The missus loves the Dino Park (as I call the Jurassic Park/World series) movies. We've seen the first six in theaters and seeing that midnight showing of the first one on my birthday in 1993 made such an impression that I called into my work on my day off to rave about it. The series has been uneven - Dino Park 1 is a GOAT, DP 2 & 4 are pretty good, DP 3 & 6 are OK, DP 5 aka Jurassic Mansion: Pointless Sequel was pants - but she was gung ho to see the latest installment, but due to various reasons of business and pretty bad reviews, for the first time we did not trek to the theater to see the dinosaurs. We just waited five weeks for Dino Park 7: Oh Look, There's Another Previously Unknown Island with Dinosaurs or as you probably know it as, Jurassic World Rebirth, to hit streaming and here it is and good thing I didn't drive to a theater to see this lackluster entry into the getting-overly-milked franchise.
This time around the world has grown bored of dinosaurs because shut up this is the plot. They've also been dying out because it's not warm enough in the areas where people live (so much for the ManBearPig hoax) and they're most living near the equator because warm and more oxygen? (Not going to bother Googling that.)
Sleazy Pharma Bro (Rupert Friend, A Simple Favor) believes his company could make trillions of dollars selling medicines developed from DNA harvested from live dinosaurs. Since they're living in an area off-limits to humans, he hires Merc Babe (ScarJo, Lucy) to get him and Dino Scientist (Jonathan Bailey, Wicked) to another InGen facility island which had been abandoned after an accident 17 years previously because a Snickers wrapper can apparently fry the security systems of a secret dino breeding lab.
After picking up Merc Bro (Mahershala Ali, Blade, LOL) and some obvious Red Shirts (including one recognizable B-list star who the trailer spoils his fate), they head off to the Forbidden Zone to harvest blood from a fishosaur, landosaur, and aerosaur. Elsewhere on the ocean, a father and his two daughters - one young and likely to find a cute dino pal, the other teenaged and bringing her stoner dumbass boyfriend along - are sailing when their sailboat is capsized by a big fishosaur. (I'm not bothering listing the actors for their privacy.)
Their mayday call is received by merc boat and they are rescued, but as they approach the island, more fishosaurs attack the boat, causing some to die, some to fall overboard, and the rest to crash onto the shore where some are eaten. The family regroups and heads for where the village is supposed to be and the mercs, Pharma Bro and Dino Scientist collect samples and try not to get eaten, which is easy for anyone who has an Oscar or nomination or needs to stay alive until they can be eaten by the Final Boss Uggosaur in a completely unexpected and OK, I totally called how they were going to get offed.
If you think I'm leaving out a lot of details, I'm not. There's nothing of interest here, nothing that surprises or delights. Sure, the action is well directed by Gareth Edwards (The Creator, Rogue One) and the visual effects are seamless & spectacular, but we were able to predict the fates of pretty much every character, the plot armor was so obvious as were the red herring intended to make you think anyone could get killed. I was even calling out lines seconds ahead of the movie. It's that predictable.
Much was made of the detail that David Koepp, who'd adapted Michael Crichton's novel for the first movie, wrote Dino Park 7, but if you've followed his work, it's been roughly two decades since he's written A-tier material and what he's done since pales what the first half of his IMDB lists. Here he's just typing, not writing. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if he just prompted ChatGPT to "write a Jurassic Park movie in the style of David Koepp." The talking and stuff between set pieces only serves to prevent the movie from being 30 minutes long.
While not the worst Dino Park movie, it's down there in the way F9: The Fast Saga is blocked from the bottom slot by 2 Fast 2 Furious. None of the performances are demanding of our getting-paid stars and they don't even try to explain how a 5'3" woman becomes a first-call mercenary. (At least Charlize Theron is 5'10" and Uma Thurman is 5'11", not that it made The Old Guard 2 any less bad.)
Jurassic World Rebirth made enough money that Dino Park 8 is a sure thing, but it's not as if its likely to tell a compelling story from the looks of things.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.
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