Jurassic World: Reboot?

This new one was flawed but fine.

My kids have been bugging me for months to go see the new Jurassic World movie, so we did that yesterday. As we were heading out to the car I had one of those slow-motion flashbacks to 1997 when I was the same age as my oldest son, and my dad took my brothers and I to see The Lost World.

The Jurassic franchise wasn’t as stretched-out back then—after all it was only the second movie and it followed up an insanely popular first entry. Now here I am, almost thirty years later, and I wonder if my boys were as stoked to see this one as I was to see the sequel.

That’s a hard feeling to fake and I don’t feel it often these days, if ever. I got it for each Hunger Games novel, and I’ve wanted to feel it for other stuff, but it’s rare. When my kids catch that itch I try not to water it down for them. They should know how good it feels to enjoy something (which is why I don’t let them on the Internet right now.)

Is Jurassic a tired and overmilked franchise? 100%. How was this movie? It was fine, it was cool, it had its flaws, I had fun. How does it stack up to the others?

Well, the best movie is the first one, obviously. I’m going to be controversial here and say the second-best one is Jurassic Park 3. It’s a throwback adventure story about a bunch of people stuck on an island with dinosaurs, trying to escape. They’re not pontificating about the ramifications of the science, they’re mostly just normies who don’t want to get eaten. The pitch is a little wobbly but the drive is fun and the landing is great.

Lost World is all sizzle, no steak. The spectacle is great but the premise falls apart once you think about it a little, especially the Godzilla sequence at the end with the T-Rex terrorizing Burbank.

But Graham! They said in the movie it was San Diego!

Shut up, Fake Detractor. My Nana lived on Cedar Avenue for forty years, that’s where they filmed it, that’s the street sign that the Rex chomps at in the movie. It happened in Burbank.

From there the Jurassic World sequels are an exercise in diminishing returns, with Chris Pratt’s charm doing most of the heavy lifting. (Bryce Dallas Howard isn’t hard on the eyes either.) The first one was a great time, the second one didn’t make any sense, and I couldn’t make myself finish the third one.

Jurassic World: Rebirth was better than the last two and somewhere between The Lost World and JP3. Which is an endorsement, I think it was just good enough.

But to be honest, I think the late Crichton’s IP farm is exploited at this point. Much like 2024’s Twisters, this new movie was a studio doing what it could to squeeze a few drops out of something “based on characters created by Michael Crichton.” Unlike Twisters, it never gives you Glen Powell in a cowboy hat and a white T-shirt, or a catchy Luke Combs single. In fact there’s pretty much no romance in here at all.

The Story

A big evil corporation wants to harvest dinosaur DNA so it can make cardio pharmaceuticals to combat heart disease. They want to hire a team of mercenaries and a paleontologist to get it all. After dinosaurs hit the mainland in the last two movies, they’re starting to die out because the environment isn’t suited to them, and now they only live on islands at the equator. One such island—which wasn’t in any of the previous movies—has an old InGen facility and all the species they need.

Big Evil PharmaCorp hires the mercs and heads for the island on a boat. En route they catch a distress call from a family of summertime sailors who got capsized by a mosasaurus. (This allows the movie to introduce a key ingredient for a key demographic: children.) Once they save them, they head for the island, only to also lose their boat to the same mosasaurus. Now they have to finish the DNA mission and get to the abandoned facility where they can get another boat and escape the island.

But oh no! This island was where they stored the defective dinosaurs that didn’t come out right, and no dinosaur is more dangerous or defective than the “D-Rex,” which stands for something but I can’t remember what, or else the movie didn’t say, I just thought it looked a heck of a lot like the monster from Cloverfield.

Along the way they get double-crossed by the Big Evil PharmaBro, who gets eaten by Doofasaurus, and then they escape the island on a boat. You get a few moments of cool heroism from ScarJo and Mahershala Ali, and the little girl from the family saves a baby protoceratops for merchandising purposes. ScarJo decides to “open source” the DNA that they harvested so that the PharmaCorp doesn’t patent it and only use it to save Da One Purcent.

The Characters

ScarJo plays Zora, a hot mercenary who has been Too Focused On Her Career and missed her mother’s funeral, so she’s upset at life and wants to retire. This job is supposed to have a huge payout to let her do that.

Mahershala Ali plays Duncan, a jacked mercenary who lost his young son to an unexplained incident and parted ways with his wife/girlfriend/whatever in the wake of it. He also wants a huge payout to make life easier.

Jonathan Bailey plays Loomis, a hot paleontologist who studied under Alan Grant, giving the movie a connection to the rest of the franchise. He talks ScarJo into open-sourcing the DNA to Save Da World.

Rupert Friend plays Krebs, a hot PharmaBro who has the most obviously telegraphed heel-turn in the history of this franchise, and that’s saying something.

Ed Skrein is briefly in the movie as Atwater, a hot mercenary who gets killed early on.

Right here is where the movie disposes with hot characters and focuses instead on diversity, bringing in Ruben, Teresa, Xavier, and Bella, who are sailing across the ocean for the summer. Teresa and Bella are Ruben’s daughters, and Xavier is Teresa’s annoying and worthless boyfriend, but he turns out ok. They were setting something up that didn’t completely pay off with this character, he’s just kind of there for the movie. Bella is there to be The Little Kid character, and she befriends the baby protoceratops. It might have been a trike actually, but I don’t care.

The final two characters are crewmen on Kincaid’s boat, Female Sailor and Black Guy Who Speaks French When He’s Panicking. I never heard their character names and I don’t know who the actors are. This is a Jurassic movie, I think you know what happens to them.

The Spectacle

The movie delivers here rather well. I don’t know where they filmed it but the island locations were really beautiful and a lot of it was practical. I’m a sucker for actual boat photography, I respect the effort. They also set themselves up well with the contrivance for a land, sea, and air dinosaur.

The mosasaur sequences were good and they worked at speed, while the titanosaur sequence was pretty chill. They needed to remind viewers that some of this dinosaur stuff was awe-inspiring, and not all terrifying. When they went after a pteranodon egg up on a cliff, they found some ancient temple-looking place that was never explained and could be a lot of fun to explore in spinoffs (which, let’s be real, they’re going to keep doing.)

And they came up with some cool sequences for dinosaur stunts too, including a tunnel network under the complex, a dock, a helipad, and some kind of poorly-explained enclosure that kept the Doofasaurus separate from the other dinosaurs…at least for a while.

Naturally you’ve got to have a scene with a Rex, which they put in the trailer, and it was properly tense. My son kept covering his eyes like I did during the original Rex escape in 1993, so they did that right. Overall they did a good job and made a fun movie with a few flaws, and it didn’t indulge in the stuff that has made Hollywood unwatchable for the last five years.

I think my biggest complaint here was the pacing. This movie is 2 hours and 15 minutes. Trim those 15. Hell, trim 25. There were parts where it lagged and overstayed its welcome. I understand movies are expensive but runtime isn’t how you give people their money’s worth. Accelerate the experience just a little and it’ll sit better in their memories.

You have to leave them wanting just a little bit more, not leave them thinking you made a little too much.

Anyway, 3/5 stars, a good Jurassic installment, better than half the films in this franchise, good for a fun night out with the kids.