Five years post-Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), an expedition braves isolated equatorial regions to extract DNA from three massive prehistoric creatures for a groundbreaking medical breakthrough. (from IMDb)

It's been 32 years since Steven Spielberg brought dinosaurs to life on the big screen in a new way and changed cinema forever. Since then, Universal Pictures has been trying to recapture the magic - and the box office returns - with sequel after sequel. 2022's Jurassic World: Dominion was the sixth installment in the franchise and largely advertised at the time as the conclusion to the series. But money talks, and it wasn't long before another entry was greenlit -- a soft reboot in the form of Jurassic World: Rebirth.

To recap, the 1993 film was based on the popular Michael Crichton novel of the same name, and its success spawned the first sequel, 1997's The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which took Ian Malcolm from the first movie to "Site B," an island where dinosaurs were bred before being brought over to the main island for the park. 2001 saw Jurassic Park III, which had Dr. Alan Grant being tricked into going to Site B, and then fighting to get out alive. This ended the franchise for 14 years until 2015's Jurassic World debuted, introducing Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard into the franchise, in which a massive dinosaur theme park, called Jurassic World, had been successfully opened. Of course, everything goes awry again, with dinosaurs escaping, resulting in the park being shut down permanently. In 2018's Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Pratt's and Howard's characters return to the island to rescue some dinousaurs as a volcano threatens to (and eventually does) wipe out the remainder of the creatures on the island. But some dinosaurs are brought back to the main land, and then let loose into the wild. So, finally, in 2022, we were given the "conclusion" in Dominion, where dinousaurs now freely roamed the earth again and people are trying to live alongside them. The major draw for that film was the return of the original main characters, too. Rebirth takes place about five years later, with dinosaurs now dying out all around the world, but a small demographic of dinosaurs still surviving in a restricted area along the equator. It's clear that, with Rebirth, the franchise is desperately trying to reground itself.

With this new story, we have all new characters. This, obviously, is a double-edge sword. For one, we get to start things over from scratch with a clean slate, but at the same time, there's no character familiarity or investment. Granted, we had to do that with 2015's Jurassic World, but you also had the star power of Pratt - coming off of Guardians of the Galaxy, Parks and Rec and The LEGO Movie - driving the film. Scarlett Johansson is the only real star power here (sorry Mahershala), and she hasn't really proven to be able to carry a blockbuster movie on her own yet. I love her as Black Widow, and I enjoy her in the lead most of the time, but even at her most endearing, she usually doesn't have the warmth and charisma needed to carry a film like this. With that said, I did enjoy her here in Rebirth, but I have to agree with those who don't think she can quite make it as the main star power. Perhaps if they'd paired her up with another lead - like Pratt (but not specifically Pratt for a fourth straight outing) - it might have worked beautifully.

With that said, Mahershala Ali appears here in a supporting role as Duncan, and I did enjoy his contribution to the story. I also really liked Jonathan Bailey as Dr. Loomis, who is basically the new Dr. Grant, but he's more naive and much less cynical. It was a refreshing change for the franchise. Martin Krebs, played by Rupert Friend, is the money here, a smarmy fellow who enlists the help of Zora for this particular mission. Apart from them, just about everyone else is pretty expendable -- whether the story acknowledges it or not. The story's strangest inclusion is that of a random family that is boating when they have a run-in with our main characters. It's four more people to have get chased by dinosaurs, but it's pretty tough to care about them. They feel very shoe-horned into the story, and one could argue that a couple of them are just begging to be eaten the entire film. It makes you wonder what exactly the filmmakers were thinking here. And I get that the formula for the franchise calls for children to get terrorized by dinosaurs, but has really no one stopped to ask if that's even necessary? (Personally, I don't think so.) It wouldn't kill the franchise to have at least one movie without kids getting terrorized, and the fact that they're so brazenly forced into this story needlessly makes it feel even sillier.

The story of Jurassic World: Rebirth further explores the idea of genetically mutated dinosaurs/monsters that was introduced in Jurassic World with the Indominus Rex. In this film, there's an entirely new island to the canon introduced that was a research facility (maybe for the Jurassic World park specifically?) where genetic accidents had been produced and stored instead of destroyed. This introduces some new cross-breed dinosaurs, including the D-Rex, which is clearly a malformed beast that looks like the lovechild of a T-Rex, a Muto from Godzilla (2014) and the Rancor from Return of the Jedi. But to make sure there's still a true-dinosaur feel to the movie, plenty of staple dinosaurs are also mixed in, including the fan-favorite T-Rex.

I definitely had high hopes with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Godzilla (2014) director Gareth Edwards at the helm. In some ways, I think he delivered, and in others, I definitely feel like he dropped the ball. There are plenty of thrills throughout the movie, but the characters do lack. And even when the story is trying to give us some backstory for Zora and Duncan in a somber "this is who/what we lost" heartfelt exchange, it feels a bit too contrived instead of natural. It has to be hard to flesh out characters in a movie where all audiences want to see are people being terrorized by dinosaurs, but in many ways, it feels like this was not quite the way to approach it. Part of the problem is the amount of screentime given to the family side characters that are treated more like side-main characters than just side characters. It's just too much character time division, and I'm not quite sure how that didn't get noticed in the editing room. There's also much too much time spent slowly building both sets of characters at the same time. After both sets are established, the movie barrels forward at a pretty good speed, but it's slow enough beforehand to worry anyone. (Somehow, Spielberg kept his two movies entertaining and interesting during those slower moments. Edwards can't seem to get the right feel here, sadly.)

But, with all the characters represented on screen, this is utilized to present the audience with a more varied selection of dinosaurs and creatures. I feel like The Lost World did a better job of this - and it had John Williams' incredible score as support, although Alexandre Desplat does a noble job - but here, Edwards does give us some pretty fun sequences. All of the stuff on the yacht had a nice Jaws meets Jurassic feel (which made my Jaws-loving wife positively giddy), and some of the bird sequences were pretty cool. There are times, however, where the film starts to tread too closely to the original - like the convenience store stalking, for example - that feels more like a rip-off or rehash than homage. The Rebirth sequence where they attempt to recapture that awe and wonder from the first one, involving mutant brontosaurus type dinosaurs, does accomplish that feel pretty closely. And it may be the first time since the original that a sequel has gotten this close to recapturing that feeling. Overall though, Rebirth exists on the edge of fresh and retread, frequently teetering one way and then the other. I get that the franchise has to check off a certain number of boxes, but the question still remains, at the seventh film in the saga, if that really is necessary to do. (By the way, can we talk about the title? Where exactly is the "rebirth" in this movie? Do they mean the franchise in general? Ha...)

One thing that really surprised me were the uneven effects for the film. Whether or not it's somewhat intentional to have poorly rendered green screen work (to match the 90's aesthetic), I'm not sure - and I highly doubt, but there is definitely more than one scene where it looked pretty bad, particularly by 2025 standards. (And given how amazing Gareth's other movies look, especially The Creator, I find this bizarre.) Basically, all of the scenes on the cliff and cliffside looked especially lacking (we saw it in Dolby, so I don't know if that had anything to do with it). Even some of the characters scaling the cliffside looked obviously digitally rendered. Many of the dinosaurs and monsters looked great, though, so it seemed strange that the movie would fall flat in several key action sequences.

The content for Rebirth is pretty on-par for the franchise. It is a bit scarier at times than some of the recent entries, but it's rarely gory. We do see a couple victims caught within the jaws of some large dinos, but it's not usually bloody. However, one death is a bit more gruesome than one might expect. For that one, a beast grabs hold of its victim and bites their head off (seen a little more at a distance). We also see a dismembered hand and wrist fall to the ground with some blood around the wound. The hand looks especially fake (think the first movie), but it's still kind of gross. The most gruesome visual, however, is seeing a large dead dinosaur with a big open wound and its guts and intestines spilling out onto the ground (no exaggeration). It's a pretty intense sight. Lastly, a character gets dragged off in the jaws of a monster and we see the water turn red with blood as it splashes along a beach (think Jaws). Otherwise, there's a decent amount of profanity - about 10 uses of the "S" word (most are relatively subtle), and a handful of other phrases and words, including 2 uses of "S.O.B." A character asks if anyone wants any weed, but we don't see any, and another character brushes off that person's offer as a joke. Lastly, there's no sexual content, but it's sort of implied that the teenage daughter in the family side story probably sleeps with her teenage boyfriend who is on the boating trip with them.

So, how does Jurassic World: Rebirth stack up to the rest of the series? Well, like the Star Wars sequels, Rebirth feels like a carefully assembled cashgrab. You can tell those making it have an affection for the source material, but it's obvious this movie just exists to sell tickets - and toys. I'm all good with that - ready to visit the theater in a Jurassic Park tee and a bucket of popcorn in hand - as long as the movie delivers. And, with that in mind, Rebirth kinda does. Some family members who attended the showing with me (aside from my wife) were pretty jaded about the movie, but I left feeling entertained. With expectations grounded, you're likely to find Jurassic World: Rebirth to be a fun enough time at the movies.