providing more humans to potentially be eaten and more dinosaurs to potentially eat them.

That said, Rebirth doesn’t have as a high a body count as some of the other sequels; it’s closer to the original in that regard, as well as in its extended passage urging genuine, old-fashioned awe at a herd of the largest dinos on the island. Whether indulging this or the more fearsome moments, Edwards doesn’t quite have Spielberg’s knack for moving the camera to elegantly guide the audience through a high-tension set piece or passage of slack-jawed wonder. Who does, though? Edwards is here to have his signature fun with scale and framing; he clearly enjoys hiding dinosaurs and allowing them to materialize in the backgrounds of scenes without big jump-scare fanfare. As in that moment in his Godzilla where our point of view stays fixed behind closing doors as two kaiju throw themselves into battle on the other side, he’s sly about calling attention to both the fullness of a monster’s environment, and the contrivances of the camera in capturing those monsters. He even teases the fandom by placing one famous species’ entire appearance in the background.

That’s the chief and simple pleasure of Jurassic World Rebirth: camera set-ups and compositions, further enhanced by shooting on locations (or very convincing sets) with celluloid, that will make creature-feature fans grin. The movie’s feints toward emotional resonance are faker than any of the visual effects (which are mostly quite good), though the actors work plenty hard to sell them. This is a monster-adventure movie, with passages that recall Jaws and King Kong; maybe not the most original influences, but certainly not shabby ones. In its fusion of Edwards’ craft with characters who aren’t thunderously stupid or unlikable, this is the best Jurassic movie in ages – in part because it works so comfortably as an ooh/ahh/run/scream monster movie.

Director: Gareth Edwards
Writer: David Koepp
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Mahershala Ali, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda
Release Date: July 2, 2025

 
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