Movies Like This Exist Because We Keep Going To See Them

Jurassic Park: Rebirth and the endless slog of retreads

Creative Commons license, image by imperator davianus

I didn’t see Jurassic World: Rebirth in theaters. I saw it at home on Peacock. That’s because A.) Peacock keeps offering me service for 1.99 or 2.99 a month for six months not to cancel. And B.) The wife and I wanted something kinda dumb we could just zone out to.

But then I paid attention. With some decent performances from big name actors and occasionally sharp writing from veteran David Koepp, I witnessed the unfolding of a spectacle film that stole so much from its predecessors — and adventure films in general — while only contributing larger, more grotesque dinosaurs to the franchise.

And yet it was nearly the highest grossing film of 2025.

We audience members have a problem. We complain about the retreads, the sequels, and the IP-milked-to-death, yet we line up to see the films.

If you need any indication of what we’re likely to see in 2026 and beyond, you need only to look at the box office mojo for last year. The top grossing films are live-action remakes of animated films, IP franchises like Jurassic, comic book movies, and horror movies.

And it’s because we keep paying for them.

Sure, Hollywood knows this stuff is new to younger generations, even if it’s blatantly retreading to us older folks. Does that matter? When Michael Crichton first wrote Jurassic Park, dinosaur stories had been around for a century. When Spielberg adapted the book, he drew on the old dinosaur films he’d loved as a boy. And yet the concept was fresh. We’d never really seen the idea of dinosaur DNA recreated because we didn’t even have the double helix model until 1953 and didn’t decode 92% of the human genome until 2003. Crichton’s story was cutting edge, and that made it exciting.

Here, the only thing the writers can think to do is go dubiously “meta” — to talk about experiments done on dinosaurs to make them bigger and scarier because that’s what the public wanted. And here we are, the same public invoked, gobbling popcorn to watch mutant dinosaurs on screen.

In the end, the big king dino — “Distortus Rex” — looks like some eerie mashup of Kong, T-Rex, and the Rancor Monster. Director Gareth Edwards was surely drawing on his own boyhood inspiration with homage to Return of the Jedi. But in a movie with one “homage” after another — whole scenes, like the grocery store scene that’s a virtual copy of the classic Velociraptor scene from the original film — it ends up feeling uninspired instead of inspired.

And what do the kids see, the generation that may not have any of those references? Instead of an exciting, complex idea with moral ambiguity, like bringing back dinosaurs, they get an obviously dark tale of mutant monsters. The original movie encouraged us to be scared, but to see the dinosaurs as animals. Here, aside from one (honestly slightly awkward) scene with two giant muties canoodling in a field, the monsters are pure monsters. They eat everything and everyone. They don’t behave much like animals but like ravenous demons, and they were created for no reason other than greed and ennui.

One last thing: the technology here felt no better than that used 33 years ago. Then, Spielberg’s inclusion of practical effects — puppets and giant T-rex heads — made everything feel closer, realer. Edwards attempts that with the nerdy scientist guy getting emotional hugging the massive leg of a lovely Brontosaur-thing, but it’s nothing like the scene with Grant and Ellie and the Triceratops from the original.

Spielberg’s world felt lived in. He didn’t shoot everything shallow focus and rely on intensive continuity and medium close-ups. He used blocking, did interesting things with the camera. Here, too, the score is ridiculously all over the place and way too rambunctious. The only time it works is when it’s resurrecting pieces of the original.

The fourth-highest grossing film of 2025 is a gross parody of the original, empty spectacle that uses no better effects, retreads the same plot, and offers nothing remotely intellectual or complex. It is cinematic fast food for us to gorge on, and gorging we are.