Calling your seventh film Rebirth is either an act of bravery or desperation. In the case of Jurassic World: Rebirth, it’s a bit of both. It implies something meaningful – a restart, a shedding of the overly commercial skin that’s encased the series since 2015. This is a franchise that’s spent the last three movies stumbling further and further from its roots – replacing tension with noise, wonder with spectacle, and dinosaurs with increasingly unhinged sci-fi nonsense.

But somehow, against the odds, Rebirth opens like it actually remembers what made this series matter in the first place. It’s far from perfect, but it’s also a world away from the three cinematic disasters that nearly made enjoying this franchise feel impossible.

Right from the start, the film signals a different tone. We open in a genetics lab, 17 years in the past – no dino wonder, no warm nostalgia. Just cold, sterile emptiness. Scientists are once again playing God, and once again, the consequences come fast. Within minutes, everything unravels, and the living creature they’ve been torturing and testing finally strikes back. One unlucky scientist is left pleading for his life while his colleague watches, helpless, from behind glass as a shadow moves in. The dinosaur doesn’t roar or leap; it creeps, patient and inevitable, until the kill comes. It’s terrifying, and brilliant.

It feels, for a moment, like the movie is channelling the survival horror DNA of Michael Crichton’s original novel rather than trying to recapture Spielberg’s untouched magic. And I loved it.  Unfortunately, that horror edge the opening promises is abandoned for most of the runtime. But when it resurfaces, it works – sometimes brilliantly. Gareth Edwards knows how to let fear simmer, holding a shot a beat too long, letting the sound of distant footsteps or the scrape of claws echo in the silence until your nerves start to fray.

It just makes you wish the film didn’t only dip its toe into horror but plunged headfirst. Those flashes are so effective, so distinct, that their absence in the rest of the film is felt like a missing limb. While the action sequences are brilliantly choreographed, swap the dinosaurs for any other apex predator and much of it could be lifted from any other blockbuster. The scenes that lean into the primal terror of these animals are the ones that truly make Rebirth feel like its own beast.

When the horror beats land, you start caring more about the people caught in them. That’s when we meet Johansson’s Zora Bennet, a mercenary haunted by the loss of her partner on a previous mission; Mahershala Ali’s Duncan Kincaid, her trusted co-worker and friend, who carries the weight of missing his young son back home; and Jonathan Bailey’s Dr. Henry Loomis, the palaeontologist brought along as their scientific advisor to yet another undisclosed InGen island. 

Let’s be honest: nobody comes to the Jurassic film for the people, but these three more than do the job. Johansson and Ali could read the a class handbook to each other and make it compelling, and Bailey brings a mostly likable awkwardness – even if his Loomis somehow thinks a mosasaur is a dinosaur, which is borderline unforgivable. They’re not especially deep, but they feel real, distinct, and carry different moral angles when the situation turns deadly. They don’t have the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of the original Jurassic Park trio, but compared to the last run’s “Chris Pratt hand-waves a raptor” era, this is a genuine step up.

If the human characters are a modest improvement (well, some of them, more on that later), then the portrayal of the dinosaurs is on another level entirely. This is where Rebirth truly shines and earns its name. The creatures aren’t treated like video game bosses or glorified jump scares. They’re animals. Living, breathing, feeling animals with individual needs, instincts, social behaviours, and a genuine presence in the world around them.

Different species of dinosaurs are shown in co-operative hunting, animals are seen wading  through water, and interacting in ways that feel studied rather than scripted. There’s a moment where two Titanosaurs embrace, their massive necks curling around one another in a gesture so unexpectedly gentle – proof that these creatures could care for each other, and did. We see the T. rex not as an apex predator, but dozing in the grass while a Dilophosaurus picks at the remains of its kill, and later, when it crosses paths with our characters, it doesn’t attack. It simply watches, following with slow, curious steps until instinct finally takes over.

And the Quetzalcoatlus, usually framed as a terror from above, is here just a fiercely protective parent.  A controversial change that I personally loved was the treatment of the raptors. Once the face of the franchise – they are dispatched within five seconds of screen time, almost as if the film itself is laughing at how overused they’ve become. It’s refreshing, honestly. They aren’t special forces anymore. They’re just animals. Dangerous, yes, but not invincible.

None of these animals are villains. None are mindless killers. Or given preferential treatment. They’re just… animals, doing what animals do: living, hunting, protecting, surviving. For anyone who’s ever fallen in love with dinosaurs – not as cinema icons or action figures, but as creatures that once walked the Earth – this is the stretch of the movie that sings. It’s the closest the franchise has come since the original to treating these beings with the wonder, fear, and fascination they deserve.

But eventually, the spell breaks. Hollywood creeps back in, slowly at first, then all at once. The more the film progresses the more less we see of the dinosaurs we were promised and more of the mutants we hoped we left in the last three instalments. But unlike the previous films, we don’t just get one fake mutant… but two.

The film spends nearly two hours re-establishing dinosaurs as believable animals, only to toss that out in the final act for over-designed, unrealistic CGI monsters. It’s a dino movie. Let the dinos be the stars. No one – and I mean no one – is bored of real dinosaurs despite what the Jurassic World trilogy tried to establish. That pivot back to “bigger, scarier, faker” triggers the same disappointment those films left us with: the sense that the franchise still doesn’t trust the creatures that made it famous.

The only thing more disappointing than the mutant dinosaurs – and a bigger monstrosity  than they were ever intended to be – is the family subplot. It feels like it wandered in from a completely different movie, and not a good one. A clueless dad decides the perfect farewell for his daughter heading to NYU is an illegal, high-risk jaunt into dino territory. She brings along her boyfriend, Xavier, a character who feels like he was engineered in an InGen lab to be as irritating as humanly possible. Supposedly comic relief, during my screening, his jokes were met with a silence so dead, it could fossilise.

Their scenes drag down the pace, add nothing meaningful, and lack any real stakes. Whatever happened to them, I genuinely didn’t mind and there was even times I found myself rooting for the dinosaurs that hunted them. Worst of all, Dolores the Aquilops adorable, expressive, and the closest the film comes to a breakout creature – is stuck babysitting the least interesting people on the island.

In the end, Jurassic World: Rebirth isn’t the bold reinvention its title promises, but it is a much-needed course correction. It peels away the layers of chaos and corporate nonsense that buried the franchise over the last decade and gestures – sometimes shakily – toward something better. It’s the first time in years I’ve watched one of these films and thought: “Maybe this franchise isn’t extinct just yet.”

It hints at what a more grounded, horror-driven Jurassic movie could be. It treats its creatures (that actually existed) with a level of respect we haven’t seen since 1993. Is it perfect? No. Is it trying? Absolutely. And in a franchise that’s spent the better part of a decade asleep at the wheel, that’s worth something.

Plus I’ll always show up for a sauropod.

Matthew Borrie

Editor of the best section, features!!