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.

It’s a difficult task to make a movie even duller than the last Jurassic World (that be Dominion, whose big twist was the presence of giant locusts) but Rebirth finds a new low. It’s a shame because Scarlett Johansson is always a charming screen presence and for once the impetus for movie is intriguing, and not another science has gone wrong and everyone is cannon fodder type of story.

Set a few years after Dominion, Rebirth lays it on thick that the world is over dinosaurs. Jurassic Parks have shut down, and the remaining dinosaurs have mostly relocated themselves to areas around the equator which have become off limits for humanity. Krebs (Rupert Friend in the thankless evil corporate guy role, a Jurassic mainstay) hires kind-of-mercenary Zora (Johansson) and scientist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) to go to the unauthorized area and get tissue samples or DNA or something from some of the worst dinos to be used for sciencey stuff. So, going into it, there’s a man vs. dino element that is both necessary and (somewhat) compelling.

Oh, but then.

While shit does go sideways, and the presence of a seafaring family shoehorns some kids in there, there’s just no there there. It’s a lot of the same being chased elements and screams typical of all the movies. And hey, I’m a fan of the franchise. There’s usually something to enjoy in these movies (even Dominion if you squint hard enough). But this one is just a little listless. The wonder of the dinosaurs returning is lost amidst the reliance on mutant dinos that look like xenomorphs. Scarjo and Bailey (and also Mahershala Ali as one of Zora’s crew) certainly give it their all (I’m glad they resisted the urge to make Bailey’s science guy a nervous putz and actually let him hold his own in the field), but at no point in the entire movie did I actually care about what was happening to anyone. And honestly, for a franchise that revolutionized special FX some of the shots looked really cheap.

Jonathan’s grade – D