Jurassic World Rebirth doesn’t re-engineer the franchise’s DNA – it just remembers how to sequence it properly.

Rebirth. It’s a funny old word, when you stop to think about it. Like, when was the last time you used it in conversation or even encountered it? Reborn, sure, but rebirth? Sure, it’s a word that exists, but more in concept than common usage. It’s also not got much to do with the plot or themes of Jurassic World Rebirth except perhaps in the metatextual way the film represents Universal’s hope that there’s still some unexploited DNA lurking in the fossilized amber of Crichton’s creation. The problem is, of course, that apart from the theme park gone wrong angle – which they’ve already done successfully, twice – there’s really not much you can do with the idea beyond variations on “people find themselves in a place where there are dinosaurs for some reason and have to survive”. Fortunately, for us and Universal, while Gareth Edwards’ film follows that template – as every other Jurassic sequel has done – it does, at least, do it very, very well.

Set in the near future, some years after the events of Jurassic World: Dominion (although set in motion by events that take place some five years before Jurassic World), where dinosaurs are once again confined to a specific, narrow region of the world, the story follows Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a former covert operative, is convinced by biotech executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to lead an expedition to harvest rare genetic material. With a team bolstered by palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and fellow mercenary Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), the expedition picks up some unexpected passengers when the team comes to the rescue of a family whose yacht has been capsized by one of the creatures they’re looking for.

For the nice little touches, homages and Easter Eggs to the original Jurassic Park, the film Jurassic World Rebirth most closely resembles is, surprisingly, Jurassic Park III, only this time it takes the appealing premise of a group with wildly differing survival skills trying to get off a dinosaur-infested island and does it justice, by prioritising suspense over spectacle. The last time a Jurassic film let the dinosaurs take their time was probably 1993. Every sequel since has confused escalation with impatience, hurling CGI at the screen like a panicked zookeeper chucking steaks over the fence. Jurassic World Rebirth, by contrast, lets the setting and its inhabitants stalk their pray before going in for the kill. It’s not that it’s shy about spectacle – this is still a film where people are pursued across beaches, cliffs, jungles and oceans by apex predators – but it remembers that awe is in the pacing, not just the camera angle.

Gareth Edwards returns to franchise-scale filmmaking with an unexpectedly respectful timbre. He wisely doesn’t seek to rewrite the Jurassic rulebook but is happy to make notes in the margins and return to the Spielbergian roots of it all. Edwards has proved time and again to have something of the pre-Schindler Spielberg about him, it runs like a rich seam of mosquito-laden amber through the bedrock of his filmography, from Star Wars: Rogue One and The Creator to his 2014 franchise-reviving Godzilla and his audacious feature debut Monsters.

In many ways, Rebirth plays like a hybrid of Monsters and Godzilla, with elements of 1993’s Jurassic Park used to fill gaps in the DNA, not just in its patient framing or love of scale, but in how it lets the threat reshape the environment rather than simply attack it. Dinosaurs aren’t just apex predators here – they’re part of a living, shifting ecosystem, and the human characters are forced to navigate that with caution and humility rather than arrogance. The jungle isn’t a backdrop; it’s contested ground, and the camera often holds its distance, letting you feel the weight and inevitability of danger instead of jabbing you with it. Where Godzilla found grandeur in scale and Monsters found intimacy in terra incognita, Rebirth threads the two – giving the film far more of a sense of place and purpose than you might expected and, more importantly, that feels earned rather than inherited.

The human cast are solid, as you’d expect with Scarlett Johansson leading the charge as Zora Bennett, the kind of character who walks into a corporate mission briefing already knowing she’ll disobey orders by the second act. She plays it cool but not hollow, giving Zora a lived-in professionalism that feels refreshingly unbothered by the need to earn audience approval and pairs well with Jonathan Bailey’s Dr Henry Loomis. Loomis isn’t the curmudgeonly palaeontologist or louche chaos theoretician of previous sequels nor is he the laconic dino-wrangler archetype that dominated the first sequel trilogy. He has elements of all of them, a dash of Alan Grant here, a smidgeon of Ian Malcom there and a tiny, improbably swashbuckling element of Owen Grady to boot but his passion isn’t jaded, his science forward-looking and his action-orientation emotionally based. He’s also the ethical fulcrum of a group made up of paid mercenaries, mercenary corporate executives and a frightened family of shipwreck providers. Alongside the ever-dependable Mahershala Ali, Bailey and Johansson form a trinity that reflects but doesn’t try to replicate the Grant-Sattler-Malcom dynamic of the first movie.

Not that Jurassic World Rebirth is interested in hollow callbacks or hollower legacy cameos at the expense of its own identity. With efficiency, it sets up an objective, a location, and a looming problem – then lets it all play out with tension and momentum. Edwards’ eye for scale and geography is in full effect, as he divides our heroes into two groups and composes the island sequences as a duet of dangerous paths towards a common destination. There’s no quick cutting back and forth, hobbling the pace and our view swaps at opportune and organic moments, with action that’s spatially coherent in a way that makes the chaos feel tangible. It’s a welcome correction from Dominion’s baffling chase logic or Fallen Kingdom’s pseudo-Scooby-Doo gothic detours. You always know who’s running, what they’re running from, and – crucially – what they’re about to run into.

The dinosaurs themselves are handled with more respect than they have been in recent films. The mutations are subtle enough to allow recognition and occasionally stark enough to be scary but as and when they appear – and appear they do even if you’ll sometime feel there’s a little too much talking and not enough teeth – they don’t feel like an attempt to fill in an audience bingo card. Yes, some recognisable fan favourites appear – the Mosasaurus, the T-Rex, the Dilophosaurus – the genetic mutation subplot gives licence for some wilder creations (as well as offering, finally, an explanation for the lack of feathers). Their presence – not always overt – shapes the environment, the strategy and, crucially, the dread.

Action-adventure isn’t just about running and screaming. It’s about making those moments matter by giving us characters that have something more to them than just proximity to repeated dangers. Rebirth succeeds because it makes its human leads competent without being infallible, and because it doesn’t confuse survival with redemption. Arguably the character arcs of the family are better articulated than the leaders of the expedition, but everyone gets just enough character development to not feel like dinosaur chum in waiting. Well, everyone except Ed Skrein thankfully.

Desplat’s score works overtime stitching that clarity into the mood. It avoids overplaying nostalgia but threads in enough classic Jurassic DNA to make you feel it in your chest when the foliage parts and something older than history comes stomping through. This is a film made by a team who know the difference between confidence and noise.

Jurassic World Rebirth‘s footsteps don’t shake the franchise’s foundations, but it plants its feet, sharpens its claws, and shows that a series built on chaos can still be fun. It’s a throwback not to a specific era but to a sensibility: the idea of a walk on the wild side through dinosaur country should be a thrill-ride, with epic ascents, dizzying drops and those quiet moments that lull you into a false sense of security before it bites you again. Perhaps it is a rebirth after all. A second de-extinction of a franchise, born again by going back to basics.