“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.” So raged the creature in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, but that line also now applies to one of the classical resurrection story’s modern descendants: Jurassic Park. In the latest film in the colossal blockbuster franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth, inhabitants of that world are not unlike moviegoers today: People have seen dinosaurs a lot over the years. They’ve seen them revived from extinction, they’ve seen them get loose and run amok, they’ve seen them so often that awe has been replaced by a shrug. Dinosaurs no longer inspire love.

So producer Frank Marshall and Steven Spielberg, who astonished audiences with the groundbreaking visual effects of the 1993 original, felt that Rebirth should lean into causing fear. After completing two trilogies of films, which collectively generated billions of dollars at the global box office, they believed a seventh film would have to escalate the risk to new levels. “I’ve always said that visual effects are great, CGI is a great tool, but it makes you lazy because you know you can do anything,” Marshall tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive early look. “It’s got to be dangerous.”

That became the mission of Rebirth: “You’re in a new place, you don’t know what’s around the corner. You’ve got a different jungle, you’ve got more water, you’ve got higher cliffs,” Marshall says. “There’s a little bit of everything that’s scary.” Add to that a new array of creatures literally engineered to trigger fight or flight.

Scarlett Johansson rappels down a cliff face as the covert operations expert Zora Bennett.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.

The story follows members of a recovery team—led by Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, and Jonathan Bailey—as they venture to an island near the equator that was once home to the first Jurassic Park’s research lab. The squad is trying to retrieve genetic material that could lead to a medical breakthrough for humanity, but three decades later the mistakes made at that ruined facility have not gone away. They’ve endured—and only grown bigger. “These are the dinosaurs that didn’t work. There’s some mutations in there,” Marshall says. “They’re all based on real dinosaur research, but they look a little different.”

Imagine the nightmare version of the giant lizards that evolved naturally millions of years ago. Rebirth director Gareth Edwards, best known for the 2016 Star Wars tale Rogue One and 2023’s AI dystopia The Creator, drew upon classics that have curdled blood for generations. “When you make a creature, you get a big, massive pot and you pour in your favorite monsters from other films and books,” he says.

The filmmaker’s beastly bona fides are already well established. He made his breakthrough with 2010’s Monsters, about invasive alien titans who fall to Earth, and followed that up by tackling the granddaddy of globe-threatening kaiju with 2014’s Godzilla. Adding to his Rebirth dinosaur inspiration were a few other favorites: the skeletal Xenomorph from Alien, the dungeon behemoth from Return of the Jedi, and the original Big Bad from Spielberg’s first Jurassic Park movie. Those references turn up all in one particular twisted dinosaur that turns up in the trailer coming Wednesday. “Some Rancor went in there, some H.R. Giger went in there, a little T. rex went in there…” Edwards says.

UPDATE: The trailer is now out.

The thing that scared Edwards the most was living up to Rebirth’s predecessor, which he feels has been disguised as family-friendly fare over the years. “Jurassic Park is a horror film in the witness protection program,” Edwards adds. “Most people don’t think of it like that. We all went to see it as kids. But I was scared shitless, to be honest, when I was at the cinema watching the T. rex attack. It’s one of the most well-directed scenes in cinema history, so the bar’s really high to come on board and try and do this.”

Screenwriter David Koepp (Death Becomes Her, 2002’s Spider-Man), who adapted the late Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel for the first movie, has gone back to the original source material to pull out a scene for the new movie that he had always hoped to use. Marshall has revealed that it’s a sequence in which Dr. Grant and the two children (who are not characters in this new movie) attempt to drift through a lagoon in a rubber raft without waking a slumbering Tyrannosaurus rex. They don’t succeed, and end up paddling for their lives. “The tyrannosaur was now chest-deep in the water, but it could hold its big head high above the surface,” Crichton wrote. “Then Grant realized the animal wasn’t swimming, it was walking, because moments later only the very top of the head—the eyes and nostrils—protruded above the surface. By then it looked like a crocodile, and it swam like a crocodile, swinging its big tail back and forth, so the water churned behind it.”

Mahershala Ali as Duncan Kincaid, a logistics expert who helps Johansson’s team gain access to danger zones—usually war-torn areas.

By Jasin Boland/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.

The final ingredient for the new film’s terror-factor, Edwards says, is supplied by the audience: the enduring instinctual fear of being chased and devoured. “There’s something very primal that’s buried deep inside everybody,” he says. “As mammals, we evolved [with] this fear of the bigger animal that’s going to come one day and maybe kill us or our family. The second we see it happening onscreen, you’re like, ‘I knew it…. We had it too good for too long.’”

Complacency was the biggest risk for early humans. Marshall credits Koepp, who returns to the Jurassic film franchise for the first time since the 1997 sequel The Lost World, for introducing the notion to Rebirth. “He came up with this idea that dinosaurs were passé now. People were tired of them. They were an inconvenience,” Marshall says. “People weren’t going to museums to see them or to petting zoos. They were just in the way. And the climate was not conducive to their survival, so they were starting to pass away and get sick. But there was one area around the equator that had the perfect climate and temperature and environment for them.”

That leads to a shot in Rebirth that evokes an iconic image from the first Jurassic Park, when the T. rex rips through the visitors center, battles some velociraptors, and roars as it topples a streaming sign that reads, “When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.” In the new film, a similar image appears in the opening, but in a less majestic way. “Well, the banner’s coming down again,” Marshall says. “Jonny Bailey’s a scientist at a museum that’s closing up their dinosaur exhibit.”

Those who turn their backs on dinosaurs will live to regret it, though probably not for long.

Monster movies are only frightening if audiences care about the people in peril. Jurassic World Rebirth serves up a trio of central characters played by Johansson, Ali, and Bailey who have a genuinely altruistic mission and skills that might help them survive long enough to complete it. “A company that [Rupert Friend’s character] represents discovers a way to cure heart disease,” Marshall says, “but you need the DNA from the three largest dinosaurs on land, sea, and air. Those three dinosaurs exist on this island where they were first created, but it’s a no-go zone.”

Johansson leads the quest as Zora Bennett, the leader of the team doing the recovery. “She’s someone who she’s a special operative. She was in the armed forces for the entirety of her career. She probably worked for a private contractor for some time, and now she’s working for herself,” Johansson says. The actor has wanted to face down dinosaurs ever since she was a child and became obsessed with the first movie. “I was really crazy about the film, and I slept in a Jurassic Park pup tent in my bedroom I shared with my sister for a year,” she says. “Anytime the trades would report a new Jurassic movie, I would forward to my agents like, ‘Hey, I’m available.’”

Philippine Velge, also playing a still-unnamed character, clings to the railing of a boat being attacked by a Spinosaurus.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.

The closest Johansson came was in 2020, when her work on reshoots for a Marvel movie took place on a British soundstage neighboring that of Jurassic World Dominion. “I was actually shooting Black Widow at Pinewood at the same time. I was like, ‘Show me the sets! I want to participate!’” Only later, when she had a general meeting with Spielberg to go over possible future projects did her dinosaur dream come true.

“I hadn’t really sat with him and talked about work, and we spent hours just catching up and chatting, and then at some point, many hours into it, he was like, ‘Wait, we’re supposed to talk about Jurassic. Do I hear you’re a huge superfan?’ I said, ‘It is actually true. I’m confirming. I’m a huge superfan.’” She didn’t tell him about the tent. “I was like, ‘He’s going to think I’m this weird stalker.’”

Now she regrets that. Johansson has had a lot of good memories of little girls dressed as Natasha Romanoff. “Obviously with all the Avengers stuff you meet so many fans who are profoundly moved by the characters and the world that you’re a part of,” she says. “I get it. It’s always wonderful to meet people like that. I probably should have just told him. But I was like, ‘Just be professional. Don’t seem desperate. Don’t mention the tent.’”

A callback to the original film. The familiar banner is now falling again because the public has lost interest in dinosaur museum exhibits.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment

About a month after that, Johansson had Koepp’s script and was proposing her own touches for the character. “I just wanted to understand what the stakes were for her, and that she wasn’t just driven by money or power. You wanted it to feel personal for her,” she says. “You have to love the characters and you want to root for them. The movie can’t just stand on the dinosaurs alone.”

Zora evolved to be less of a mercenary. “She’s someone who’s dedicated herself to saving other people, and I think she’s at a professional crossroads. I think she’s burnt out,” Johannson says. If all goes well, this can be the job that allows the character to retire from danger zones. “Of course everything goes wrong, but that’s the fun part,” she says.

As it charts a new course for the franchise, Jurassic World Rebirth also promises some other callbacks to the original Jurassic Park. Bailey hints that his paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis, has a history with Sam Neill’s intrepid character. “I’ve always wanted to make Dr. Alan Grant proud,” the actor says. “You’ll have to wait and see to see what sort of link there is between them.”

His professorial hero is a contrast to Bailey’s recent breakthrough role as Fiyero in Wicked, a less-than-intellectual character who scoffs at the library and kicks books aside in his signature song “Dancing Through Life.” Dr. Loomis would be aghast. Bailey says his Rebirth character “reinforces big, cerebral, and emotional arguments about the natural world and how we as humans live our lives.”

Unlike the others, he’s not combat-ready, however, which places him at extra risk on the Island of Misfit Dinosaurs. He may be a little too fascinated by them, and not guarded enough as he guides the team toward harvesting the dinosaurs’ genetic material. “His strengths are his compassion and enthusiasm and hunger for the natural world,” Bailey says. “That’s his brilliance and that’s also his downfall.”

Speaking of extracting DNA, the new film does this with Spielberg himself, who serves as an executive producer on Rebirth. “To me, it’s like a heist movie that meets all the films of Steven Spielberg I loved growing up,” Edwards says. “The three films we were orbiting were Jaws, Indiana Jones, and the awe and wonder of the original Jurassic.”

You’re gonna need a bigger boat … if you are ever surrounded by a Mosasaurus and assorted Spinosauruses.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.

Bailey’s character channels Dr. Jones in one sequence set on a towering cliff, when he tries to extract fluid from the eggs of some flying dinosaurs who are said to be the size of fighter jets. The egg is about the same size as the golden idol from the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark (which was the first of many movies Marshall made with Spielberg.) “The original script just referenced the nest in a cliff and I really felt like we’re in Central America, and I like the idea that there was an old civilization here at one point,” Edwards said. Instead of a cave, he made the setting “an Inca-style old temple that had been abandoned hundreds of thousands of years ago. Inevitably, the second you do that, you’re suddenly going, ‘This is very Indiana Jones.’”

Bailey points out that the relationship between the three leads mirrors another monstrous Spielberg classic about a killer shark. “Much like in Jaws, you see how three people react to the same extreme level of survival,” he says. His Dr. Loomis is like Richard Dreyfuss’s bookish oceanographer; Johansson is the battle-hardened leader like Roy Scheider’s police chief, Martin Brody; and Ali’s Duncan Kincaid, a black-ops logistics expert who shepherds them into the island, has elements of Robert Shaw’s grizzled seafarer Quint.

“That is his impression, but I appreciate Jonny’s observation,” Ali says. “He’s a film buff, a movie head, and he’s always looking for the connections and pulling things apart and dissecting them.”

Ali may not have necessarily had Shaw’s antagonistic antihero in his head during the performance, but there are undeniable parallels. Each has a hardened exterior, while being somewhat wrecked inside. “Kincaid is a guy who at this point in his life has chosen to live off the grid,” Ali says. “He’s in Suriname, but he’s somebody who has been a good friend of Zora’s and is always willing to help out when she needs something handled covertly. He’s a good-spirited guy, but he’s definitely been through some tragedy in his life. All in all, he’s learned to live with his wounds, and he’s making the best of the life that he has.”

Jonathan Bailey prepares to extract material from a dinosaur egg as paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis.

Courtesy of Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment.

The key to making a memorable human in big-budget, visual-effects-heavy escapism is finding something intimate to put onscreen alongside the bravado, Ali adds. “Doing something this big is very new to me,” says the two-time Oscar winner for Moonlight and Green Book. “It’s a little bit of a test for me personally: Can I exist in a space this large, in something that is so much bigger than you and maybe your own specific talents? It’s just hard to pull it off. I think the bigger things are, the harder that can be. But there were people in Jaws and in Jurassic Park, in Star Wars and these huge tentpole films that resonated with authenticity and a certain truth and purpose that made those films worth watching again and again.”

His goal was to make Kincaid lovable to the audience. “I was really going into it hoping to bring something special and buoyant to that character, to really bring an energy and heart to him,” Ali says. “These big, blockbuster films, they’re not filmed in a way that’s necessarily going to set you up to feel that all the time because it’s so hard shooting these action sequences and running from a tennis ball and things of that nature.”

The worse things get on the island, the more relatable Kincaid seems. “There comes this opportunity for him to evolve because they’re having this life-and-death experience. There are people around them that are passing away, and that provides some perspective shift.”

“Passing away” may be the most elegant euphemism for “devoured by giant lizards” that has ever been used.

“It’s my polite way of saying that in this kind of movie, people die, right?” Ali says. “There’s no draft of the film where everyone survives.”