Jurassic World Rebirth

 The Jurassic World movies are built around a seriously toxic, mind-numbingly idiotic plot point: That dinosaurs are just not cool enough, and that people will get bored of them quickly. The original Jurassic Park was built around the awe that these creatures inspire; They're the entire appeal of the franchise, for fuck's sake.

 This whole concept seems to come from one Colin Trevorrow, who's finally left the Jurassic World building to go fail upward somewhere else. He leaves behind three of the stupidest mainstream films of the last decade.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is helmed by the infinitely more capable Gareth Edwards, working from a script from David Koepp -  a man who's produced his share of shit, but also some cool stuff. Their tack, which is to hew closer to Jurassic Park than to any of the sequels, is solid.

 Unfortunately, they've chosen to carry forward the stupid, stupid baggage from the Jurassic World films. So as the film starts, we're informed that dinosaurs are dying all over the place, and people just don't give  a shit.
 Well, most people. Obviously evil biotech companies are after dinosaurs' magic blood, which they know they can use to eliminate heart disease. And since there are no more parks, they need to go get this magic dinosaur blood (it needs to be from the biggest dinosaurs, because they have the biggest hearts, you see!) from closed off areas near the equator where dinosaurs still roam free.

 You know what, after re-reading the paragraph above, I'm not sure Koepp is that much of an improvement over Trevorrow. Sadly, it doesn't get a whole lot better.

 An obviously evil suit (Rupert Friend) working for one of those obviously evil big pharma companies hires a mercenary (Scarlett Johansson) and a dinosaur expert (Jonathan Bailey) to go get the magic dinosaur blood with him and a group of other PMC types. On the way they rescue a family who decided to go sailing in dinosaur-infested waters, so when things inevitably go wrong and everyone gets stranded in yet another dinosaur island, the film splits its time between the PMCs going after their quarries and the family trying to make it to safety.

 And... it's mostly fine. It's dumb - really dumb - and noticeably making an effort at being very kid-friendly (complete with a cute baby dinosaur following the family around and basically acting like a puppy). It's also overstuffed, making its relatively lean (for the current status quo) runtime feel much longer than it actually is.
 But action is mostly good. There's extremely little sense of risk - this is the kind of movie that blatantly only kills evil characters or the ones it doesn't spend any time developing. It also cheats all the time by making pursuing monsters either disappear or suddenly fall back in the interstices between one shot and another; The worst offender in that respect is a scene where the family out-paddles a chasing dinosaur (a scene that's directly taken from Crichton's book for the original Jurassic Park).

 OK, I'm not really selling it, am I? It's got good momentum, the effects are pretty good (although nothing groundbreaking), and there's good variety. There's also good dinosaur variety: We get Quetzalcoatlus, Mosasaurs, Titanosaurs, and a few others. The mutated dinosaurs fare less better, but at least the sausage-headed big bad is a botched mutation, so it looks like something out of H.R. Giger's sketchbooks than an actual dinosaur.

Seriously, the HR Giger estate must not be thrilled.

 The main issue here is that the movie is in too many ways really fucking basic. An early scene where Zora (Johansson's character bonds with another one played by Mahershala Ali is representative - they trade sad, sad news and make sad sad faces at each other, while all the time Alexandre Desplat's extremely intrusive, manipulative score indicates to us that we should be sad too. The filmmaking relies far too much on glib lines, reaction shots and hearty laughs (tm) whenever someone does something that's supposed to be funny - the rhythms almost make things feel like they're edited like a trailer a lot of the time. This might be a side-product of being aimed at children, and I fucking abhor it.

 David Koepp's script is another major problem. The plotting is... fine, but all the characters are fairly nondescript, the humour is terrible, and every interaction is clumsily handled or botched. Oh, and he insists on writing young people, that's always funny to watch. In this one he's created a lazy zoomer who offers weed to a pre-tween! Isn't that hilarious? The less said of his attempts at a 'stick it to the man' messaging, the better, but at least he includes an American family of latinxs as the coprotagonists - that's actually appreciated in the current political environment.

 Going by his work, at this point I'm convinced that the indelible characters from the first Jurassic Park are all Crichton and Spielberg.

 Jurassic World Rebirth is a blatant bid to recapture the magic of that fist movie - there are a ridiculous number of references, callbacks, and scenes that mirror events from it. It's a pale imitation, though, and it's weighed down by too many iffy elements. A respectable attempt, and much, much better than the last few tries, but it still misses the mark.