JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH is one of those sequel titles referring more to the series itself than the story. I think the only rebirth is that it’s new characters and storyline, you don’t need to remember any previous entries. They really exhausted all the bringing-back-characters gimmicks in the last couple so this is an all new cast with only one unobtrusive mention of one of them studying under part 1’s Alan Grant.

Scenario-wise it’s similar to THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK and JURASSIC PARK III. There’s no theme park, just a small team sent on a mission to an area where leftover dinos created on a separate island run wild. Since it’s set after three JURASSIC WORLD movies the world is used to and bored of dinosaurs, they get into cities sometimes and it’s not a huge deal, there are genetically altered breeds and mutations created for entertainment purposes. But mostly this is set at the equator, where travel is illegal due to dangerous wild dinosaurs, and on an abandoned R&D island, so it’s not that different from any other chapter.

It’s definitely the most woman-led one, though. One of our last movie stars, Scarlett Johansson (NORTH), feels like the actual lead instead of co-lead, and it leans heavily on her ability to make a fairly generic character get by on charisma. She plays accomplished coverts op badass Zora Bennett, who’s hired by shady ParkerGenix pharmaceuticals slickster Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend, COMPANION) to take blood samples from the three largest dinosaurs in the wild.

The first pitch is that the mission will cure congenital heart disease and save numerous lives, but the one she goes for is that it will pay $10 million. It’s a traditional cynical-wiseass-but-we-know-she’ll-do-the-right-thing-in-the-end type of role that could’ve been written for young Harrison Ford or other men, and thank God they didn’t throw in some “but she would make a great mother” shit. I almost feel like screenwriter David Koepp (I COME IN PEACE) should get some kind of award just for resisting that.

Krebs teams Zora with Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey, WICKED), a paleontologist who will identify the correct dinosaurs. He’s a nerd who expected to just be a consultant from afar, but he doesn’t turn into scaredy cat comic relief or, for that matter, Rambo. He just says some silly things sometimes (comparing rappelling down a cliff to the rock climbing wall at his gym) and does his best, which is pretty good. It’s a refreshing change from the manliness of the Chris Pratt character, which admittedly was a refreshing change at one time.

Dr. Loomis plays as possibly gay to me, and I guess Bailey is gay in real life, so that may be why they chose not to have him and Zora fall in love during their adventure, as would happen in 99% of movies. It’s such an expected element that again it feels kind of fresh not to bother with it. We can get that in any other movie we randomly pick off a shelf, pile or menu.

They go to Suriname, where Zora recruits her old friend Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali, PREDATORS), his small boat and his capable crew of LeClerc (Bechir Sylvain), Nina (Phiilippine Velge, Station Eleven) and Bobby (Ed Skrein, MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL) – yes, they’ve got both Hitman: Agent 47 and The Transporter: Refueled in this cast. They head for one of InGen’s abandoned laboratory islands in the Atlantic, where they will track different dinos and deploy cool darts that take blood samples then fire like rockets and parachute down. But along the way they heroically respond to an S.O.S. from a family whose small sail boat capsizes after a Mosasaurus encounter.

Duncan appropriately lectures Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO) for taking his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise, Fresh Off the Boat) and Isabella (Audrina Mirand) and Teresa’s stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono, JOKER) into such a dangerous area. Unfortunately Duncan also loses his boat and the team is separated from the family, but both head for the same place where Zora says her backup helicopter rescue team will search for them at dawn.

This marks Koepp’s return to the series after having written the two best ones (the two Spielberg ones). His previous four movies were KIMI, INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY, PRESENCE and BLACK BAG – his beat is decent-but-forgettable Spielberg-franchise-extenders and under-the-radar Steven Soderbergh joints. That explains how old fashioned sturdy and straight forward this is, alternating between the two groups with their various tensions and subplots, but nothing too tangential or convoluted. I think the inevitable arc of Xavier from comically horrible boyfriend to hero is pretty effective because I felt as reluctant about handing it to him as the dad did. And Krebs is a good antagonist because you assume he sucks from the beginning (usually in a movie Rupert Friend is not your friend) but he’s not as cartoonishly shitty as, say, the lawyer in the first movie, so there’s some Burke-in-ALIENS style tension about just how much we’ll get to hate him.

I think I may have gotten a little more fun out of JURASSIC WORLD DOMINION’s FAST & FURIOUS-esque excess, but I also respect this one being less stupid and more disciplined. These days I gotta appreciate a tastefully simple story that moves the characters through different locales for a variety of action types: a long section on the water (with obvious JAWS influence), then land, on a mountain, in a cave, a lab, somehow a gas station mini-mart.

Part 1 legends the raptors and the t-rex do feature, but they don’t act like they think they’ll need an applause break. Some winged ones show up, which is always fun. The new top dog is a “mutant as shit” thing called Distortus rex. He looks like a mix between a Rancor monster and the Newborn from ALIEN: RESURRECTION. I like this guy. I like the concept that this is the Island of Misfit Dinos, the “Mutadons” deemed too ugly for public consumption. I do think they should’ve had some much more ugly ones. If you prefer cute, though, Isabella makes a pet out of a little aquilops she names Dolores and carries around in her backpack. I question Dad’s judgment in letting her keep Dolores, but this is a different world where dinosaurs are normal. I guess it’s probly safer than having a pitbull.

The director is Gareth Edwards (ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY), chosen after David Leitch and Edgar Wright backed out. The producers were very open about wanting a hired gun who would stick to their dinosaur designs and the screenplay Koepp had already written (developed with executive producer Spielberg). Edwards is a pretty good choice for that type of work. He makes it look good, the integration of FX is excellent, there are some really cleverly staged sequences. A character is coming ashore, doesn’t notice the dinosaur moving slightly out of focus behind her, our view of it is blocked by a boat in the foreground until suddenly it’s right there munching on her. Or smoke clears and slowly reveals the horrific features of the d-rex we didn’t know was standing right there. Maybe these were already storyboarded for Edwards, but it’s the kind of stuff he excelled at in GODZILLA and ROGUE ONE, great looking movies and individual sequences within not-great stories, in my opinion.

Unsurprisingly Amblin Entertainment were able to back him up with some real professionals doing professional work. Cinematographer John Mathieson got his start in music videos, including Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” and “3 Chains o’ Gold,” an infomercial for Prince’s symbol album, before becoming Ridley Scott’s guy starting with GLADIATOR. He also shot THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD and LOGAN. Editor Jabez Olssen has exclusively worked on Peter Jackson movies except for this and ROGUE ONE.

The score is by Alexandre Desplat (BIRTH, RUST AND BONE), a good composer I associate with Wes Anderson and Guillermo del Toro, but I guess he did a couple Harry Potter movies (R.I.P.) so this isn’t his first time having to work around beloved John Williams themes. He does fine and it’s not his fault that the main theme evokes so much that it feels like cheating to use it. I like the parts where I thought “oh, they must’ve put some ALIENS on the temp track for this scene” but also his more original sounds are good.

They mention in the movie that dinosaurs have been around for 32 years. Holy shit, 1993 really was that long ago. It makes me sad that back then it was normal to make an adventure movie with a team of heroic scientists, and now it’s gotta be a special ops warriors with guns and A Very Particular Set of Skills that we’re supposed to believe it goes without saying would easily apply to dinosaurs, even though you never need to disarm them or break their wrists. To be fair, it’s ultimately an anti-mercenary story. Her arc is to take a job for the money and realize she’d rather get nothing and give the cure to the world. The message is good. And I enjoy seeing Johansson do action star shit, run and pose and be capable and say some funny lines, even if I’d rather see her play a more distinct character.

But in the end I thought about her character not being in the dinosaur business, not necessarily needing to be in the next one, wondering if that was part of why she signed on, and thinking “Good for her.” This is the first JURASSIC PARK movie I didn’t get around to seeing in theaters, so it’s the first one that didn’t feel like an event to me, but maybe it wouldn’t have anyway. The bottom line is it’s technically well made, I was reasonably entertained by it, I would disagree and even scoff at any claims that it’s terrible, of which there are many. But I’m not convinced there was reason enough to make the movie. I don’t think it does anything fresh enough to justify the time spent, it doesn’t offer anything for me to be passionate about. Making another movie in the JURASSIC PARK series was definitely something they were capable of doing; it was obviously possible, but another possibility would’ve been to just not do one, and maybe a stronger argument could’ve been made for that choice. Man, I wish Ian Malcolm was here, I bet he would have a more catchy way of putting it.