Jurassic world: rebirth: Scarlett sticks it to the dinosaurs.

Johansson plays Zora Bennett, In Jurassic World: Rebirth

By Harlan Jacobson – July 2, 2025
First broadcast on WBGO, July 5, 2025

DD: Summer films have showed some mettle at the boxoffice – How to Train Your Dragon in June with Mission Impossible, Lilo & Stitch, Sinners & Final Destination: Bloodlines adding to their totals beginning in May. A Minecraft Movie, which tapped into the 12-year-old psyche like nothing else, was the undisputed king of Spring earning $425 million at the US boxoffice. Our film critic, HJ, has a few thoughts about a dinosaur challenger opening this July 4th weekend.

HJ: Jurassic World: Rebirth is the latest in the franchise that began in 1993 when book and screenplay author Michael Crichton, a native of Roslyn, Long Island, had just turned 50. Having much earlier discarded his Harvard Med School degree for a burgeoning career of sound-the-techno-alarm entertainments, Crichton saw two more Jurassic sequels – Lost World (in 1997) and Jurassic Park 3 four years later – before he died at 66 of lymphoma in 2008. Almost all the Jurassics hinge on a truism of classic education: tampering with nature is hubris that does not end well. Except all the Jurassics do end well—they’ve stopped doing what cinema does, take a ride on the wild side to let the audience flirt with loss of control. Everyone benighted as good in the script gets home safe, as the film now mimics the theme park ride it spun off. There’s nothing to see here you haven’t seen better before. If there is an audience older than 12, it’s to take their measure of how Scarlett Johansson assumes the position. And why.

This one is brought to you by producer Frank Marshall in collaboration with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, plus the usual visual crew of thousands and with Alexandre Desplat importing significant bars from John Williams’ horn-driven original soundtrack to make us feel right at home.

In Jurassic World: Rebirth, new archetypal characters from the dinosaur world Crichton left behind have been put to different use by Indiana Jones franchise writer David Koepp — whose last screenplay, Black Bag for Steven Soderberg, with Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as married spies jetting about London, I reviewed here in March as all style and no substance. Koepp’s outing here for director Gareth Edwards, is nominally about the greed of Big Pharma but mostly about Scarlett Johansson showing no fear in the face of Dinosaurs.

Johansson plays Zora Bennett, a crack mercenary adventuress hired by Big Pharma Baddie Martin Krebs to go to an off-the-grid Caribbean Island where genetically engineered dino-mutants from the previous installments of the series are waiting for their closeups. Scarlett’s mission is to extract live blood samples from the dinos to turn over to Big Pharma to develop a sure-fire cardio drug that will make the company trillions doing good for rich people doing bad. The target dinos include one mad raptor bird, one big ocean thing and a tyrannosaurus rex knockoff bigger than Macy’s. Zora, the team leader, will get a $10 million payday which screenwriter Koepp in a Hollywood writer fantasy leverages into a $20 million gambit sequence to split with her trusty crew. Johansson plays Zora not quite in the weary aging gunfighter mold, but more as she is: a 40-year-old bred for a higher calling who went rogue to escape office drudgery.

Jurassic World: Rebirth: Inside theater before the viewing of the film. 

We spend the first couple beats of the 2:14 minute film with Scarlett/Zora assembling the team: Jonathan Bailey fresh from his Lord Anthony Bridgerton British TV gig, here as Loomis, the earnest paleontologist at the Museum of Natural History forced to close his department due to public boredom with dinosaurs. Also slumming from a high-profile British career, Rupert Friend plays Martin Krebs, the obligatory bad Big Pharma guy, given a pencil-thin mustache and almost a flashing neon banner rolling across his forehead that says WEASEL (all caps). And Mahershala Ali is Duncan Kincaid, a former mercenary pal of Scarlett, putting on a big happy face to hide the obligatory bad personal loss, now with a fishing boat living out Jimmy Buffet’s dream with a touch of boredom somewhere in the Caribbean.

View more information about Jurassic World: Rebirth on IMDB.

The motley crew sets sail but enroute intersects with a divorced Mexican-American Dad, (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo from The Lincoln Lawyer) sailing the world with his two girls and one of their callow boyfriends, who’ve wandered into the forbidden Dino-zone. Their job in the script is to mirror the mallplex audience, which you can hear in the line Koepp gives one of the kids after their first Tyrannosaurus Rex encounter: “Mom won’t ever let you take us for a vacation again.”

Smart Scarlett plays Zora the bounding, leaping, shooting and always thinking “mission specialist,” as she calls herself unconvincingly, as if it’s been a while since she’s been in touch with anyone as nice as Paleontologist Loomis. He whispers the professionally unthinkable to her, checking her professional credo about executing her mission at the island’s edge, and instead turning the dino blood over to an open-source lab to make a cardio drug for the people. One of my closest friends happens to be expert on the process of drugs making it through development, trials and FDA approval, and says it’s a minimum $100 million investment. Loomis either glosses over that detail to the mercenary Zora or has no clue.

But no matter, Scarlett’s Zora is faced with the decision to stop doing bad crap for money and get clean. Perhaps that explains how Scarlett, who knows how to use her eyes, conveys the irony here. Scarlett taps into Zora’s fantasy of one last job to exit the mercenary gig, with something of her own. Like other stars, Scarlett has it wired: one for the money, two for the show. A big job like Jurassic World – which might be a fun beach break – sets her up to direct her first film, Eleanor the Great, about a firecracker old Jewish lady that debuted in Cannes last month. Scarlett knows how to scrape the bark off a dinosaur.

You can read the whole of Jurassic World: Rebirth as a political action plan, if you like: Well-educated Gen Y gets into a dog fight with Boomer dinosaurs, make of that what you will. The true dinosaur was pre-ordained in Koepp’s genre formula script as the American corporate male’s indefatigable hubris of messing around with Mother Nature for profit. Audiences can embrace the contradiction of relaxing by sitting on the edge of their seat. And tune out CNN’s wall to wall dinosaur coverage for a couple hours to rehearse surviving 100-foot-high Boomer fantasy mutants that snatch helicopters out of the sky and eat ‘em. Which they do.

Not to mention product placements for Snickers and one of the potato chip companies that I always thought put heroin in the fryer, requiring a cold turkey exit. Gotta hand it to Jeep, which inked a TV ad deal with the production to use a Jeep to demo some dino off-roading in the jungle. “Imagine what that will do for sales to our weekend warriors!,” you can hear them saying in the Jeep HQ in Toledo, my old hometown. Alas, the Jeep in the film appears to the Tyrannosaurus Rex – cast after the usual intense round of auditions – as just another cocktail weenie in a bun. (Missed opportunity for an antacid product.) Shocking to see how easily an animal can crunch down on a Jeep on the run. Best that can be said is that it doesn’t seem like it’s the fault of the Jeep’s transmission so much as the usual driver error. You’d think the head guy at Jeep Toledo would have had the guy on retainer in Hollywood check out the script. They eat the Jeep! He’ll no doubt be reassigned back to Toledo, after the film opens this July 4th weekend absolutely everywhere.

Kill the Jockey Opening

Also opening this week is Luis Ortega’s Kill the Jockey, which I reviewed here (and on on WBGO at the Toronto Film Festival last September: 

“There are sublime and hilarious sequences in Kill the Jockey, and a spiritual quest in a stupor. There is great art in the script by Rodolfo Palacios and Fabian Casas that plays out in the deadpan, modern minimalist styles of Jim Jarmusch, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Aki Kaurismaki, and the straight-on cinematography of Timo Salminen. And there is the central performance of Remo, by Nahuel Perez Biscayart, whose direct antecedent is Roberto Benigni from Jarmusch’s Down by Law and everything else Benigni has ever done, all the way back to the great silent comedies of Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton.”

Kill the Jockey is opening at the Film Forum in Manhattan this weekend for a limited release. And I say giddyap and go.

And I’m HJ