Next time your doctor asks for a blood draw, try not to think about this needle.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: for us the Jurassic Park/World film series is a Family Tradition Franchise, by which I mean — like the Marvel, DC, or Star Wars universes — ever since my son was small we’ve seen see every installment in theaters because we’ve always gone to see them every time, no matter how unenthusiastic we are about the diminishing returns. The resistible drag of IP inertia is among our strongest bonds, exactly as studio execs count on to prop up these dilapidated blockbuster assembly lines.

The last trilogy came nowhere near touching the Steven Spielberg/Michael Crichton classic, its first sequel whose flaws get funnier every time I catch a basic-cable rerun, or even Joe Johnston’s underrated yet perfectly fun JPIII. Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World was a roadshow revival presenting a handful of entertaining scenes, numerous derivative ideas in the form of “callbacks”, the first of Chris Pratt’s many generic action heroes to come, the callous murder of poor innocent Lena Luthor, and a T-Rex/raptor team-up that was probably the first line of the pitch. With Fallen Kingdom J.A. Bayona arguably crafted the least worst of the three, with a wild Dinosaur Island cataclysm that segues to the bizarre high-concept “dinosaurs in a haunted house”, only to fumble in the final ten minutes with one of the stupidest movie endings so far this millennium. Trevorrow returned one last time for Dominion, a Jurassic All-Stars cash-grab reunion tour in which our beloved dinosaurs played second-fiddle to the threat of giant locusts, to the delight of that microscopic Venn-diagram subset, Jurassic Fans Who Hate Dinosaurs.

Three years later, here we go again! Those hungry, hungry dinos are back in their seventh chapter, Jurassic World Rebirth — courtesy of sci-fi director Gareth Edwards (The Creator, most of Rogue One), who learned a few things from directing an actual Godzilla film such as “perhaps a giant-lizard movie should have more than five minutes of giant lizard in it” and “always cast a Marvel actor”. Joining him is David Koepp, primary screenwriter of the first Jurassic trilogy, which movie-news sites took as a good sign even though his last blockbuster credit was among the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny brain trust. The results manage to hurdle the low bar set by Trevorrow’s two company-man products, but once again Edwards and Koepp aspire to a cover-band quality level, which doesn’t have to be an entirely bad thing.

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