Jurassic World Rebirth takes inspiration from plenty of places – some more likely than others.
“The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going ‘Beep-Beep!'”
The way he told it, Chuck Jones created Wile E Coyote and the Road Runner in the glow of nine commandments. Thou shalt not stray from the road; thou shalt buy all materials from the Acme Corporation, etcetera etcetera.
Decades later, confronted by Universal and Steven Spielberg’s need of a new Jurassic movie, veteran screenwriter David Koepp was feeling inspired. “I actually wrote a list of our nine commandments… inspired by Chuck Jones” he told The Playlist last year.
“I made a list of things that we had to abide by – one was the events of the previous six movies that cannot be contradicted or denied because I don’t like a retcon. Those are no fun. Two, humour is oxygen. Science must be real. You know, all the things that we wanted our movie to be.” What the other six are is anyone’s guess.
These commandments would inform Koepp’s return to the franchise in different ways. His first rule sees Rebirth starting up five years on from the events of Jurassic World: Dominion, which concluded with our formerly fossilised friends endemic across the globe. In Koepp’s world, an unfriendly climate and human activity have driven the dinos close to a second extinction, restricted to a handful of islands around the equator.
“I love limitation,” the writer told Indiewire last week. “I love a bottle. I love a container.”
Look at Koepp’s recent screenwriting output and it’s clear he’s putting his money where his mouth is. His two 2025 films with Stephen Soderbergh, taut spy thriller Black Bag and haunted house flick Presence, showcase his taste in different ways. One sticks so rigidly to its premise the confines of the plot start to feel like Michael Fassbender’s extra-snug turtleneck; the other limits the action to a single point of view in a single suburban location.
“I found [Presence and Rebirth] strikingly similar”, Koepp said. “Yeah, one cost $2m and one cost $200m… But I found the challenges the same and the things that excited me the same.”
In Jurassic World Rebirth, the bottle is an island which looks a lot like a Taiwanese jungle – one used as R&D for the original park. As spooky science labs tend to be, this one’s long abandoned. “We wanted to recapture the idea that we are in the dinosaurs’ environment”, Koepp told Empire. With a simple mission in mind (grab blood samples from three massive dinosaurs to cure heart disease), mercenary Scarlett Johansson joins more mercenaries (Mahershala Ali, Ed Skrein), an archaeologist (Jonathan Bailey) and a big pharma suit (Rupert Friend) for a story more reminiscent of The Land That Time Forgot than Michael Crichton’s satirical original.
Read more: Jurassic World: Rebirth | Full spoiler breakdown and where the franchise could go next
The need for humour prompted the introduction of the Delgado family – a loveably ordinary boat of characters left shipwrecked and picked up en route to the world’s least relaxing holiday destination. “I wanted to broaden the types of people that we put in the movie,” Koepp said. “Everybody who goes to this island on our team at the beginning knows it’s this terrible place… but if you bring in innocent people who have no desire to go to this place and think you’re all crazy for doing it, then I can have more fun.”
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The whole “science must be real” commandment might have been taken with a fistful of salt – the minute-one destruction of a dino lab at the hands of a Snickers wrapper doesn’t exactly scream authenticity – but efforts have clearly been made to satisfy the dino-addicts in the audience. Since Jurassic Park III, for example, research has suggested the terrifying Spinosaurus was more amphibious than previously thought; Rebirth finds a flock (pack? Shoal? Parliament?) of them enjoying a lovely swim.
An early draft of the script even saw the franchise get, er, biological. “I wrote, “They approach the dinosaurs in the field,” Koepp said. “Let’s just put it this way: they have eight legs between them but only six are on the ground.”
Plenty of that science, though, comes from Crichton’s source material, alongside some more unrealistic moments so far expunged from the big screen adaptations. A river chase scene involving a T-Rex (“thou must involve a T-Rex” was surely another commandment) is lifted straight from the author’s original text.
“One of the first things I did when I came on this,” Koepp said, “was I reread both the Jurassic Park and The Lost World novels… 800 pages of meticulously researched science, great ideas, great spectacle… I started taking notes of all the stuff we didn’t get to use the first time.”
Jurassic World Rebirth is in cinemas now.
