Chasing the magic of the original Steven Spielberg-directed Jurassic Park was always a fool’s errand. Even Spielberg couldn’t do it when handed the reigns a second time. But there was novelty in returning to the Jurassic series back in 2015. Burdened mostly by the hampered script-writing and directing duties of Colin Trevorrow, Jurassic World still managed to sucker audiences back in, delivering a whopping $1.6 billion dollar gross. Perhaps a 14-year absence made the heart grow fond for this franchise, but the old-fashioned story structure, the movie star cast, and a logical envisioning of the dream John Hammond had left behind only to inevitably let chaos take control yet again made the first Jurassic film a (deeply flawed, but) successful reboot. Then it decided to have two sequels, both exhausting the life out of the brand with disastrous scripts and an overstuffed ensemble of bland characters. In 2022, Jurassic World: Dominion promised to be “the end of the saga”, and yet here we are in 2025 with a brand new film.

Universal seemed to be aware of the poor reception and slightly declining box office returns and smartly scaled back with a smaller budget in mind, a director who can make a lot look good for a little, and a returning key to the original film’s success, writer David Koepp. However good a team they’ve assembled, the results can’t escape a few burdens: being the seventh film in a franchise and playing into the same writing tropes that has plagued every Jurassic sequel. The characters are stock archetypes with little investment, with two noble moral heroes, an obvious villain who has nefarious purposes for the dinosaurs, children in danger just because, and side characters whose job it is to be eaten. One has to assume Koepp was at least briefed on the history of the franchise since his initial departure given he had to continue the “dinosaurs coexist with humans” story left behind by Trevorrow, but he never seems to avoid the formulaic choices that weighed those movies down. Promising a back-to-basics horror-approach, what we get are a few intense moments, but a film too afraid to really go for it. Whether it’s being too shy to not let characters survive deadly encounters, not allowing character growth in favor of more time for dinosaur action, adding a family-lost-on-the-island B-plot that takes away time from our main protagonists, and repeating pivotal beats from the original film, it feels as though Koepp wrote a film only for a quick paycheck and not that he had any passion to return with a great story.

In what feels like an amusing middle-finger to Dominion’s closing moments, Jurassic World: Rebirth takes place five years later, and instead of living harmoniously with the prehistoric creatures, humanity is starting to see their endangerment yet again as the dinosaurs aren’t actually able to handle the Earth’s new climate. Many die out, but enough migrate south to Tropical regions. Covert ops specialist Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) are hired by pharmaceutical representative Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) to extract the DNA of three dinosaurs in an attempt to create the cure for a handful of major life-threatening human illnesses. They are also joined by Bennett’s friend and boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) to bring their crew to Ile Saint-Hubert, an island that was once a former InGen dinosaur research facility. Conveniently during their arrival, a father (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his children are stuck at sea after a mosasaurus damages their sailboat. Both groups cross paths and are inevitably separated on the island, which just so happens to be the “island of misfit dinosaurs”: the rejected, mutated dinos that are an entirely new species of their own.

There is a nugget of a great idea there: an island of mutated creatures. This Corman-style plot would be perfectly snug in the Godzilla universe. As a Jurassic film, it is both logical and demented, initially feeling too out-there for the franchise, and yet by the time the film finishes, doesn’t feel like enough was done. The boss-level creature, a deformed large-scale dino that moreso resembles the Cloverfield Monster, is introduced in the opening scene, but isn’t used again until the film’s finale and not in a way that feels all that fulfilling. Had this truly been a mutated monster palooza instead of a formulaic Jurassic movie, that would have at least substituted for the lack of attachment we have with these characters. That isn’t to say there isn’t fun to be had.

Yes, the writing is a hinderance, though nothing offensive or even anywhere near the level of Trevorrow and Connelly’s horrid efforts. But that’s where Edwards swoops in, capturing warm, tropical, lavish imagery with legendary cinematographer John Mathieson and cleverly constructing sequences that feel like genuine summer escapism. Where this film shines is its purpose in being a film about surviving an island of dinosaurs and the mission of obtaining their blood samples. While the dinosaurs themselves are almost entirely CGI, as opposed to the original’s brilliant blend of digital and practical animatronics, Edwards still films on location with large-scale, beautiful filmic settings. Koepp’s only real passion in writing this sequel seems to be to finally include the original novel’s river raft sequence, which is, no-surprise, executed pretty effectively.

For about two hours, it’s an easy time on the brain. A bowl of cereal on a Saturday morning. But nothing beyond that, leaving this incredibly mild but pleasant excursion to fade from your brain hours after seeing it. There is no purpose to this other than to make Universal more money, no reason in the story to continue beyond this entry with these characters. The film chooses to play it small and safe, fast and loose, and for better and for worse, it’s completely harmless. It never strives for greatness nor does it understand its potential. It’s quite easily the best of the titular Jurassic Worlds, but is that saying much? Would this have felt better and more fresh had that prior trilogy not existed and dragged itself into the mud? Mindless satisfaction is perhaps the best this film can achieve. Utterly forgettable as a whole package, but easy on the eyes.