⚠️ Contains spoilers.
🧂 Jurassic World Rebirth (2025)
A franchise that ran out of islands finds a new one, then fills it with a mutant dinosaur that looks like it wandered in from a different, worse movie.
Directed by Gareth Edwards. Distributed by Universal Pictures. 2025.
🧂 Salt: 6 / 10. A film with genuine craft in its bones keeps reaching for a cheap jump scare instead of trusting the dinosaurs it already has. and ⭐ Stars: 5 / 10. Handsome, competently tense, and never once as interesting as the franchise it's rebooting.
Somewhere on Ile Saint-Hubert, a company decided the cure for heart disease was worth more than the lesson Jurassic Park has been teaching for three decades.
Five years after dinosaurs became too costly and dangerous to keep contained anywhere humans actually live, the survivors have been left to rot on a handful of equatorial islands nobody's allowed to visit. Covert operative Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) takes a black-market job from corporate fixer Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend): sneak onto the restricted Ile Saint-Hubert, the site of an abandoned InGen-style lab, and extract blood samples from the three largest living dinosaurs, because their massive hearts apparently hold the key to a blockbuster heart medication. She recruits boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) for muscle and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) because somebody on this expedition should actually know what a Titanosaurus is before it steps on them. Running parallel and inevitably colliding with all of this is a civilian family, led by Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), whose sailboat gets wrecked by a Mosasaurus and strands them on the same island, forced to survive among lab-bred mutant dinosaurs nobody asked for.
Scarlett Johansson plays Zora like a woman mildly annoyed this job has dinosaurs in it, and that flatness is both the performance's strength and its ceiling. She's convincing as competence incarnate, rappelling and triaging with zero wasted motion, but the script gives her almost no interior life beyond "good at the job, slightly haunted by the last one." Johansson sells the professionalism; she can't manufacture a character the screenplay never wrote.
Jonathan Bailey's Dr. Loomis is the one performance clearly having the most fun, and the movie is smart enough to let him carry its sense of wonder. Loomis gets genuinely giddy at the sight of living dinosaurs instead of treating them as set dressing, and Bailey plays that enthusiasm as earned expertise rather than comic relief. He's doing the thing Jeff Goldblum did decades ago, and he's one of the few people in the cast who seems to understand why audiences still show up for this franchise in the first place.
The Distortus Rex, the lab's mutated final-boss dinosaur, is a design swing that doesn't pay off. Stitching together parts from multiple species into one pale, fanged, vaguely cosmic-horror creature is a legitimately novel idea for a franchise that's recycled the T. rex roar for thirty years, but the execution reads more like a creature feature cutaway than anything that belongs in daylight on a Jurassic movie poster. It wants to be the film's signature monster and ends up its most forgettable one.
The Mosasaurus shipwreck sequence is the film's best set piece, and it's not particularly close. Edwards, who clearly understands scale after Godzilla and the Death Star trench run, stages the capsizing boat and the family's scramble across open water with real tension, letting the creature's size do the work instead of cutting every two seconds. It's the one stretch where Rebirth feels like it's making its own movie instead of assembling the greatest hits.
The two plotlines, mercenary extraction team and stranded family, never earn the time spent cutting between them before they converge. Both halves work as survival thrillers on their own, but the film spends its first hour treating them as separate short films, and the eventual merger feels like a structural necessity rather than a story the script was building toward. Garcia-Rulfo and the kids are fine; they're just marking time until the plot needs them in frame with Johansson.
The verdict: a technically proficient, occasionally thrilling creature feature that remembers this franchise is supposed to be about awe and then keeps interrupting itself to be a generic monster movie instead. Bailey is a genuine bright spot, the water-based set pieces are the best this series has looked in years, and Edwards clearly has the eye for scale this franchise needs. It just can't decide whether it wants to be Jurassic Park or a creature-feature knockoff wearing its skin.
So why only six shakers? Because a franchise with this much built-in wonder shouldn't need a man-made mutant monster to manufacture stakes, and leaning on a generic third-act threat instead of trusting the real dinosaurs is exactly the kind of shortcut that's kept this series circling the drain since the Chris Pratt years.
So did Jurassic World need a rebirth, or just a rest? A rest, mostly, but at least this time somebody remembered to let a paleontologist look genuinely thrilled to be there.
Pass the salt. 🧂
