Directed by Gareth Edwards | Written by David Koepp, from Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton | 134 min | ▲▲1/2 | Amazon Prime

In some ways, Jurassic World: Rebirth can’t lose. It just needs to be better than the last three films in the franchise, and that shouldn’t be too hard.  The Jurassic World franchise takes the amber-filled cake as the worst box-office hit movies since Transformers. The first one is abysmal, the second marginally better, and the third, Jurassic World: Dominion, so bad I don’t even have a review up on the blog because I couldn’t finish it — it commits the worst crime of a summer popcorn movie: it’s a bore.

The producers of this new one have chosen a solid director, a man with a knack for scale and monsters: Gareth Edwards (Godzilla, Rogue One, and The Creator) and a screenwriter with experience: David Koepp, who adapted the novel for Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park back in 1993.

The result is an OK b-movie with an a-movie budget. I can’t complain too much about a reasonably well-made monster picture, well cast (especially Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali), with a few decent dinosaur-chasing-people set-pieces. Like many of these movies it’s too long, and it borrows a little too deeply from its predecessors, but it easily clears the franchise bar — this is the best Jurassic World.

It’s a slow start: Dominion established that dinosaurs can now be found all over the planet.
But they have not flourished. They’re now mostly living away from humans near the equator — better weather, better food — and humans are warned to stay away. Big pharma weasel Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend, channelling Aliens‘ Carter Burke) puts together a mission to extract dino DNA for a possible heart disease cure, recruiting soldier of fortune Zora (Johansson) and her buddy, Duncan (Ali), a paleontologist, Henry (Jonathan Bailey), and a few other expendable crew people we barely get to know before they’re eaten.

This would be plenty to keep us interested, but the producers decided we needed an adorable family to care about — sailing across the Atlantic their sailboat is capsized by a massive undersea creature, forcing Krebs’ team to rescue them. It’s daddy Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella  (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s obnoxious boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono).

So much of the family’s story feels forced and implausible — for instance, that Reuben would even allow Teresa’s boyfriend aboard given he barely knows him and doesn’t like what he knows. At the end of the first act the movie decides the family needs to be separated from the DNA hunters, but the mechanics of that split are ridiculous. Naturally, Isabella finds herself a cute baby dinosaur to carry around in her backpack, an entirely sick-making subplot.

But what most people are gonna be here for are the dinosaurs — especially the big, hungry ones. The stuff on the ocean is exciting, as is a sequence with a T-Rex chasing a raft down some rapids. Later on we get an impressive scene of a guy swallowed whole by a pterodactyl and more ugly beasties prowling a dilapidated tech complex.

Here’s the thing — Edwards is smart to steal from the best, but some of this feels carbon copy familiar. Obviously, he loves himself some Spielberg, not only a few easter egg nods to the original Jurassic Park but also a whole lot of Jaws. Composer Alexandre Desplat goes for a John Williams impersonation, but the score is either played too low in the mix to be effective, or it’s just a pale reflection of what we love about the Spielberg/Williams collaboration. The Aliens “homage” goes way beyond Paul Reiser — it’s a big part of the set design in the last act and even in the dialogue. Other cultural properties mined for this movie include King Kong and Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter Black Heart.

All of this makes for a picture that suffers from a glaring lack of originality. Still, it’s an undeniable crowdpleaser, with help from Bailey, who seems to be speaking American English with a Swedish accent, Johansson, who brings her usual professionalism, and Ali, who has been absent from the big screen for awhile.  Jurassic World: Rebirth gives them all something to do and provides a watchable hour and 45 minutes — that lingers about a half hour too long. Just don’t look for any romance here between, say, Bailey and Johansson — can’t have that kind of excitement in our summer monster movie.

It’s by no means a great movie, but it’s undeniably a lot more fun than this franchise has managed for a decade, and certainly the dinosaur lovers out there will have a good time — the packed cinema I saw it with on opening night certainly did.