“Jurassic World Rebirth” should be titled “Jurassic World Regurgitation” instead in my trivial opinion. While it is supposed to try to do some new stuffs, it only serves us the same old kinds of terror and action without bringing anything particularly fresh to its declining franchise, and I only ended up feeling more bored and exhausted when I left the screening room at last night.

At least, the movie indirectly recognizes how much we have been accustomed to watching big CGI dinosaurs on the screen since “Jurassic Park” (1993). After what happened in “Jurassic World Dominion” (2022), those dinosaurs become mundane things for the human civilization, and then, due to several issues including climate and disease, they eventually inhabit the remote tropical areas of the Equator region only.

One of those remote tropical areas is a small island near South American continent, and it turns out that some big pharmaceutical company wants to extract a fresh biological sample from three certain dinosaurs for developing a drug to cure human heart diseases once for all. Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a covert operation expert, is hired for this highly dangerous mission, and we soon meet several other team members including her old colleague Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) and Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), a young paleontologist who will willingly assist and help Bennett and her team.

Of course, things do not go that well for them right from when they arrive at that island in question. The island turns out to be much more dangerous because it actually has an abandoned secret facility involved with developing new kinds of dinosaurs, and there is also a serious matter involved with an American family who happens to be sailing around the island.

Even though their plan is jeopardized to some degree due to rescuing that American family from an imminent danger, Bennett and her team keep trying to get their job done as soon as possible in the island, but the situation keeps becoming more perilous. They get separated from that American family as trying to deal with another dinosaur attack, and that is just the beginning of more troubles to come for them.

As the main characters try to survive their increasingly risky circumstance, the movie naturally throws some dinosaurs into the story as expected, but many of their scenes are less scary or awe-inspiring even compared to the three previous Jurassic World flicks. While there is a lovely moment where we are allowed to appreciate the view of a bunch of gigantic dinosaurs for a while as Alexandre Desplat’s score expectedly quotes the theme from “Jurassic Park” by John Williams, many dinosaur scenes feel utterly plain and mundane while mostly existing for scaring us, and this is particularly evident in case of an action sequence involved with T-Rex.

Above all, the new dinosaurs introduced in the film look merely ugly and hideous. Sure, they are supposed to be the freaks of genetic engineering, but they do not look particularly memorable on the whole. In case of a certain big dinosaur appearing later in the story, it looks so unimaginatively dreadful that you may laugh a bit instead of being amazed or excited at all.

In addition, the screenplay by David Koepp, who wrote the screenplay for “Jurassic Park” and its 1997 sequel, does not provide much human element to engage us. While Bennett and Kincaid have a few private moments to show a bit of their inner life, they remain as thin archetypes just like the other main characters including that American family. The subplot involved with the rather strained relationship between the father of that family and his elder daughter’s goofy boyfriend is quite predictable to say the least, and the same thing can be said about the one involved with a cute little dinosaur, which apparently exists only for merchandising.

The main cast members did try their best with their respective generic roles. Although this is not the first time when she played a covert operation expert (Remember all those Avengers flicks?), Scarlett Johansson dutifully holds the center as required, and Mahershala Ali, who is also too good for the movie just like his co-star, provides a bit of extra gravity to the story as required. In case of several other notable cast members, they do not have much to do from the start, but Rupert Friend is suitably sleezy as an employee of that pharmaceutical company, and Jonathan Bailey, who recently became more notable thanks to his supporting role in “Wicked” (2024) and will soon return in its following sequel in this year, manages to bring some humor and enthusiasm to his nerdy but handsome character (In addition, he also gladly participated in the recording of Desplat’s score as one of the session musicians, by the way).

In conclusion, “Jurassic Park Rebirth” is disappointing in many aspects even though director Gareth Edwards, who surely knows how to present big CGI creatures as shown from “Monsters” (2010) and “Godzilla” (2014), try his best with his crew members including Oscar-nominated cinematographer John Mathieson. If you simply want to see more of the same stuffs, you will be probably more entertained than I was, but, folks, don’t we deserve better than this cynical and pointless commercial product?