Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: C
Cinematography: B
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

Talk about a diluted franchise. Steven Spielberg’s original, 1993 film, Jurassic Park, is easily one of the greatest blockbuster movies ever made, and people have now tried six more times to recapture its magic, with varying degrees of never fully succeeding. In terms of box office, the reboot Jurassic World (2015) came the closest. Ironically, even though it felt like a significant comedown, Jurassic Park’s first sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park came closest in quality. It was the only other one also directed by Spielberg, at least—and is really the only other one that still had the same sense of wonder, alongside the monster menace.

Reporters love to note that Jurassic World made the most money out of any film in this franchise, but what they constantly ignore is that figure being in unadjusted dollars. Adjusted for inflation, Jurassic Park remains the biggest grossing film in the franchise by a fair margin—by that metric, it remains the 18th-most successful movie ever made in the U.S. Jurassic World ranks 30th, and The Lost World: Jurassic Park ranks 113th, much further down the list but notably higher than any of the other sequels.

No one even thinks about Jurassic Park III (2001) anymore. Even though Jurassic World was itself a massive success, rebooting the franchise 14 years after the end of the original trilogy, it could also be said that no one thinks about its two sequels anymore either: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), which was flawed but still pretty fun upon rewatch; and Jurassic World Dominion (2022), which held exciting promise by combining that trilogy’s cast with the cast of the original film, only to turn out to be hot garbage, easily the worst movie of either trilogy.

Should Hollywood leave well enough alone, then? Of course not! All of three years later, let’s . . . do another reboot! Functionally that’s sort of what Jurassic World: Rebirth is, although it has too much in common with its immediate predecessors to feel too separate from them, even with an entirely new cast. And let’s be honest, Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey are all far more compelling than Bryce Dallas Howard, and arguably at this point, even Chris Pratt.

Here’s the downside of these otherwise incredibly charismatic actors in Rebirth: I could not possibly give less of a shit about their characters. Scenes offering us backstory near the beginning of the film are so dull, I thought about how I’d rather be napping. This film takes some time to get to any real dinosaur action—one of several allusions to the original Jurassic Park (something even Jurassic World did, making this a bit like a copy of a copy)—but what made Jurassic Park work so incredibly well even in scenes with no action was its clever humor, vibrant performances, and genuinely compelling characters. At the end of Rebirth, when one of the principal characters turns up alive when everyone else was terrified they were dead, I found myself thinking: I’d have way more respect for this movie if the six-limbed mutant “Distorus Rex” suddenly appeared and ate that person after all.

So yes, this time around, a large number of the dinosaurs are cross-bred mutants. We meet the Distorus Rex in the opening sequence, a flashback from “17 years ago” introducing us to the second-ugliest creature ever to appear in this franchise. (The ugliest, and also the stupidest looking, would still be the feathered Pyroraptor from Dominion.) They even talk about how these genetically mutated creatures were not something any park goers wanted to see. So why do they think movie goers want to see them? Distorus Rex doesn’t even look like a real dinosaur. It looks like the xenomorph from Alien crossed with the Elephant Man.

It really kind of sounds like I hated this movie, doesn’t it? Nope! I just . . . didn’t love it. Distorus Rex aside, Rebirth still has a whole bunch of other creatures that are very cool, in sequences that are very exciting. Granted, no part of any of them is original: much of Rebirth just feels like a cross between the original Jurassic Park, Jaws (particularly the boat sequences, complete with characters shooting nonlethal devices at the sea creatures), and King Kong (specifically the sequence where they visit an island that turns out to be still inhabited with dinosaurs). Those are all great movies, at least, and when Rebirth pays homage to them, it generally does them well. Which is to say: when it’s focused on the characters, this movie is dull as hell. But when the dinosaurs start eating people, it cooks.

It was easy to feel optimistic, having the likes of Gareth Edwards as director, and David Koepp—who wrote the scripts or both Jurassic Park and The Lost World—as the writer. It may be relevant to note that Koepp is 62 now, and not exactly brimming with the original ideas he once had. (Or maybe he just needs to work with the right director: his script for Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, also released this year, was excellent.) This time out, he shoehorns a completely unrelated family into the plot: a divorced dad (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is sailing across the Atlantic with his two daughters (played by Luna Blaise and Adrian Miranda) and the older daughter’s boyfriend (David Iacono), and they inevitably get their boat capsized by a giant sea creature. Johansson & crew hear the distress call in their own boat, go to rescue them, and that’s the only reason why the Delgado Family winds up tagging along on a misguided and harrowing adventure.

What exactly are they doing then, you ask? Just kidding, you didn’t ask. Nobody cares! Except it’s so dumb, I’m going to tell you anyway: they need blood samples from live specimens of the largest dinosaurs of those now thriving only in the equatorial region, so they can use it to cure heart disease. Because they have such huge hearts, you see! Whatever, move along, next we have another thrilling action set piece.

None of these movies have ever been plausible, not even the original Jurassic Park—although that one at the very least had adjacency to plausibility, a clever conceit that could sound real enough to the uneducated. They’ve just gotten dumber as they went along, but they all work when characters are getting chased and sometimes eaten by menacing dinosaurs. (This was the fatal flaw in 2022’s Dominion: nobody cares about giant mutant locusts. We want dinosaurs!)

It could be argued that the action setpieces are more satisfying throughout the film in Rebirth than any of these movies at least since Jurassic World. Gareth Edwards knows how to shoot this kind of stuff with a sense of scale, if not always wonder—that’s kind of his thing. It’s the wonder, really, that’s missing here. But at least it has heart stopping thrills, and that’s all anyone is going to these movies for.