Jurassic World Rebirth may not be the best blockbuster you’ll ever see, but it works a whole lot better than Jurassic World Dominion does by appropriately distancing itself from the original Jurassic Park.
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone out there who has something bad to say about Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. It’s a classic, it’s an all-timer, it’s one of the best to ever do it, etc. The subsequent sequels have been hit or miss — personally, I saw Jurassic Park III at the right age to where I’m nostalgically fond of it, the talking “Alan!” raptor and all, but none of them have come anywhere close to matching the original movie’s quality.
Jurassic World Rebirth certainly doesn’t buck that trend, as this isn’t even in the same ballpark as Jurassic Park; however, by ditching the legacy sequel nonsense that dragged down Dominion, there’s some fun to be had with this one.
Jurassic World Rebirth ditches legacy sequel baggage
There are many reasons why Jurassic World Dominion didn’t work, admittedly. Too much talk about locust. A random dinosaur black market subplot. Chris Pratt. More than anything, though, I remember coming out of that movie feeling sad that they brought Sam Neill, Laura Dern, and Jeff Goldblum back into it. None of them looked like they really wanted to be there; the whole thing reeks of a studio head saying, “We need to do this because it’s a legacy sequel and fans are expecting it.”
We’re not doing that this time in Jurassic World Rebirth. The days of trying to tie things back into Spielberg’s movie; rather, Rebirth has more in common with The Island of Dr. Moreau than it does with Jurassic Park.
Mostly, at least. There are still some moments that are meant to homage the franchise’s past entries, and that’s when Rebirth is at its weakest. There is a bit in the third act where Gareth Edwards is clearly trying to invoke the raptors in the kitchen scene, and the whole thing feels completely hollow. And trying to recreate the iconic brontosaurus scene? Yeah, no thanks.
Nonetheless, by ditching the constant Easter eggs and references that Jurassic World Dominion was cluttered with, Rebirth manages to be a pretty straightforward, pretty simple flick that gives audiences exactly what they paid to see.
Rebirth revitalizes the franchise similarly to Alien: Romulus
Fede Álvarez made a similar move with 2024’s Alien: Romulus. Romulus was clearly set in the same world as Alien, but it tells its own story, it has its own characters, and it feels like its own thing. That movie, too, is at its worst when they are referencing past lines of dialogue or other things that happened in the Alien timeline.
Blumhouse’s Jason Blum recently had an interesting comment about sequels when speaking about why M3GAN 2.0 was a box office dud, saying, “You have to ride this very fine line — if you make it too close to the first movie, everyone says you ripped off the first movie. ‘Why’d you make this movie? What a waste of time.’ If you make it too far away from the first movie, everyone says, ‘Why the f— is this a sequel? This has nothing to do with the first movie and we’re pissed about it.’”
He’s not wrong. While that’s a tough needle to thread, Jurassic World Rebirth does it in a pretty successful fashion, making it one of the better Jurassic movies we’ve had in a minute.