Hold on to your water glasses because you can hear the plot of “Jurassic World Rebirth” coming from a mile away. A ragtag group of adventurers land on a remote island planning to exploit dinosaur DNA — and some of them get chomped. The only new thing about this seventh installment is the cast: Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali as freelance covert operatives Zora and Duncan, Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Henry Loomis and Rupert Friend as a pharmaceutical titan named Martin who wants to treat coronary disease by harvesting samples from three massive reptile hearts. Gauging by the response every time this sequel has come up in conversation, it should have been subtitled: “This Time There’s No Chris Pratt.”
I went to the theater with my own heart as big as a Titanosaur’s. (Goofy name aside, it’s a real herbivore and you’ll see a herd of them.) After all, screenwriter David Koepp wrote the screenplay for the 1993 original and the franchise’s latest director, Gareth Edwards, made a serviceable “Godzilla.”
Alas, Edwards has made “Godzilla” again. “Jurassic World Rebirth” is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined. You’ll see a nod to the 1962 adventure “One Million Years B.C.” (you know: Raquel Welch, fur bikini), which is more of a template than a kitschy joke. There isn’t a shiver of surprise about who gets the chomp, only disappointment that the fatalities are so bloodless — they’re mild even for PG-13.
Some of this ennui is by design. The narrative backdrop is that after 32 years of who-coulda-thunk-it rampages, humankind is tired of dealing with the darned things. Audiences can relate.
To establish this miserliness of spirit, the present day scenes start with a Brooklyn traffic jam caused by an escaped sauropod laying collapsed and dying on the side of the road. It’s the same species that transformed Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum into giddy, glassy-eyed children, only now drained of all majesty. Some creep has even spray-painted its hindquarters with graffiti.
Plenty more dinosaurs will arrive in the film’s two-hour-plus running time: swooping Quetzalcoatlus, splashing Mosasaurus, frilled Dilophosaurus and a bitty Whoknowswhatasaurus that Ali’s Duncan keeps in a bamboo birdcage by his boat dock in Suriname. But the only one that made me feel anything was that pathetic sauropod abandoned like a sidewalk sofa.
A beat later, “Rebirth” cuts to a shuttering museum exhibit where workmen are trashing their copy of that iconic banner that reads “When dinosaurs ruled the earth.” The original “Jurassic Park” inspired a generation of kids to dream of scientific discoveries. This era is throwing in the towel.
The action sets sail with a hefty oceanic sequence where Edwards leans on his expertise in sluicing fins and underwater ka-thumps. Our heroes also scoop up a rather ungrateful shipwrecked family: yachtsman Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Teresa’s good-for-nothing boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono). Initially, we can’t wait for Iacono’s louse to get eaten but we come to treasure his comic relief, particularly when Xavier wanders off to relieve himself next to a nest of velociraptors. Danger lurks and the doofus just stands around with his johnson in his hand.
Eventually, the crew makes land on Ile Saint-Hubert near French Guinea, where a genetic dinosaur laboratory was evacuated 17 years earlier. In an opening flashback, we learn that a technician concocting a freakish T. rex littered a Snickers wrapper, causing a chain reaction that within two minutes resulted in the snacker becoming a snack.
You may consider yourself inured to product placement. Even so, its use here is brazen and strange, from this case of death by chocolate to an “E.T.” embezzlement in which Isabella befriends a baby Aquilops with red rope licorice. There’s even a scene in an abandoned convenience store which, despite a decade and a half left in the custody of pesky dinosaurs, the snack labels remain tidily pointed toward the camera. At least that setting has a modified raptor pausing at a soda cooler to admire its reflection.
I don’t think Johansson and Ali will take as much pride in “Rebirth,” assuming they bother to watch it. Both get through the film without embarrassing themselves, in part because neither is very committed. Johansson’s tough security expert swaggers, Ali smiles and our sturdy goodwill for both actors keeps us from holding the movie against them. Early on, the two get one scene together where they put on a pretense of speaking in shorthand about the emotional costs of a career in Blackwater-style skulduggery. It has the air of a stretch before buckling in for a long haul flight.
This is composer Alexandre Desplat’s “Jurassic” debut and he dutifully reworks John Williams’ famous notes of wonder and yearning a few ways, like a subtle tinkling when Bailey’s strapping science geek imagines the joy of witnessing a dinosaur not in a zoo or a theme park, but in the wild. Bailey is a fine actor and his Loomis would be the soul of the movie if he wasn’t battling for screen time. He’s the only character who seems to like dinosaurs — everyone else sees them as dollar signs or boogeymen.
The series itself has gotten so bored with the beasties that it continues to invent new ugly mutants. “Rebirth” unleashes the Distortus rex — imagine a parakeet’s head on a bodybuilding cockroach. All the dinos struggle to feel convincing as they seem to change size every time you look at them (and the CG backdrops are chintzy). Yet, I still prefer the trusty regulars like the amphibious Spinosaurs, who resemble dog-paddling hellhounds, the pecking Quetzalcoatlus that gulps people like sardines and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus rex, now striped and able to hide in ways that defy physics but at least get an audible chortle.
“Rebirth” is a confounding title for a downbeat entry that’s mostly preoccupied by death and neglect. Who knows whether we’re at the head or tail of the Anthropocene, but the movie seems weary of our dominion. “I doubt if we make it to even 1 million,” Loomis admits, adding that he hopes to die in shallow silt so he can become a fossil too. With the franchise officially out of ideas, how about skipping to “Jurassic Park: One Million Years A.D.” so a futuristic species can resurrect us for some malevolent fun and games?
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