The latest Jurassic Park movie is about to hit screens tomorrow, but if this was supposed to be breaking a long run of bad films in the series, Jurassic World Rebirth seems like it’s not going to manage that.
While reviews have been fluctuating, as it stands, Jurassic World Rebirth currently sits at a rotten 54% on Rotten Tomatoes with a hundred reviews in. That makes it the fourth best-reviewed Jurassic Park movie out of seven total, as this series has not managed to produce many great offerings. Here’s the list:
- Jurassic Park – 91% critic, 91% audience
- Jurassic World – 72% critic, 78% audience
- The Lost World: Jurassic Park – 56% critic, 52% audience
- Jurassic World Rebirth – 54% critic, N/A audience
- Jurassic Park 3 – 49% critic, 36% audience
- Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom – 47% critic, 48% audience
- Jurassic World Dominion – 29% critic, 77% audience
If you are saying, “Well, critics don’t know anything,” as you can see here, critic and audience scores are close to even, with some audience scores even being lower for some entries. Somehow, there’s a huge gap with Jurassic World Dominion, where that’s the third-best audience-scored entry despite being the world-scored critically by a significant margin.
Jurassic World Rebirth stands out because it has an entirely different cast and director from past entries. It stars Jonathan Bailey, Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali, big stars all. It’s directed by Gareth Edwards, monster movie veteran who directed both 2014’s Godzilla and before that, Monsters. He also did arguably the best new-era Star Wars movie, Rogue One. But this? It seems like it’s mostly a miss. Here’s a sampling of some of the critics who don’t love it:
- The Daily Beast: “The underwhelming result is similar to its signature beasts: a handsome clone that serves no purpose except to line its creators’ pockets.”
- New York Magazine: “Audiences may not have run out of enthusiasm for what the Jurassic Worlds are selling, or at least they haven’t yet, but the people tasked with making them sure are out of ideas.
And here’s a positive one for balance:
- The Times (UK): “The pairing of Edwards with Koepp is the complementary master stroke. They are camera and script in harmony, deftly entwined for a franchise that is finally, after thirty years, worthy of rebirth.”
The questions now are 1) If audiences are going to agree with critics that this is a somewhat middling film and 2) how much money it will make regardless, which of course is the most important question and the driving force behind whether there’s going to be an eighth movie or not. Jurassic World Dominion got terrible critic scores, but guess what? It made a billion dollars globally. Yeah, I think Jurassic Park will continue after Rebirth no matter what.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
