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.

Coming a mere 3 years after possibly the worst ‘Jurassic Park’ movie to date is yet another attempt to reboot a franchise that has never managed to match the awe and wonder of Steven Spielberg’s original classic. By this stage in the series, the ‘de-extincted’ dinosaurs that were roaming the earth have mostly died out, leaving only pockets left along the equator line where the conditions are suitable for their survival. At the same time, people have became bored of dinosaurs, which incidentally could be an unintentional metaphor for the franchise as a whole!

This time, we have a new cast of characters entirely with some familiar dinosaur foes, led by Scarlett Johansson’s former military covert operative, with Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend and Jonathan Bailey in supporting roles. The team, put together by Rupert Friend’s big pharma representative, are tasked with retrieving biomaterial samples from three large dinosaurs, necessitating a trip to the Ile Saint-Hubert, an abandoned island in the protected zone where a laboratory used to operate. No one is allowed to travel to the protected zone so this operation is off the books, which of course means when things go wrong, as they must, help will be hard to come by.

Gareth Edwards directs and he’s proven pretty adept at both low budget (‘Monsters’) and high budget (‘Rogue One’) action spectacle. The movie moves from set piece to set piece and Edwards is accomplished at bringing them to life, and he does as much as he can with a script that doesn’t really do him any favours. Despite the pretence of doing something fresh, it falls back on familiar tropes from the series from the villainous corporate suit to stalking sequences and narrow escapes with a T-rex. At this stage they feel more lazy than nostalgic callbacks and it got to the stage that I was hoping they’d let the bad guy win, just to do something surprising! It is written by David Koepp, who wrote the screenplay for the original and the initial sequel, but even his involvement can’t avoid falling back on familiar themes and retreading old ground.

‘Jurassic World Rebirth’ is an improvement on ‘Jurassic World Dominion’, aided by Edwards good direction, some tense action set pieces and the gravitas of Ali and Johansson, but it remains a stuttering rehash of the past with a script that is pretty ropey throughout.

Rating: 3/5

Directed By: Gareth Edwards

Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Bechir Sylvain, Philippine Velge and Ed Skrein 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt31036941/