New Jurassic World Rebirth Trailer Remembers to be Fun
The dinosaurs are on their way to crush this summer’s superheroes. Today, Universal Pictures released a new trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth, the sequel/soft reboot (I think I’m using that term semi-correctly) of the Jurassic Park/Jurassic World franchise. This time – hold onto your hat because you won’t believe this – there’s yet another super-duper secret island on which InGen created dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, and a pharmaceutical bigwig wants to get samples of the DNA from these particular species so he can cure human diseases. He hires a covert special ops team to guide him and a paleontologist to the island to extract the DNA, but as with all the Jurassic movies, the dinosaurs attack – including some new hybrid mutant alien what’s-it-now dinosaurs to spice things up. Jurassic World Rebirth stars Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend, Jonathan Bailey, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, and Ed Skrein. With Colin Trevorrow, the director of the previous three Jurassic World installments, gone from the franchise, Gareth Edwards has stepped in to direct (so I hope you like the shots of the dinosaurs in the trailer because that’s all you’re likely to see of ‘em), with a script from David Koepp, the screenwriter of the original Jurassic Park. Jurassic World Rebirth will stomp into theaters on July 2, 2025, and you can see the new trailer below:
I’m not going to lie and say that I’m looking forward to Jurassic World Rebirth. Aside from the outstanding first film, I don’t like any of the Jurassic movies, and I wish they had just left it at that one incredible movie; I didn’t even see the last one, which brought back the three main characters from Jurassic Park (although it’s hard to care after Jurassic Park 3 destroyed Alan Grant’s character arc and made Ellie Sattler a footnote in his story). But the Jurassic films make too much money for the franchise to stop, so it’s hard to blame Universal for keeping them coming. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, with a movie about mankind refusing to let a species that had run its natural course die and suffering grave consequences as a result spawning an interminable series of sequels that get worse and worse, but they’re so lucrative that it probably doesn’t quite hold. However, I have to admit that some of the shots and sequences in the new Jurassic World Rebirth trailer look very good. Despite my earlier joke about Gareth Edwards, none of whose movies I particularly like, there is some good dinosaur action in these clips, particularly the Tyrannosaurus Rex (my man) going after a family as they float by in a raft. (Apparently, this is a scene from the book; I read Jurassic Park a long time ago, so I don’t remember it all that well, but it’s neat that they’re going back to the source material.) This also implies that while Jurassic World Rebirth is moving on to sci-fi monster crazy zany dinosaur hybrid mutant things, the T-Rex is one of the main catalysts for the plot, which I love.
Speaking of which, while I agree with people critical of these films that it’s ridiculous to think that dinosaurs aren’t enough for the audience, and we have to go full-on monster movie, I found that opening sequence of the Jurassic World Rebirth trailer quite suspenseful. There’s real dread in that clip, and the horrified pleas of the trapped scientist are effective; this guy is about to die horribly, he knows it, his colleagues know it, and they all know that nobody can save him. It makes me wish this were part of some original sci-fi horror film, not the 64th Jurassic sequel. It also helps that you can’t quite make out the new villainous mutant dinosaur in that shot because when you see him, he looks exactly like what Edwards admitted he was: a combo of the T-Rex, the Alien from Alien, and the Rancor from Return of the Jedi. And while the Rancor thing is mostly just that he’s big, the Alien influence isn’t just inspiration; the creature’s head is a straight-up Alien ripoff. At what point do you have to stop patting yourself on the back for how imaginative you are?
But, then, this is Jurassic World 4: Jurassic Park 7, so I don’t think anyone is expecting much on that score; Jurassic World Rebirth mostly has to deliver some thrilling dinosaur attacks with good special effects while good, likable actors fight for survival. That’s one of the smartest things this franchise did: it never forgot to give people stars they want to see, particularly after the original actors (none of whom I’d have called stars at the time – Steven Spielberg and his dinosaurs were the draw back then) had moseyed along; they gave way to Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, and now, we’ve got Scarlett Johansson, probably the biggest name of all of them. And she looks great; it takes a sure hand to make sure an actress can look simultaneously gritty and glamorous, and based on the trailers, Edwards is pulling that off… not that Johansson is a difficult subject (because OH MY GOD!). My point is that part of the reason the Jurassic movies continue to do well while other franchises have been falling by the wayside is that they haven’t forgotten to be entertainment first, not just with thrills and special effects, but with human connections between appealing actors playing fun characters. I’m sure Scarlett Johansson will be a badass, but I doubt she’ll be a shrill, obnoxious girl boss. Compare that to the Superman trailer, where Lois Lane berates Superman as he whines like a toddler. Superman could very well be a better movie than Jurassic World Rebirth, but based on how they’re both being sold, this one looks a lot more fun.
Let us know what you thought of the new Jurassic World Rebirth trailer in the comments!
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Comments (4)
I think that’s going to help it win the July box office, unless Superman really pulls people in. Audiences are starved for entertainment that isn’t forcing a message on them in one way or another. I don’t know if Superman will do that (Fantastic Four almost certainly will, and even if it doesn’t, nobody trusts Marvel anymore), but they’ll be reasonably sure Jurassic Park won’t. I think there’s also something elemental about dinosaurs that appeals to the little kid in everyone; that fascination never really goes away.
Also, you know, there was a buzz about that whole Dire Wolf situation, allegedly being brought back from extinction. That is a very real startup company thing. I like the CRISPR technology, playing with the DNA. Embryos and designer DNA, to think that this was more than just a movie and more than just a book, but it’s a very real industry now. Was Crichton that brilliant or just an insider, because looking back, he said it was fiction as fact, but it comes off like he knew in advance.
I think a lot of authors end up being prescient, partly due to the research they do for their books and partly because of their imagination. Tom Clancy was debriefed by the government after 9/11 because he wrote a VERY similar situation in Debt of Honor. And in an interview during the 80s (I think), Robert Ludlum, who had written mostly about Cold War and post-WWII espionage, said he believed the biggest threat to the West on the horizon was Islamic terrorism.
It probably helps that much of Crichton’s sci-fi is at least somewhat plausible. The idea of using DNA to recreate life in Jurassic Park is based in the reality of gene manipulation, something that had been tried for decades. And in Congo, the more fantastical parts of the story really aren’t all that crazy; new species of animals are discovered all the time, so some lost type of ape could exist somewhere. I never read it or saw the movie, but I think The Andromeda Strain is just about a virus that comes to Earth, which is also plausible; they found bacteria on Mars in the 90s, I believe, or the early 2000s. Timeline is more radical because it’s about time travel, but even with that, the premise is kept relatively simple; they’re not going all throughout history, just to one particular time.
I had no interest in this anymore, but was invited to see the last one and it was just a good summer monster movie. When people say, they don’t make ’em like that anymore, well, in the case of Jurassic World, they do. It’s a lot like Godzilla or the Harryhausen flicks. They always kind of work.