Jurassic World Rebirth review: What do we really want from a dinosaur movie?

It doesn’t take long for Jurassic World Rebirth to show you its big bad dinosaur, the so-called Distortus Rex, a mutant monster with a bulbous head, rows of teeth and, still, those teeny weeny hands.

Before it even appears, you know it’s coming. The scene, in the film’s first few minutes, has gone quiet, and one character is looking behind another in horror. Sitting in your seat, you automatically clench and recoil, prepared for the horrors to come.

Only, it’s not horrifying. We’re not saying that if ever confronted with such a creature in real life, you wouldn’t, best case scenario, wet your pants. But on screen, it’s more funny than scary. The lifeless body of the about-to-be-eaten, bopping in its jaws like a ragdoll.

That’s every death in Jurassic World Rebirth, kind of comical, and it really highlights that this is a franchise that struggles with stakes.

The fourth Jurassic World movie and the seventh Jurassic Park movie overall, Rebirth is something of a standalone chapter. You don’t need to have seen the three or six prior entries to get the gist of what’s going on because Jurassic Park is so embedded in the pop culture of the past three decades.

First of all, huzzah, no more Chris Pratt! The cast is all new, led by Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali and Rupert Friend.

Set a handful of years after Jurassic World Dominion, the dinosaurs that were set free to roam among the human population have almost completely died off thanks to our more toxic atmosphere and climate change.

The only ones still thriving live in a band around the equator, which is off-limits to human travel.

Enter pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Friend), who, you just know, is going to bite it - or be bitten - before the credits roll, because he’s a pharma bro and they make for the best villains.

Krebs is putting together a mission to extract biological material from three living colossals that can be found on the island of Saint Hubert, and use the secret to their longevity to unlock a treatment for heart disease – and make billions of dollars, of course.

The mission is definitely off-books, so he hires covert operative Zora (Johansson) and her team consisting of Duncan (Ali), and three characters (Ed Skrein, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain) whose names barely register, and palaeontologist Henry Loomis (Bailey).

On route, they pick up the distress signal of the Delgado family – dad Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), teen daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), little daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) - whose boat was capsized by a Mosasaurus.

Now you have two groups in peril, and they’re separated by the time they arrive on the island, so the film cuts between their quests, which dissipates a lot of tension as they jump between them.

The Delgado storyline also seems to exist to fulfil one of the franchise’s most enduring tropes: putting kids in jeopardy. It was super effective when Steven Spielberg did it in the first movie, and has had a diminishing impact ever since.

The Delgados have another narrative purpose, as a litmus test for the main group of characters – separating those who care about their fate as deserving to survive versus those who don’t.

Not that there are any surprises about who will be left standing. You know as soon as you meet each person whether they’ll live or die, which deflates the stakes.

Everyone might be traipsing through the deadliest of jungles where, at any moment, a raptor could chew your face off, or you might be plucked into the air by a Pteranodon, but you also know, in your heart of hearts, who the movie is actually willing to kill off. Not everyone is disposable.

Directed by Gareth Edwards and written by David Koepp, who returns to the franchise for the first time since the Spielberg era, it was smart of the filmmakers to take the story back to an island and keep it contained to a clutch of characters.

The former trilogy expanded the world too much (remember the human cloning?) and it became unwieldy, although Fallen Kingdom had some cool visuals with its whole haunted house thing.

The question is, what do we want from a Jurassic Park movie?

Do you need emotional beats and developed characters? You won’t find that here, as likeable as Johansson, Bailey and Ali are. Do you want trauma-inducing, proper scares that will give you nightmares for a week? None of that either.

Or do you want to be sufficiently entertained enough by some cool set-pieces like the face-off with the Mosasaurus, so you can remember how fun it was that time you rode the Jurassic ride at Universal Studios?

On that count, Rebirth is perfectly serviceable.

Rating: 3/5

Jurassic World is in cinemas July 3