If you’re of a certain age, 1993’s Jurassic Park is one of your favorite movies. It makes sense, considering it’s made by Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live. It’s got groundbreaking special effects that fuse CGI, puppetry, and mechanical creatures. Perhaps most importantly, it’s got dinosaurs. Just a metric ass ton of thunder lizards lumbering, sprinting, roaring, and causing mayhem.

On its own, Jurassic Park is a masterpiece. The franchise it spawned…uh…isn’t. The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a mess.* Jurassic Park III is kinda fun and features kinda annoying characters. Jurassic World is disappointing.** Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom isn’t very good (though it has dinosaurs killing people in a spooky old mansion). Jurassic World: Dominion is a bit too fan service-y for the likes of me, and I say that as someone who likes the MCU.

And yet, these movies make money! People love them, and I wonder why. Maybe it’s because, for all their flaws, Jurassic movies hit differently when you’re high — from roaring dinos to massive chase scenes, they’re just fun. If you’re into that vibe, here’s a full list of the best movies to watch high. Yes, I’m a farty old film critic who can’t watch a movie without thinking about mise en scene and all that junk. So what’s the deal? Once you get past the “Man’s hubris causes a dino-rampage” of it all, are there really that many stories that can be told in this particular franchise?*** To paraphrase Peggy Lee, after people run through the jungle pursued by formerly extinct creatures, is this all there is? The newest film in the franchise, Jurassic World: Rebirth, somewhat answers the question in that it manages to be fun while taking no risks whatsoever.

Five years have passed since the events of Jurassic World: Dominion. Remember how dinosaurs walked among us, in our cities, towns, villages, and hamlets? LOL, never mind! Shockingly, the environment of twenty-first century Earth is so different from the planet sixty-five million years ago, that dinosaurs are dying out en masse. The equator is the only place close enough to their original habitat for them to survive.

Then why does Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) want to go to the remote Equatorial island of Ile-Saint Hubert so badly? As it turns out, Krebs works for a pharmaceutical company. Their researchers discovered that the largest species of dinosaur had low instances of heart disease. The plan is to get their hands on samples of dinosaur DNA, synthesize them, and create a drug that cures heart disease in vast numbers of people. You can see how that would be good for humanity and wildly profitable, right?

To do that, Krebs needs a team. His team leader is Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), a covert operator who’s awfully good at getting in and out of places she’s not supposed to be. Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) will provide the transportation to Ile-Saint Hubert in his tricked out ship. Paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) will advise them on the behavior of the formerly extinct critters.

The plan should be simple, right? Not right! The first complication is the Delgado family. Father Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), older daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), younger daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and older daughter’s stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) find themselves shipwrecked after an attack by a Mosasaurus.  The other complication is the fact that dinosaurs are big, dangerous, unpredictable animals, which now that I think about it, is less a complication and more the way things tend to work out in these movies.

We now have seven movies in the franchise, and the quality dropoff between Jurassic Park and its sequels is insane. I imagine part of the reason why is that, in 1993, nobody had seen VFX sorcery of the kind that would bring dinosaurs to life. An equally important part is that Spielberg loves dinosaurs, and you can feel that love in the first movie. He recognizes that, while they’re highly dangerous, they’re not monsters. They’re animals. For these movies to work, there needs to be a balance between the running and screaming with the knowledge that a T-Rex is an apex predator as opposed to a creature out of myth.

Does Jurassic World: Rebirth reach the Brontosaurian heights of the first film? At times, yes.  Director Gareth Edwards specializes in scale. Watch his Godzilla or Rogue One, and you’ll see a filmmaker who understands the concept of bigness and how to present it. We forget how massive dinosaurs were, and every time one of them is in a scene, Edwards carefully accentuates their size. He’s also shot on film, and the movie looks absolutely gorgeous. The deep greens of the jungle, inky blacks during night, and the blue of the ocean positively pop off the screen.

We’ve established that it’s a good-looking movie, but is it a good movie? Veteran screenwriter David Koepp worked on the story and script with executive producer Steven Spielberg for six months. To quote a certain ex-President, God love ‘em, but I wish they’d spent another six months on it. It’s true that the heart disease angle isn’t a bad one, and folding in the shipwrecked family fulfills the requirement of children in peril. The initial twenty or so minutes of setting up the plot is decent in terms of introducing us to our possible victims…sorry, characters. That’s not a bad instinct, it just feels like the script is taking a little too long. Then, like in the first movie, and the one after that, and the one after that, we have numerous scenes of terrified people hauling ass away from dinosaurs. I will say the set pieces are cleverly done and feature a number of fun reversals.**** Everything just feels a little lopsided, and I wished there was a bit more of a balance between character and carnage.

Beyond the aforementioned running and screaming, the cast turns in good work. One callback to the original film is the idea of people who are largely competent coming into contact with dinosaurs. Scarlett Johansson embodies that nicely as shadowy operative Zora. We know Johansson can handle the action stuff, and I liked that she also brings in a calm professionalism. The same goes for Mahershala Ali as Duncan. He and Johansson have a fun work friends chemistry, and I’d enjoy a movie where their characters go on a dinosaur-free adventure. A lesser film would portray the team scientist as a bumbling rube, and I appreciate that Jonathan Bailey’s performance of Loomis has more of an emphasis on his respect for dinosaurs. While nobody steals the show, nobody drags it down. Everyone showed up, delivered decent performances, and hopefully received a nice check.. 

Having said all that, I think Jurassic World: Rebirth might be the second best film in the franchise. I know it’s largely, “The first movie, but kind of again.” Don’t get me wrong, I had a relatively nice time with this one, and walked out of the theater feeling something that passes for satisfaction. Yet I feel like, beyond the spectacle, that it would have been nice had there been more meat on the fossilized bone. Is it possible, at the end of the day, that there are only a finite number of stories that can be told in the Jurassic Park universe?***** Perhaps, but while life finds a way, narrative apparently doesn’t.

*A mess featuring an unbelievably good set piece involving a couple of trailers and a couple of T-Rexes. Even a not good Spielberg film is better than most people’s best film.

**It’s funny to me that the sole Jurassic Park movie that features a fully functional park is titled Jurassic World.

***I’ll never understand why, in the Jurassic World trilogy, the concept of dinosaurs running amok within populated areas was introduced and immediately retreated from.

****One involving a T-Rex chasing a raft down a river comes largely from Michael Crichton’s original “Jurassic Park” novel, and it’s a sequence Spielberg has been trying to get made for decades.

*****Indie filmmaker John Sayles wrote an absolutely bananas-ass Jurassic Park 4 script involving dinosaurs trained to be super-soldiers. 

Tim Brennan Movie Critic

Tim has been alarmingly enthusiastic about movies ever since childhood. He grew up in Boulder and, foolishly, left Colorado to study Communications in Washington State. Making matters worse, he moved to Connecticut after meeting his too-good-for-him wife. Drawn by the Rockies and a mild climate, he triumphantly returned and settled down back in Boulder County. He's written numerous screenplays, loves hiking, and embarrassed himself in front of Samuel L. Jackson. True story.