I’ve never expected coherence from the Jurassic franchise, and the 7th installment didn’t challenge those expectations at all, though its development is at least linear. Whatever associations its story has with past chapters either don’t exist or flew over my head, but at this point in the renewed dino saga, the giant lizards are no longer terrorizing urban centers and have somehow been banished to uninhabited territories around the equator, where they live in relative peace because it’s illegal for humans to visit them. Sounds like good sense to me, but, of course, you can’t build a movie out of that sort of premise, so along comes a guy named Krebs (Rupert Friend) who works for a pharmaceutical company that wants to tap some mutant dino DNA for a miracle heart medication, and that means sneaking onto the tropical island featured in the last Jurassic World movie where there was a laboratory carrying out doomed mutant experiments. Krebs enlists a so-called extraction expert, Zora (Scarlett Johansson), a large boat for hire and its skipper, Duncan (Mahershala Ali), and the usual bespectacled paleontologist, Dr. Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), to help him with his mission by promising a lot of money. As Loomis so helpfully explains, the public’s interest in dinosaurs has diminished greatly in recent years, so work for people in his profession isn’t as plentiful as it used to be. I’ll have to hand it to screenwriter David Koepp: Cynicism was something else I never expected from the franchise. 

For what it’s worth, the set pieces by director Gareth Edwards do the trick, though many of them involve a family on a sailboat cruise who are attacked by sea-dwelling dinosaurs and end up being rescued by Krebs’ contingent. It’s a complication that provides for the kind of chase-and-gobble incidents the franchise is famous for, but the family—a dad, two teenage daughters, and one daughter’s ne’er-do-well BF—never really justifies its presence except as dino bait. Zora’s gymnastic feats to secure dinosaur blood samples using Loomis’s boomeranging dart invention is more interesting in the way she employs geometric common sense to get what she needs rather than brute force or firepower. When she’s set upon by pteradactyls while raiding a nest, Edwards makes the most of the cliffside vista. In fact, Rebirth may be the most beautiful Jurassic movie simply because it’s all in the wild—except for a cheap joke scene in an abandoned convenience store. 

In addition to the requisite T-Rex pursuit and the cute baby dino-as-cat-stand-in, there are a few mutants that look nothing like dinosaurs so you have to hand it to the SFX crew: Like Loomis, they may wonder if there’s still an audience out there for dinosaurs, so they hedge their bets.

In Japanese subtitled and dubbed versions. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Jurassic World: Rebirth home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Universal Studios