Jurassic World Rebirth may be stomping into cinemas this summer, but it’s not exactly roaring with critical praise. Following a lukewarm premiere at London’s Odeon Luxe Leicester Square on June 17, Gareth Edwards’ dinosaur epic is facing an uphill climb to prove it can breathe new life into a franchise over three decades old. And if you ask the director himself, the film’s mixed reception might just be the result of a very modern problem: people are over dinosaurs.
“There’s been many dinosaur films in terms of [Jurassic Park movies], and the audience, you’ve got to do something new and fresh to give them a reason to come see the movie,” Edwards told GamesRadar+. “And so by acknowledging that at the beginning and saying, ‘Look, audiences aren’t that interested in dinosaurs anymore,’ I thought it was like, ‘Okay, well, this is an honest beginning. Let’s see where we go from here.’”
Scarlett Johansson leads the cast as Zora Bennett, with Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis, Mahershala Ali as hardened team leader Duncan Kincaid, and Rupert Friend as a pharmaceutical exec with suspicious motives. Come on folks, did you think his motives would be pure? Along the way, the group encounters a stranded family and unravels a dark secret buried beneath the island’s overgrown terrain.
What Is ‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ About?
Set five years after Jurassic World Dominion, Rebirth drops viewers into a world where the spectacle of dinosaurs has all but faded. No more chaotic street chases or global crises—just isolated pockets of prehistoric life surviving on forgotten equatorial islands. Specifically, the story centers around Île Saint-Hubert, a remote Caribbean outpost once used for secret experiments. So secret that we’ve never heard of it before. Hmm. The idea is that our non-Alan Grants are going to extract dino DNA to create a life-saving drug.
The setup is bold to say the least and the themes are timely—corporate greed, fading wonder, environmental decay—but critics haven’t been won over. The film currently sits at a dismal 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, with most critics feeling like it’s just playing the Jurassic hits and not very well.
Collider’s Aidan Kelley was equally underwhelmed by the latest Jurassic installment, awarding Rebirth just 5/10 in his review, stating that: “There’s some fun to be had here, but overall, Jurassic World Rebirth feels indicative that this franchise is not dissimilar from what the original film is trying to say about the ethics of cloning dinosaurs. Another one coming back might sound exciting or even revolutionary, but the hypothesis around the scenario never seems to account for the practicality.”
Jurassic World Rebirth is in theaters now.
Source: GamesRadar+
