With Steven Spielberg’s masterful Jurassic Park in existence, any sequel will suffer from comparison. Save for a few moments, even Spielberg couldn’t recapture the magic with his 1997 follow-up, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Director Joe Johnston helmed a decent third film in 2001, but it couldn’t touch the original. In 2015, Colin Trevorrow directed the first of three Jurassic World pictures. Each of the new generation films were badly written, horribly miscast, and just plain dumb; void of anything that made the 1993 original so special. With the trilogy’s worldwide gross of over 4 billion, now comes the inevitable continuation, Jurassic World: Rebirth. While this is a film sprinkled with the occasional silly moment and filled with average stock characters, this supposed beginning of a new JW era remembers why Steven Spielberg’s original classic worked so well. Driven by a desire to recapture such a vibe, fun, excitement, and a sense of awe make a welcome return.

After adapting Michael Crichton’s original novel for the big screen in 1993, David Koepp returns to the world of the dinosaurs to write the screenplay and Gareth Edwards takes the helm as director. As he did with 2014’s Godzilla, Edwards proves his skills at crafting an old fashioned monster movie, while keeping audiences interested in the characters. Viewers won’t find anything new regarding this current cast of adventurers, scientists, and victims, but the film is well-cast and the director knows how to blend the human drama with expertly designed thrill scenes.

As Jurassic World: Rebirth begins, everyone has grown tired of the dinosaurs. Earth’s climate has killed off a great number of them and the few species that remain have migrated to areas of the world where travel is forbidden. No one cares about New York City’s Natural History Museum’s dinosaur exhibit and the last surviving Brachiosaur is now nothing more than an annoying cause of a traffic jam in midtown Manhattan. For the people of the world who once marveled at such an historic achievement, the shine has worn off and the magic of seeing dinosaurs walking among us is gone; an unavoidable irony regarding the state of the Jurassic World series. 

Guess what? There is yet another island where dino experiments took place. Shocking! Big pharma exec Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) enlists “extraction expert” Zora (Scarlett Johansson, doing her best Lara Croft) to join him on his quest to Ile Saint-Hubert, an island in the Atlantic Ocean where scientists cloned the dinosaurs for maximum profit. It is against international law to trespass on the island, but Krebs needs to extract dino DNA from three of the beasts in the hope of creating medicines that will cure heart disease. Does Krebs care about saving people or is he focused on the billions of dollars in profit that will make him a rich man? If you don’t know the answer, perhaps you haven’t seen enough movies. 

After securing the help of Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey),who studied under Sam Neil’s Dr. Alan Grant, Zora contacts old friend and military colleague Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali, making something interesting out of playing this film’s “Quint”). Duncan’s mate LeClerc (an underused Bechir Sylvain) rounds out the crew and off we go to an easy in-out mission, right? Of course not. The island is far from safe and things go wrong in deadly ways. 32 years past the events of Jurassic Park and hundreds of deaths later, one would think people would stop assuming they can control environments where dinosauria roam.

Believable situations and actions have never really been the order of the day in the Jurassic movies and that is just fine. Ticket-buyers are there for the thrill of big, realistic, dinosaurs laying waste to as many characters a PG-13 rating will allow. Jurassic World: Rebirth gives audiences what they want, but doesn’t insult them. No one is going through the motions this time; the fatal flaw of the previous JW trilogy. Edwards and his team design many exciting sequences that will certainly see theaters’ popcorn sales rise. 

One of the film’s best is an early sequence that introduces Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a father who is sailing with his two daughters, 11-year-old Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and 18-year-old Teresa (Luna Blaise), and Teresa’s annoying boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono). On the high seas all alone, the family is attacked by a giant Mosasaurus. The foursome fights against all odds to survive as their boat overturns and the creature comes for them all. 

Director Edwards and his cinematographer John Mathieson shoot the sequence to allow for a sense of scale, showing the size of the attacking beast and enhancing the reality of the family’s powerlessness against such a monstrous attacker. The effectiveness of the scene finds comparison with (and is certainly an homage to) the moment in Spielberg’s Jaws where the crew of the Orca first see the full size of the shark as it swims past their boat. Dr. Loomis has designed vials to collect the dinos’ blood that you shoot into the beast. As it automatically extracts the DNA, once full, the container releases itself into the air and opens a small parachute with a tracking light for easy retrieval, à la the barrels Quint puts into the shark. In truth, a good portion of the film’s first hour is full of homages to that 1975 summer classic to the point where it could have been titled, Jaws 5. 

Throughout the movie, there are nods to many Steven Spielberg pictures, including the aforementioned killer shark classic, a little Indiana Jones, a dash of E.T., and (of course) Jurassic Park. Gareth Edwards doesn’t waste his Spielberg hat-tips and refuses to coast on nostalgia. One of the biggest problems of every sequel that followed the 1993 original was how the sense of wonder was gone. Everyone remembers how they felt when the dinosaurs first made their full-on appearance in 1993. It was nothing short of jaw-dropping and the audience shared with the gasps and wide-eyed amazement of the original film’s characters. Not one of the subsequent films were able to find that feeling and the dinosaur moments suffered from a “Yep, there they are.” disconnect. 

Edwards gives fans a scene that will certainly return them to a closer connection with Spielberg’s classic. Dr. Loomis is able to walk up to a pair of Sauropods who seem to be snuggling with one another. As Zora shoots the vial into one of the dinosaur’s legs (probably a mere pinch to such a mammoth creature) Loomis touches the lower part of the leg and is so overwhelmed with emotion, he is moved to tears. As Zora sees the creatures in their full glory, she is also overcome with their majesty and catches her breath as the Sauropods slowly walk away. Moments such as these are rare in any Hollywood blockbuster and have been nonexistent in the Jurassic World films. It is a pleasure to see a modern filmmaker not afraid of slowing things down for a moment and letting the audience reconnect to feelings of child-like wonderment.

Koepp’s screenplay is full of clichés but nothing hampers the film’s excitement, as just about everything works. Each dino attack is designed and executed for maximum thrills and chills, while the filmmakers never insult fans of the series by straying from the established lore. There are no absurd “clickers” that can help train dinosaurs this time. 

A particular T-rex sequence is nail-biting fun and filmed with a quiet patience and respect for pacing. A tense nod to the Velociraptor kitchen-attack sequence in the 1993 original works very well while the slam-bang ending is full-on dinosaur carnage fun. At times, this is one deliciously menacing monster movie. 

Edwards sets out to deliver the best Jurassic World film and succeeds by leaps and bounds. The filmmaker creates a grand entertainment by returning the series to a world of inventive set-pieces where the dinosaurs are used to their full potential. Edwards takes care in structuring the film’s pace and gives the story time to breathe. The lessons he learned from a childhood of Spielberg movies are evident in every minute. 

Forgiving the offensively blatant product placement and been-there/done-that characters, Gareth Edwards and David Koepp have given this worn out series a shot of creative adrenaline.

Who knows if any further sequels will be worthy. For now, let us hold onto the fact that Jurassic World: Rebirth is an exciting summer entertainment that restores the essence of Spileberg’s 1993 original and brings back the magic that captured the imagination of audiences around the world 32 years ago. 

Jurassic World: Rebirth

Written by David Koepp (Based on characters created by Michael Crichton)

Directed by Gareth Edwards

Starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda

PG-13, 134 Minutes, Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, SKY Studios