JWR review:
So I recently watched Jurassic World Rebirth in theaters.
It was definitely peaker than Dominion for sure. I liked how it followed a similar format to JP2 and JP3, and the plot was straightforward and easy to follow. T-Rex river scene was peak, this guy needs a name.
Henry Loomis was definitely the best character in my opinion. The family subplot wasn’t bad like how I expected.
All the scenes where they try to extract DNA from the Mosasaurus, Titanosaurus, and Quetzalcoatlus were peak.
There were however, some dumb parts that I won’t go into detail about.
The mutants weren’t bad. The Mutadons were reminiscent of the Velociraptors in the original Jurassic Park. They don’t go into too much detail about them.
All in all, I’d say this is the best Jurassic World movie. 7/10 from me.
WWD review:
Now onto WWD 2025.
PROS:
The science was better than LOOP’s, and some of the designs (e.g. Tyrannosaurus, Utahraptor) were really great. The Tyrannosaurus was undeniably the best animal design in the series, and my second favorite Tyrannosaurus design below Prehistoric Planet.
I also liked how they portrayed certain behaviors, like the Lusotitan munching on pliosaur bones so that its leg injury would heal faster. The CGI is a bit clunky, but it isn’t bad at all. You can see the meticulous detail when they zoom in on the dinosaurs, especially for the Utahraptor and Lusotitan. The narration is good, Bertie Carvel isn’t Kenneth Branagh but he knows how to do his job. There’s no Ben Bartlett, but the music is still good, especially the intro and outro music. The prehistoric environments for each episode are mostly accurate.
CONS:
Many people took issue with the lack of Triassic episodes, the narrator not being Kenneth Branagh, the music not being composed by Ben Bartlett, non of the team behind the original series returning, and the clunky CGI. I didn’t take issue with these at all, but if you look past them, there are other problems with the series.
And in my view, the worst was definitely ANTHROPOMORPHISM. Some of the creatures, scenes, and plots are just too Disney-ish. At some points, I was wondering whether I was watching a Disney movie or a documentary. The entire plot of Episode 1 can literally be made into a Disney movie: it just revolves around a villainized Tyrannosaurus relentlessly pursuing a baby Triceratops who tries to seek shelter with an adult Triceratops, but the adult doesn’t want anything to do with her, so she goes to an Edmontosaurus herd and becomes best friends with their youngster. A lot of the scenes, such as when Old Grande first met the female and nuzzled her neck and when the teenage Albertosaurus pair were sad and groomed each other at night away from the rest of the pack, are way too Disney-ish. Sometimes it felt like a documentary, but a lot of the time it didn’t.
The dig site scenes are mediocre. Like when the paleontologists brought a prepped coprolite from a museum collection to a dig site and pretended they didn’t know what it was from before saying, “Let’s measure this thing, hmmmm, based on the size we can conclude that the only animal who could’ve produced this was Tyrannosaurus”. It would’ve been better if the paleontologists actually talked to the screen to explain stuff like in When Dinosaurs Roamed America. Instead, we got theatrical performances.
Some of the episodes reused the same shots and animations over and over, sometimes three or four times within a few minutes. The biggest upset was definitely the Lusotitan episode: the only Jurassic episode focusing on the diverse Lourinha Formation only featured two animals (no, the dead pliosaur and the pterosaurs that appeared for 2 seconds don’t count).
All in all, I’d rate this show a 6/10. They really should’ve named it Dinosaurs Unearthed or something like that.
Surviving Earth news:
In other news, we got some more BTS shots of Surviving Earth, which in case you’ve forgotten is Tim Haines’s upcoming paleo documentary about the history of life on Earth through 8 extinction events.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SO_93lApxKw
We have our first look at a theropod (probably Nanuqsaurus or Yutyrannus), Meganeura, and a trilobite. The team from Lola Post Productions (the studio who did CGI for WWD that was acquired by Milk VFX who is creating the visual effects for Surviving Earth) showed these in the video above.
And we have another picture of prehistoric Native Americans here.
Unfortunately, even though NBC released an article that said SE would come out in the fall, Tim Haines has said the following on Instagram.
And Kenneth Branagh won’t be narrating. Screw NBCU.
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