The magic of Jurassic Park has never been just about its sense of wonder — it's about fear. Tension. That primal thrill of watching humans outmatched, outpaced, and outsmarted by creatures that should never have been brought back to life. At its best, this franchise is a monster movie with an irresistible sci-fi hook. That hook, of course, has dulled over seven entries and perhaps grown a little too convoluted for its own good. But Jurassic World Rebirth delivers what I've been starving for: a no-nonsense monster movie. (Okay, maybe there's some nonsense.)

Gareth Edwards, whose sense of scale and grounded spectacle (as seen in Godzilla, Rogue One, and The Creator) feels well-suited for this kind of material, directs with a steady hand. Action setpieces are thrilling. The Mosasaurus water chase is part spectacle, part homage to Jaws. And the T-Rex river chase is tense, clever, and feels completely fresh. It's one of the most memorable sequences in the entire franchise, and crucially, it doesn't treat the dinosaur as a third-act superhero swooping in for a tired Deus Rex Machina.

Edwards wisely hits rewind on the overcooked lore of the last two Jurassic World installments. Gone are the global conspiracies, the black-market auctions, and the weaponized raptors. In their place: something almost elemental. Climate change has rendered much of the world uninhabitable for dinosaurs, confining them to a handful of equatorial safe zones. Into this scenario steps Scarlett Johansson's Zora, a field specialist dispatched to retrieve DNA from three apex survivors — one land-based, one sea-based, and one air-based — for a biotech company chasing a cure for heart disease. Rupert Friend is the corporate puppet master pulling her strings, sending her to a remote island lab to gather samples. It's structured like a video game — a Shadow of the Colossus adventure, with each dinosaur encounter framed as its own survival puzzle, featuring a distinct environmental habitat. It's a welcome return to creature-feature simplicity, even if it doesn't rack up quite the body count I might have hoped for — a few more red shirts on the team would have gone a long way toward restoring a sense of truly lethal danger.

The script does gesture at bigger ideas: the ethics of medical breakthroughs, the commodification of cures, and a throwaway mention of climate collapse. Jonathan Bailey plays an idealistic educator who argues these discoveries should belong to everyone, while Zora shrugs her way to a massive payday. But these themes are sketched in so lightly that they barely register. I don't see that as a failure — Rebirth knows precisely where its priorities lie.

The film stumbles in its opening act, weighed down by a half-hearted backstory. A long boat ride finds Zora and Duncan (Mahershala Ali) sharing their familial traumas in an attempt to provide character depth to otherwise bland characters. Ali and Johannson are fine, but this faux characterization never pays off in any meaningful way. Perhaps it's meant to set up story threads for the next film. Even though nothing materializes in these convos, you do believe in their chemistry and friendship, which does deliver at least some emotional stakes in the final act. Friend is a boilerplate corporate ghoul, more archetype than a person. If you've seen a Jurassic film before, you've met his character before, and you know exactly his ultimate fate.

Thankfully, Edwards resists leaning too far into the legacy-sequel swamp. There's no Dr. Grant cameo, no Sattler reunion. Nostalgia is rationed through visual echoes, the kind of blink-and-you'll-miss-it references to moments from the original trilogy.

If you were a fan of the franchise's pivot to high-concept world-building of Fallen Kingdom and Dominion (dino auctions, black markets, weaponized dinos, etc) — Rebirth might feel like a step back. To me, that's a mercy. Burn it all down, strip it to the skeleton, and rebuild a proper creature feature. Those previous two films felt like they had built a world where, yes, dinosaurs were everywhere, but the consequence of that is a world no longer wowed by dinosaurs. There's an early scene in Rebirth where a brachiosaurus (I think) is seen under a New York bridge, and commuters barely glance or marvel at the gargantuan beast being craned out. It felt like an overt signal that we're removing this kind of depiction of dinosaurs from the films. There's no scenario where the sight of a real dinosaur shouldn't elicit a shock and awe reaction from the character that witnesses it.

It is, of course, impossible to recapture the shock and awe of Spielberg's 1993 original. Modern audiences are jaded. CG breakthroughs are routine, and it's increasingly hard for even myself to be legitimately wowed by something projected on the screen. But I asked my own kids what they remember most from Jurassic Park. In turn, they rattled off several vivid moments: Grant taking off his glasses, the T-Rex between the jeeps sequence, the raptors in the kitchen sequence, "Hold onto your butts." From the recent Jurassic World sequels? Their list was a blur of locusts, auctions, a cloned girl, Malta black-market nonsense, and Chris Pratt's magic hand pose. Scarce little of their memories of those films had anything to do with dinosaurs.

Rebirth has its flaws — thin characters and a bare-bones plot — but its set pieces absolutely land, and I'm sure that those are what will linger in my memory about this film. They're scary, spectacular, sharply staged, and, best of all, they make dinosaurs feel rare again. And that's why I'm happy to see the franchise, however belatedly, come back to life — as if it has managed to extract a bit of the original trilogy's DNA, long preserved in amber, and splice it back into the heart of this series.