The first film in this franchise Jurassic Park (1993) grossed over a billion dollars in the box office. All of the films starting with Jurassic World (2015) have also grossed over a billion dollars. There was no question that Universal Pictures was going to keep making more. Steven Spielberg who directed that 1993 blockbuster has been producing these films since the beginning. The writer of the 1993 film was David Koepp, along with Michael Crichton who was the late author of the 1990 book on which the film was based. Koepp also wrote the 1997 sequel. Koepp wrote a bunch of other Spielberg projects, but this is Koepp's return to arguably his and Spielberg's most successful work. As often is the case when a couple or group of old guys get together, they reminisce on the past, reliving their best moments. It's like when an old music band gets back together. Often, what they do is play the hits, or play the songs that were the most popular and that people most remember. That seems to be the case here, Koepp as writer and Spielberg as producer play the hits. They relive the best moments from their 1993 smash. Yes, there are new characters, but so much of it feels like a replay of Jurassic Park.
Scarlett Johansson (The Avengers and Lost in Translation) stars as Zora Bennett, a mercenary or a person with military experience that is hired or paid for work outside their own country. She's basically a soldier of fortune, in this case literally, because she's recruited for a mission to an island full of mutant dinosaurs and she's only doing so because she's promised she'll become rich. A representative for a pharmaceutical company comes to her with the idea that life-saving drugs can be made from the blood of dinosaurs, specifically drugs to treat heart disease. The medical breakthrough isn't as intriguing as the tons of money that the pharmaceutical guy is offering. She's definitely profit motivated, but this score will also allow her to retire at a young age and not have to be put in dangerous situations where she'll lose friends or tightly bonded co-workers. It'll also allow her to be there for important moments in her life that she might miss, like when she missed her own mother's funeral.
Jonathan Bailey (Wicked and Fellow Travelers) co-stars as Henry Loomis, a paleontologist who is recruited to help identify the dinosaurs that are needed for this mission. Specifically, there are three dinosaurs that have to be found and blood from those three in particular must be extracted in order to develop the new drugs. If you've seen Bailey in Fellow Travelers, he's more in line with that character than his character from Bridgerton (2020) or Wicked (2024). In other words, he's a straight up nerd and a member of PETA, if PETA represented dinosaurs. If you're expecting newfound sex symbol, Bailey isn't giving that vibe here. He's certainly not the equivalent to Sam Neill's character from the 1993 film. If anything, he's more like Laura Dern's character, except I feel like his character is more extraneous.
Henry has a functional purpose, but his character could be taken out of this narrative and I feel like nothing would have been lost in terms of how the narrative plays out. Neill's character of Alan Grant not only had a functional purpose but also he had an emotional one to the story being told in that 1993 film. He was a guy that didn't want to become a parent who then is forced to be one to kids who aren't his own and learn to relate to them and take care of them. There's no arc like that for Henry. Even for Dern's character of Ellie Sattler, she's a woman who was so curious and excited by the prospect of introducing dinosaurs to humans, but over the course of the film, she becomes disillusioned of this idea. Henry doesn't have anything like that either. Arguably, the person who has the arc is Zora. She goes from wanting to give the drugs to the pharmaceutical representative and getting the money to not wanting that. Her journey to become more altruistic though feels clunky and not as emotionally resonant as the arcs in the 1993 film.
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer and The Magnificent Seven) also co-stars as Reuben Delgado, a father who is on a sailing trip with his two daughters, one who looks college-age and the other who is probably around 10 years-old. Joining them on their sailboat through the Caribbean Sea or Atlantic Ocean is his eldest daughter's boyfriend who seems to be there mainly for comic relief. Garcia-Rulfo is a tall, dark and handsome man who is also an incredible actor. I appreciated seeing him on the big screen, but his character also felt extraneous. Yes, his character gets an arc, which involves his daughters, but it didn't resonate as much as the arcs in the 1993 film. The arc involves Reuben and his daughter's boyfriend but it doesn't resonate because we get practically nothing about his daughter's relationship. We don't dive any deeper into her relationship that would help Reuben understand it more or even help the audience empathize more.
The only reason Reuben's there is because Koepp decided that the film needed a character with two kids, so that he can re-create iconic moments from the 1993 film, involving children being put in peril. The iconic scene where the children are trapped in the kitchen while a Velociraptor stalks them is re-created here but instead it's in a convenience store and it's a Mutadon, which is a Velociraptor with wings. It's not an exact re-creation, but a lot of the same beats exist between the scene here and the one in 1993. There's a scene that re-creates the iconic scene where Alan and Ellie are staring up at the Brachiosaurus but instead it's Zora and Henry looking up at something that looks very similar. Obviously, in the 1993 film, there weren't dinosaurs that were water-based or shark-like. Here, there are such dinosaurs, but even with those water dinosaurs, this film doesn't rip off Spielberg's 1993 flick as it does Spielberg's Jaws (1975), which just had its 50th anniversary. This would be fine, if the film did so with any kind of fanfare. There are so many dinosaur attacks and kills that occur as if nothing is happening at all, and we move past them, as if we're not supposed to care or mourn any losses. The deaths are rather nonchalant, whereas as the deaths in the 1993 film were more impactful and scarier. The deaths here aren't scary, again most feel nonchalant or matter-of-fact, not dramatic in the slightest.
Mahershala Ali (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1) rounds out the cast as Duncan Kincaid, another mercenary who is friends with Zora. He has a large enough boat that can take her and Henry to the island inhabited by dinosaurs. He also has a crew to support him. He really gets short shrift in this film. He's mostly in the background. He gets one heroic moment, but otherwise his presence here is negligible. Like Henry, you could've taken his character out of the narrative and it wouldn't have mattered all that much. It's hinted that his character lost a son, so both he and Zora are dealing with grief. Yet, the film doesn't explore or dive any deeper into his character. Yes, this film is mostly an action flick and the film obviously doesn't want to slow the momentum for the kind of character development or character empathy someone like two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali would demand. Those scenes might be on the cutting room floor, but his character here remains rather hollow without those moments to get to know him better.
Many people might come just to see the dinosaur action, or at least see the action of people trying to escape dinosaurs attacking and trying to eat humans. In that, I'm not sure Koepp and director Gareth Edwards (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Godzilla) came up with action that was all that compelling or interesting, certainly nothing as unique. Again, the problem is that those sequences aren't scary. Spielberg had some really scary moments in that 1993 film. It really terrified. In that 1993 film, there is a sequence where two characters are hanging on a rope and it truly was nerve-wracking. Here, there's a sequence where a character is hanging off a rope and it fell flat, literally. I never felt the thrills here.
Some people might come for standout or remarkable characters. The 1993 film had those in abundance. Almost every character in the 1993 film stood out and were memorable in some way, especially the so-called villain. If one remembers the 1993 villain, there's a scene where we hear him say, "You didn't say the magic word." It's a memorable line from that villain. The villain here is so forgettable and so easily disposable that again he could've been removed from the narrative and not much would have been affected.
Rated PG-13 for violence, action, bloody images and a drug reference.
Running Time: 2 hrs. and 14 mins.
In theaters.