That faint sound you hear in the distance? It’s a Tyrannosaurus rex awakening from a three-year slumber. This week sees the release of Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film in a series that kicked off in 1993 with Jurassic Park, an adaptation of Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel of the same name, directed by Steven Spielberg. The franchise began simply enough, if any film involving cloning and chaos theory can be called simple: Billionaire industrialist John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is on the verge of realizing his dream of opening a theme park filled with dinosaurs brought back from extinction by cutting-edge science when things, well, go awry. But any film series with this many entries is bound to get convoluted after so many installments (and that’s not even factoring in other spinoffs, like the animated Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous). So what do you need to remember before going into Jurassic World Rebirth?
This might be a good point to settle on a definition of the word need. Though set within the same continuity that stretches from Jurassic Park through 2022’s Jurassic World Dominion, Rebirth doesn’t spend much time dwelling on the past. The accomplishments — or, depending how you look at it, misdeeds — of InGen, the company behind the dinosaur de-extinction, set the film’s plot in motion, but Rebirth stays in the shallow end of the lore pool. In fact, the film’s opening scenes effectively wave away the escalating dramatic developments of the previous Jurassic World trilogy, which climaxed with dinosaurs living among us across the globe. This ultimately did not work out so well for the dinosaurs, which have dwindled in number and now mostly live in a few spots close to the equator. An island that was once home to a genetic laboratory is filled with dinosaurs, some of which are the result of experiments that have turned them into weird hybrid species. If you know that going in, you are fully prepared for the Jurassic World Rebirth experience.
That said, while Rebirth does make previous knowledge of the preceding Jurassics unnecessary, it doesn’t throw out what’s come before. In fact, a little bit of dino DNA from each previous installment can be found in this latest outing. Here’s a look at the genetic contributions of each.
Jurassic Park (1993): Dinosaurs are cool, but bringing them back might not be such a good idea.
Wonder and terror live side by side in Spielberg’s original film, in which the decision to bring back dinosaurs produces awe-inspiring results with some unintended consequences. (We’re assuming that Samuel L. Jackson’s character would have preferred to stay attached to his arm, for starters.) Scripted by Crichton and David Koepp, Jurassic Park treats the decision to undo the course of evolution as just the latest example of humanity’s hubris before nature. If a single line sums up the whole movie, it’s when Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) tells Hammond, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” The film’s main takeaway — that perhaps it’s safer for humanity if dinosaurs remain extinct — can be applied to each subsequent film, and Rebirth is no exception. Still, if those scientists had given the matter enough thought, there wouldn’t have been much of a movie, much less six sequels so far.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997): Mother Nature may have killed the dinosaurs, but the equally powerful force of capitalism will keep them alive.
Spielberg reunited with Koepp — who subsequently stepped away from the franchise until his return to script Rebirth — for this loose adaptation of Crichton’s sequel novel in which, oops, it turns out there’s a second dinosaur-filled island and that, too, might create some problems. Here, Isla Sorna, the companion island to the original film’s Isla Nubar and the site of a second scientific facility, becomes the focus of an intra-company struggle thanks to the attempts of InGen CEO/John Hammond’s nephew, Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), to exploit it. Hammond would prefer the dinosaurs be left alone to live in peace. A climactic mishap leading to a T. rex running amok in San Diego would seem like the sort of incident that should settle the issue permanently, and yet what’s true within the film is true in the real world too: As long as there’s money to be made from dinosaurs, they’ll keep coming back, even if the earth itself doesn’t welcome their return (and no matter how many good dogs get eaten).
Jurassic Park III (2001): Dino-tourism is not for amateurs.
Jurassic World Rebirth focuses on a pharmaceutical company’s attempts to harvest dinosaur blood as part of an attempt to create a miracle drug. (Science!) Not messing around, the company hires Zora (Scarlett Johansson), an experienced soldier of fortune, to lead a team that also includes fellow mercenary Duncan (Mahershala Ali) and Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a paleontologist. But their mission gets sidetracked when they choose to rescue Reuben Delgado (Manuel García-Rulfo), a man crossing the Atlantic with his two daughters and the older daughter’s boyfriend. You know who has a hard time navigating an island crawling with dinosaurs and the waters around it? Skilled professionals. You know who has a really hard time doing the same? Vacationers who have no idea what they’re doing. That pretty much describes most of the characters in Jurassic Park III, in which hero paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill) reluctantly signs on to be an aerial tour guide of Isla Sorna, only to find himself on the ground and participating in the search for some missing persons. And guess how they ended up there in the first place? Tourists are the worst.
Jurassic World (2015): Creating new dinosaurs by patching together parts of old dinosaurs is just a terrible idea.
If there’s an overarching theme to the Jurassic films beyond Hey, don’t bring dinosaurs back from the dead, it’s that nobody learns anything. Directed by Colin Trevorrow, Jurassic World revived the dormant franchise with a story about the revival of a dormant franchise. Years after the Jurassic Park disaster, the new Jurassic World has risen from its ashes with offerings that include a selection of classic dinosaurs and the new Indominus rex, a big meanie made from the genetic elements of other dinosaurs. Events soon reveal this to be a bad idea. But it’s not the only bad idea pushed forward by Masrani Global Corporation, the company that has acquired InGen’s assets as well as its tendency to play fast and loose with public safety. Rebirth reveals the Indominus rex has other, even freakier mutant companions that are just as committed to devouring any creatures that cross their path.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018): This whole dinosaur experiment has really opened up an ethical can of worms, hasn’t it?
The problem with reintroducing dinosaurs into the world, beyond the highly likely possibility that they will eat you, is that you have little control over what happens next. Maybe the same technology will be used to clone humans. Maybe dinosaurs will become highly desirable black-market items for those seeking exotic pets or cutting-edge weapons. Maybe they’ll get loose and run amok in nature. Rebirth mostly lets these questions hang out in the background, and its central quest to retrieve some blood for medical purposes seems to be a one-and-done operation. But is it? Aren’t dino farms, in which the poor creatures are kept alive just to be drained of their precious bodily fluids, the next step? Think about it.
Jurassic World Dominion (2022): Sometimes you have to wipe the slate clean if you want to keep a franchise moving along.
By the time the series reached Jurassic World Dominion, it had acquired an expansive supporting cast. Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard had taken center stage as, respectively, Owen Grady and Claire Dearing. Original Jurassic Park cast member BD Wong had been a part of the series since Jurassic World. And Goldblum made a brief appearance in Fallen Kingdom, setting the stage for a full-on Jurassic Park reunion in Dominion, which also welcomed back both Neill and their Park co-star Laura Dern, whose Dr. Ellie Sattler had been absent from the series since making a cameo in Jurassic Park III. But, hey, weren’t these movies supposed to be about dinosaurs? Why were all these humans with their human stories getting in the way? Rebirth seems to have treated this outing for the old gang as one last hurrah before sending them and their decades of history off to the home for aging blockbuster characters, allowing 2025 moviegoers to come into Jurassic World Rebirth knowing as much or as little about what’s come before as they choose to know. It’s all prehistory, really.
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The new stand-alone sequel may stick to the shallow end of the lore pool, but that doesn’t mean it throws out what has come before.
