Blood in the Water

Fifty years ago, a largely unknown film director unleashed on the public a cinematic experience so thrilling, so unnerving, that it stands even today as the consummate summer blockbuster.

“Jaws” put Steven Spielberg on Hollywood’s radar as a wunderkind to watch and, at the same time, scared the public from ever wanting to swim in the ocean—a fear that for many still exists.

In one iconic scene, actor Roy Scheider’s character and Robert Shaw’s fishing boat captain are being menaced by a Great White shark. Scheider turns to Shaw and says “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

That iconic line could well be repurposed for the seventh iteration of the Jurassic Park movie franchise. “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” after a kind of story line setup, focuses on a family of four out for a sailing adventure near the equator, which we are told in a preamble is where the last surviving modern-day dinosaurs still roam.

Big mistake.

In one of the best action sequences of the entire film, they come, keel to face, with a creature that could eat a Great White for lunch. The special effects would have you believe that this ocean-going behemoth actually exists and easily overturns the boat.

The quartet scrambles onto the upturned hull and they wait to be rescued.

A research vessel answers their distress call and we meet the true stars of the film, Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and not-quite-A-lister Jonathan Bailey (“Wicked”). They are leading an expedition to retrieve dino DNA for a Big Pharma company determined to manufacture some sort of wonder drug, and earn hundreds of millions in the process.

The samples must be obtained from three sources: an ocean-going dinosaur species, a land-based species and a winged species. Talk about a triple threat.

The leader of the expedition is a by-the-book, and somewhat sinister, Big Pharma executive who pushes the group to abandon safety protocols at every turn. Because there’s always a villain in stories like these. And we need to root for the dinosaurs to, at some point, mete out his punishment.

(Remember the lawyer in the first Jurassic Park movie who instantly regretted hiding in a port-a-potty?)

As the story unfolds, the crew of the research vessel and the sailboaters are separated and have to navigate a tropical island populated by creatures that aren’t all that interested in a plant-based diet.

Screenwriter David Koepp, who co-wrote the first “Jurassic Park” script with sci-fi writer Michael Crichton, author of the original book, keeps the action moving at a brisk pace and, for the eagle-eyed series fan, drops in occasional references to the original film.

“Jurassic World: Rebirth” does a serviceable job of attempting to move the series forward in new directions. But let’s face it: we come to these movies to see creatures with teeth the size of Volkswagens and blood-lust in their veins. Anything else is beside the point.

Number 7 is better than many of its predecessors and offers moviegoers a terrific entry in the summer movie sweepstakes. In other words, these dinos soar.