'Jurassic World Rebirth' review: Wonder, gone extinct

In the 32 years since dinosaurs started roaming the earth again -- that is, since Jurassic Park opened in theaters -- a list of required ingredients for entries in the franchise has evolved. They always center on scientists and adventurers, usually bickering with one another. There's always some shadowy billionaire, or billion-dollar corporation, lurking in the background. Kids are always in peril. And of course, there are always dinos.

Save for the dinosaurs, this could describe pretty much any summer Hollywood blockbuster. But the Jurassic movies -- of which the new film, Jurassic World Rebirth, is the seventh -- have a particularly distinctive quality, something I rarely encounter in big-budget cinema. They're action-packed and filled with peril, yes. But each movie also gives way, however briefly, to a sense of quiet awe.

Cinema is well-suited to provoking wonder. In the art form's early days, just seeing moving images left viewers astonished (and, in some cases, panicked). It has always felt a little like magic, the experience of watching another world emerge, drawn with lights, through a frame hung on a wall. Adding sound to the experience made it even more amazing, and most cinematic innovations over the past century -- everything from Smell-o-Vision to 3D to 4DX -- try to wow the audience even more.

But mainstream movies have often leaned more on spectacle (a shark chomping in the water, superheroes zooming through the air, Tom Cruise hanging off the side of a plane) than awe, which is a quieter thing. Awe makes us feel small, and it feels good. The first Jurassic Park movie introduces the dinosaurs in a way that makes the characters, and the audience, stop talking and thinking about anything else and just stare. These giant, stately creatures -- the franchise is especially fond of the sort with long, curving necks -- are tremendous to behold, and John Williams' score swells to symphonic heights. Yeah, you know that's not a real dinosaur. But who cares? You feel small and hushed in the presence of something great, and ancient, and achingly beautiful.

Every Jurassic movie has repeated this moment, trying to reevoke in the audience that feeling of awe, with somewhat diminishing returns. But sometimes they still manage it. For instance, the 2022 installment, "Jurassic World: Dominion," is not a very good movie. But it succeeds on this one specific front by moving the big dinosaur moment to a wintry landscape. Two Brachiosauruses have wandered into a place where loggers are working. They're being slowly led away from the spot, and the burly men are silently watching. These animals can't move quickly, but they're not in a hurry either. Their ancestors were here long before ours, and their bodies carry the memory of a land before time.

This is all a windup to this: Jurassic World Rebirth tries very hard to evoke that same moment of awe. But in the story, the ubiquity of the dinosaurs has left humanity feeling bored and annoyed, cutting the feet out from under those moments. And it's starting to feel like the movies are getting bored, too.

The name Jurassic World Rebirth signals the studio's intention to reboot the series, more or less, with this film. It's set a while after Dominion, with none of those human characters returning. (Yet, anyhow.) At this point in the saga, humanity is getting annoyed with dinosaurs, who keep getting in the way. Early in the film, one long-necked type is blocking traffic near the Brooklyn Bridge which, true to New York traffic, is provoking more irritation than magic.

The humans in this installment include Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a covert ops genius; Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a paleontologist and resident nerd; Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a morally flexible pharmaceuticals guy; and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), Zora's longtime collaborator, team leader and friend. There's also a side plot that crashes into the main plot, featuring a family of civilians stranded at sea: Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), her stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) and the youngest daughter, Isabella (Audrina Miranda).

The plot is fairly standard fill-in-the-blanks Jurassic stuff: With the "neo-Jurassic period" climate change, the world is getting difficult for dinosaurs to live in. They've mostly been herded toward the equator in an area to which humans are strictly forbidden to travel; furthermore, as we know from the first movie, there are very, very scary mutants among them.

But, of course, someone wants to travel there -- Martin, specifically, whose company offers Zora an eye-watering sum to go with a team and extract some DNA from the dinosaurs that will be used to make a very, very expensive drug that cures heart disease. They need a dinosaur expert, so they call on Dr. Loomis, who is growing disillusioned with his museum job. Few people seem interested in the dinosaur exhibitions anymore, and when Zora dangles the possibility of seeing the great creatures in the wild, Dr. Loomis can't resist.

I had high hopes for Jurassic World Rebirth, primarily because director Gareth Edwards is one of the best big-budget filmmakers in the game. His 2014 take on "Godzilla" was brilliant, and "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" is one of the more thoughtful takes on that franchise.

Everything in Rebirth is perfectly competent, so the fault likely lies in the screenplay, written by the prolific David Koepp, whose credits in the past few years include the limp Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny; and the far more limpid KIMI, Presence and Black Bag, those three all streamlined collaborations with Steven Soderbergh. Maybe the budget and attendant studio oversight is the problem, because this one feels hacked to pieces, with thematic and plotlines raised and then ghosted.

But it's really the struggle to provoke awe that instead provoked sighs. In one particular moment, the humans encounter the dinosaurs in the wild, and it is, admittedly, beautifully conceived. Yet the characters' amazement feels a bit hollow, given they've been apparently dwelling in a world in which dinosaurs are not a shocking sight on the street. I might be hushed into awe if I encountered a pack of lions in the wild, but lions don't hang out under the Brooklyn Bridge.

Mostly I spent Rebirth wondering why I was bored -- not annoyed, not disgruntled, just disengaged from it all. Even the characters' discussions about whether a heart-disease-curing medication should be patented by a company or given freely to mankind felt jammed in sideways, rather than organic to the story. Were there too many characters? Maybe. Too much dinosaur exposure? Perhaps. It just doesn't feel like a movie that knows why it exists, other than the story told by potential box office returns.

I have no doubt the Jurassic movies will keep making money as long as they keep getting made, because some part of our brains can't resist the prospect of eating popcorn and seeing Pteranodons on a hot summer day. But if the franchise wants to be more than a shell of its former self, it's going to need to recapture the wonder so many felt as kids, or adults, when faced with something so beautifully grand as a dinosaur.