Perhaps if I were very young I might find this seventh “Jurassic Park” adventure fun and exciting, but somehow, I doubt it.  I remember times when “Jurassic Park” and even “Jurassic World” meant adventure, exciting and fun.  Not anymore.  Now it is all just monster show, and maybe that would have been cool fifty years ago.  Not now, not anymore, when the series has had such high points.  Now it has sunk into irrelevance and spectacle for the sake of spectacle.

Gareth Edwards’ film takes place five years after the epic conclusion of the second trilogy, Jurassic World: Dominion.  In five short years, we are told, the dinosaur menace to humanity has largely disappeared.  Wild dinos live only in equatorial regions and everyone knows to stay away.  But in the hunt for medical breakthroughs one crazy company is sending a team to collect blood from the three largest specimens before they disappear forever, hoping to use that blood to cure heart disease once and for all.  The charity of that notion, plus a whole lot of money, persuades a group of people to sail into forbidden seas . . . and everything goes wrong that could go wrong, and more.

I’m not describing the actual plot and characters because they are largely unimportant and the characters are almost wholly uninteresting, even when played by babe Scarlett Johansson and others.  Writer David Koepp has done a lousy job of writing interesting people for which we should care; we do not.  And even with one touching sequence involving a pair of spooning dinosaur giants with super-long tails that was kind of sweet, Koepp has done an even worse job with the animals.  From the very beginning, the “Jurassic” writers and filmmakers have emphasized the beastliness and lethality of these resurrected creatures, over the incandescent wonder that they should inspire.  When I was a kid, I loved dinosaurs but I didn’t love them because they were lethal killing machines.  They were cool, and different, and individualistic in their appearances, and it was fun to imagine them in their habitats, and in the modern world as well.  But the business side of these dinosaur movies is determined to present them as hellish beasts from which to escape rather than wonders to (symbolically) embrace.  I’ve never liked that about this series; it should have focused more on the wonder, which would probably make the scary sequences even more harrowing than they already are.

In this case, the dinosaurs are not really dinosaurs at all.  Modified by genetic retooling and mutated within their new environments, these dinosaurs are simply monsters.  Now I know people love monsters.  Especially the old monsters of Universal Studios, and others.  But those monsters have personalities, and even their idiosyncrasies are sometimes cool, if still lethal.  These creatures have no such appeal.  They are monsters, especially the big bulbous-headed thing that tries to eat everyone at the big, overblown climax.  Monsters are fine, I guess, but they’re not really my thing.  And I don’t think that monstrosities are appropriate for this series, in which so many of the beasties developed personalities even while committing monster mayhem.  One, the raptor Blue, is so well developed that she became a genuine character, my favorite of the entire series.  These creatures are just marauding monsters, and that is, or should be, the death knell for any future “Jurassic” adventures.  If they cannot treat their star attractions as beings worth respect and actual characterization, there should be no more of these movies.  ☆ 1/2.  30 July 2025.