While waiting in the theatre for new sequel Jurassic World: Rebirth to begin, I noticed a mother and child sit down in the row ahead of mine. Said child was small and young, and terribly excited to be holding a serve of popcorn about the same size as their head. I was privately a little concerned that wee Timmy – let’s call him Timmy – was a few years too young for the inevitable violent mayhem that was about to ensue, but at the same time I have always believed we should challenge our children with their viewing habits.

Any concerns I had were quickly allayed the moment Rebirth‘s various dinosaurs started eating people. Each moment of carnage was met with open guffaws of laughter, enthused cheering, and loud declarations of ‘Ahahaha, the pterodactyl bit off the man’s head!’ Young Timmy, it turns out, was firmly on Team T-Rex, and all of the film’s human characters were simply items on a menu. Trust me: if you have not shared a Jurassic film with an excitable child, you have never seen Shakespeare the way it was meant to be played.

What T-Rex Timmy understands – and what writer David Koepp and director Gareth Edwards clearly understand as well – is that dinosaurs are cool. Steven Spielberg clearly appreciated it when he directed the original Jurassic Park in 1993, as well as its patchy-but-underrated sequel The Lost World four years later. I am inclined to believe Colin Trevorrow, who relaunched the franchise in 2015 with Jurassic World, never fully understood the assignment. His film was predicated on the assumption that – in the world of the films – audiences would tire of seeing real live dinosaurs, and that corporate research divisions would start to splice together the DNA for their own monsters. This assumption was largely responsible for the most recent trilogy’s creative downfall, because while a rampaging tyrannosaur is cool, a rampaging Indominus Rex or Indoraptor simply feels like somebody is trying too hard. There is a weird cynicism about dinosaurs in Trevorrow’s trilogy that never sat well with me, and if there is a reason to frequent this new seventh Jurassic adventure it is that the original senses of wonder and chaos have returned.

Rebirth picks up five years after the last instalment. Dinosaurs, once freed across the modern world, have largely died out due to their incompatibility with a 21st century climate. The few that remain are littered across highly restricted islands along the Earth’s equator. A pharmaceutical company dispatches a team – very illegally – to one of these islands to capture blood samples for use in developing new medications. The team need to sample from a Mosasaur, a Titanosaurus, and a Quetzalcoatlus: conveniently a sea dinosaur, a land dinosaur, and a flying dinosaur. Honestly it is like Pokémon in this movie, and about as weak a narrative justification the franchise has ever had.

Shortly into the mission the team intercepts a wrecked yacht with a family of four aboard, who are then brought along to the island as well. Their inclusion feels forced, as do the majority of plot elements, simply because the audience has seen them all before. This is franchise filmmaking as greatest hits package: the family is there because it gets a child and a teenager into the picture, which is what Jurassic has done before. Similarly the military-style mission to track down dinosaurs is straight out of The Lost World, the central research facility developing mutant hybrids is a Jurassic World legacy, and many of the new action sequences are cribbed from unused elements of Michael Crichton’s novels.

It is the execution that works, with Gareth Edwards adopting a highly Spielbergian take on the material. The action sequences are exciting and tense, and very well shot – particularly a river-based T-Rex encounter. The film thankfully refuses to lean on velociraptors again, and its choice of dinosaur species to feature are well balanced and entertaining. Most importantly it really does re-embrace the sense that seeing actual dinosaurs in the field would be a marvellous spectacle. The pace of the film is arguably too slow – a regular problem with Edwards’ films including Godzilla (2014) and The Creator (2023) – but at least on a scene-by-scene basis this is probably the third-best instalment of the series. There is a significant drop-off in quality after the first two films, but third-best is still preferable to seventh.

The actors are very good, including Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, and Masershala Ali, although their characters are arguably a little underwritten. Rupert Friend is suitably oily as an untrustworthy ‘big pharma’ executive.

The title Rebirth is a misnomer, since all the film does is revert the style and tone back to an earlier generation of Jurassic picture. That, in itself, is welcome. If, like me and T-Rex Timmy, you enjoy watching dinosaurs do their thing, this is a suitably entertaining diversion.