Jurassic World Rebirth (2025) Reviews: What Critics Said

Editorial note: This is a roundup of published criticism of Jurassic World Rebirth. Celluloid has not screened the film for this piece, and it carries no Celluloid rating. The critics are named and linked under Sources.

Is Jurassic World Rebirth worth watching?

Most critics say yes, with reservations: Gareth Edwards stages the series’ most assured dinosaur action in years, but the film rarely does anything the franchise has not done before. Reviewers praised the suspense of the big set pieces and Edwards’ obvious affection for the creatures. The common complaint is that the human characters are thin and the story is familiar, and at least one prominent critic found the whole thing toothless.

What is Jurassic World Rebirth about?

Set five years after Jurassic World Dominion, the film follows covert operations expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), who is hired to lead a skilled team on a secret mission to collect genetic material from the three most massive dinosaurs alive. Alongside her are Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend). When the operation crosses paths with a civilian family, the Delgados, whose boat has capsized, everyone ends up stranded on an island that has been hiding something for decades.

Gareth Edwards directs from a screenplay by David Koepp, who wrote the original Jurassic Park. Released in 2025, Jurassic World Rebirth runs 134 minutes.

What critics praised

The warmest notices centred on Edwards’ direction. In Time Out, Phil de Semlyen saw the film as a big-budget cousin of Edwards’ debut feature, Monsters, and argued that one or two of its sequences are among the best the series has produced since the 1993 original. He singled out a chase on river rapids as a model of action design, found Johansson, Ali and Bailey a charismatic trio to build a film around, and enjoyed Rupert Friend’s slippery turn.

For TheWrap, Bill Bria framed the series as America’s answer to kaiju cinema and credited Edwards with making the dinosaurs feel genuinely dangerous even when the audience can guess who will survive. He admired the way the camerawork of John Mathieson and the effects team led by David Vickery keep a sense of wonder alongside the tension, and he rated Koepp’s script as sharp, if perhaps overworked.

Empire’s Ian Freer thought Edwards’ filmmaking consistently on point, praising a colourful quest full of striking images and clever staging. He enjoyed the film’s nods to Jurassic Park, which he felt stopped short of empty fan service, and named Mahershala Ali the standout of the cast. Even the more sceptical Rory Doherty, writing for The A.V. Club, conceded that the river-raft sequence is edge-of-the-seat stuff and that the island survival stretches are tightly paced and edited.

Where critics were divided

The reservations concerned story and people rather than spectacle. Freer felt the film adds very little that is new, that the team of mercenaries and scientists is unlikely to stick in the memory, and that the pacing is uneven, with one airborne sequence looking studio-bound. De Semlyen, despite his enthusiasm, found the opening laborious and judged that the film delivers exactly what is expected and little beyond it. Bria’s main complaint was about what the film is not: for a picture called Rebirth, it offers a modest, self-contained adventure rather than a genuine reinvention.

Doherty was harsher on the writing, arguing that Koepp’s stock characterisation leaves Johansson stuck in a thinly sketched sarcastic role, that the first hour drags before the island, and that the wonder of the original has gone. He read it as a hurried corporate course-correction, capably made but short on soul.

The strongest dissent came from Tim Grierson in Screen Daily, who found the human characters bland and prone to foolish decisions, and Johansson unable to shine. His central objection was that the dinosaurs are simply not frightening enough, which he considered the film’s real failing, and he felt its echoes of Spielberg only exposed how thin it is. He did credit some of the creature designs with a flash of invention.

Who is it for?

On the critics’ evidence, Rebirth suits viewers who want a solid creature feature with well-staged set pieces and can live with stock characters. Fans of the early films may enjoy the homages Freer noted, while anyone hoping for the bold reinvention the title implies is more likely to share Bria’s and Grierson’s disappointment. It is rated PG-13 in the US and 12A in the UK, with the peril and dinosaur attacks that suggests. There is more in the same vein on the adventure and sci-fi shelves.

The critical verdict

Critics largely agreed that Jurassic World Rebirth is the most competently directed entry in the series for some time, with Gareth Edwards bringing real suspense to its set pieces. They agreed just as widely that the script offers little that is new and fills the island with thin characters. The majority view is a qualified recommendation for an enjoyable, well-made blockbuster, while a sceptical minority, led by Screen Daily, found it hollow.