JURASSIC WORLD: REBIRTH

Here's the short version: this is one of the best entries this franchise has produced, and it earns that praise honestly. A team of mercenaries hunting dinosaur DNA for a life-saving drug collides with a shipwrecked family, and the combination gives the film something rare for a summer blockbuster — genuine heart alongside genuine spectacle. The action sequences are exciting, well-built, and suspenseful, and an act of sacrifice near the end gives the whole story emotional weight.

It isn't spotless. There's a fair amount of mostly light foul language, some intense dinosaur attacks that will unsettle younger viewers, and a throwaway comment nodding toward evolutionary dating that Christian viewers should be ready to discuss. None of it derails the film's strong pro-family, pro-life themes.

For teens and adults, this is an easy recommendation. For younger children, wait — the dinosaur sequences are genuinely frightening, and the film wasn't built for them.

A Big Pharma representative offers mercenary leader Zora Bennett and her team billions of dollars to extract DNA from three massive dinosaurs — DNA that could cure the world's biggest killer, heart disease. Their hunt for a giant sea creature collides with a family on a sailing trip when the same dinosaur capsizes both boats. Shipwrecked together on a remote island, the mercenaries and the family must fight their way to a rendezvous point where a rescue helicopter is waiting — if they can survive what's guarding the way there.

Four stars means this delivers at the highest level the franchise has managed in years. The direction and editing turn every dinosaur encounter — a sleeping T-Rex disturbed on a riverbank, a cliffside egg heist gone wrong, a chaotic shipwreck at sea — into a tightly structured, genuinely suspenseful set piece. The score does real work too, echoing the original film's themes at exactly the right moments.

What elevates it further is the human core: the shipwrecked family gives the story stakes and heart, and the chemistry between Zora and her longtime friend Duncan grounds the bigger action beats. The performances carry real weight, and the climax's act of sacrifice lands with earned emotion rather than manipulation. This is confident, well-made blockbuster filmmaking.

This film gets more right than most summer adventures. It centers a caring father protecting his daughters, gives real weight to sacrifice, and builds its whole climax around a pro-life idea borrowed straight from the original Jurassic Park: life finds a way. Characters say "Thank God" more than once, and unlike a lot of blockbusters, that's treated as sincere rather than throwaway. A Big Pharma executive's corruption gets called out plainly, and the film leans into some environmentalist sympathy for the dinosaurs themselves — worth noting, though not a major thread.

The one real wrinkle: a paleontologist casually references humanity being on Earth for 200,000 years, a nod toward secular evolutionary dating that Christian families may want to address directly rather than let pass unchallenged.

Taken together, this is a film that believes in family, sacrifice, and the stubborn persistence of life — themes Scripture affirms far more deeply than any movie can. The film can only gesture at why life endures against every threat; Scripture names the reason. "In him was life, and the life was the light of men" (John 1:4). And the sacrifice this story stages for effect, Scripture shows was made once, in full, for us: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

This is a rare summer blockbuster with both spectacle and soul — thrilling dinosaur sequences married to a genuine story about family and sacrifice. It also has enough rough language and intense peril that younger kids should sit this one out. Our answer stands: worth the trip — teens and adults. Bring the whole family, and this one's for the older half of it.