For anyone who wondered what Scarlett Johansson was doing in a Jurassic World movie – the fourth of these now, meaning they now exceed Jurassic Park movies in number – you weren’t alone. But for anyone who hoped Johansson, now that she had deigned to be in Jurassic World: Rebirth, would loan it a touch of class, congratulations! You hoped correctly, and it doesn’t hurt that two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali is along for the ride to further class up the joint.

Dreamworks may not have cast these two actors to signify a shift in the franchise that is now in its seventh instalment overall, but they are in fact symbolic of a slightly different approach. This is a Jurassic World movie that, finally, never sets foot on the grounds of a theme park, and instead has some action on the high seas in which an intrepid Johansson wraps her leg around a guardrail while trying to harpoon a mosasaurus with a blow dart. That dart will sample the creature’s blood before rocketing in the sky and parachuting to safety, all part of a hoped for cure to heart disease. When you’re in the seventh instalment of any franchise, any tweak to the formula is a good tweak.

Johansson’s Zora Bennett, a security specialist (she swears she’s not a mercenary), has been contracted for this expedition by Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a representative of a pharmaceutical company. The company requires the blood from three dinosaurs still living near the equator, after the rest of the planet has become inhospitable to them. Given the rampant dinosaur activity in these zones, no travel is permitted there, but the company needs the blood from a living specimen for their heart disease cure to work, and to make them trillions of dollars. (The less the logic is pondered, the better, unless it is the plain-as-day logic of the holy dollar.)

Also accompanying them will be palaeontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), whose speciality is in waning need as human beings grow bored of dinosaurs, and ship captain Duncan Kincaid (Ali), who will take them into this forbidden region for a fee similar in heft to the one Zora’s getting. However, because it wouldn’t be a Jurassic Park/World movie without a child in peril, they’ll acquire some stowaways when they rescue a family whose sailboat was capsized by one of these pesky mosasauruses. (Mosasauri?) That’s father Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), daughter Teresa (Luna Blaise), daughter’s boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) and youngest daughter Isabella (Audrina Miranda), who adopts a cute baby dinosaur along the way.

You’d be smartest to start any Jurassic World review with a nod to the dinosaur effects, but it’s a tribute to Jurassic World: Rebirth that we’re starting with the actors – and therefore also with David Koepp’s script. Koepp, back in this franchise after writing the first two Jurassic Park films, has spent some quality time on character work here. It doesn’t all pay off, but the effort counts for something in a film where dino mayhem might be enough. One imagines that only because they have an actor as good as Johansson – staring off the bow of a boat, teary eyed about something that happened in the past – is it even worth bothering to write something of a back story for her. The actors and the script have kind of a symbiotic relationship here, each making the other better.

The good news continues in the way director Gareth Edwards et al have envisioned some of the set pieces, especially those that have no clear antecedent within franchise history. Most notable in that regard are the water sequences, which involve somersaulting sailboats, passengers hanging off rails for dear life and barely removing their legs from the lunges of large aquatic reptiles, and gallons of salty liquid sprayed all over the screen. Another sequence with a T-Rex toying with an inflatable raft, and the passengers clinging to it, is also creative. In short, these feel new within a franchise for which stale was already three movies ago.

It is, however, probably too optimistic to imagine this as a genuine rebirth for the series, though early box office indicators are that it would be sensible to make more. The innovations, at this point, have to be in character and narrative conception, because there are no new mountains to climb in terms of the digital presentation of dinosaurs. We do get some gestures in that regard, as our characters have landed in a sort of mad scientist laboratory where they were once trying to create new dinosaurs that blended the best parts of several species. (Anything to keep the tourists coming, right?) The “big bad” in that regard is a behemoth called “Distortus Rex,” or D-Rex for short, and its swollen head kind of makes it look like the unholy offspring of a dinosaur and a xenomorph.

The fundamental limitation of this series still exists, though: We just don’t care that much about seeing dinosaurs on screen anymore. Or maybe it’s better to say that we care about seeing them – this is a more true analysis of the box office – but that maybe we care about it more for nostalgia and familiarity. The wow factor is pretty much gone by this point, as these dinosaurs never really got all that much better than the ones Steven Spielberg first presided over 32 years ago.

That, fortunately, does not prevent Jurassic World: Rebirth from being entertaining. A Jurassic World movie where we sort of shrug at the dinosaurs and still have a good time? That’s a new approach indeed.

 

Jurassic World: Rebirth is currently playing in cinemas.