The new "Jurassic Park" film features giant mating titanosaurs. But will this save the dinosaur series from extinction?

Hardly anyone is interested in dinosaurs anymore. At least not in the world of "Jurassic World Rebirth," the latest installment in the blockbuster series, which now seems prehistoric itself. Plastic dinosaurs are thrown in the trash, theme park attractions are dismantled, and museums with stuffed prehistoric animals are forced to close. The spectacle is over.

Due to the climatic conditions, so the dramatic explanation goes, the few surviving dinosaurs have gathered on deserted islands on the equator. The others languish in big cities, and no one cares. Society leaves the animals to their own devices and represses their existence. In the real world, however, public interest in the dinosaur event isn't quite as bad.

All of the films in the latest trilogy have grossed more than a billion dollars worldwide. So it's no wonder there's already another spin-off, the seventh so far. Universal and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment aren't shying away from the usual exploitative practices for which the henchmen in the film series would be mercilessly punished. Whether the latest spin-off is a sequel or a reboot remains unclear. In any case, it follows the events that caused the dinosaurs to spread across the globe.

This time, it's a greedy pharmaceutical company that discovers a way to make a lot of money from the genetic material of surviving dinosaurs. A group is sent to an island near the equator to take blood samples.

These include the usual characters who travel to the ends of the earth in such films to discover themselves or die quickly. Zora, a sleazy mercenary with a good heart, played listlessly by Scarlett Johansson. The man with the boat (Mahershala Ali). The nerdy scientist (Jonathan Bailey). The shady businessman (Rupert Friend), and the family who, quite by chance, find themselves entangled in the events.

Everyone carries their traumas with them, and some know each other from their past. The dialogue is once again a relief when the actions speak for themselves. It's all about the dinosaur action anyway, and as a survival horror for the whole family, the film is certainly entertaining, thanks primarily to director Gareth Edwards's excellent sense of space and time.

A sequence in which an inflatable boat is inflated a few meters from a sleeping Tyrannosaurus rex proves once again how much tension in cinema is ignited by what is simultaneously seen and unseen. This also applies to the sometimes excitingly designed dinosaurs, which Edwards often only shows in fragments or hints at in secret, allowing the imagination to do the rest. Technically, it's pleasing and pleasantly unexciting.

In particular, the family, who repeatedly come into contact with the mercenaries and encounter aquatic dinosaurs on a sailing holiday before soon being stranded on the island, impresses with its surprising interpersonal dynamics. The wheel isn't reinvented here, but Edwards doesn't waste the hundreds of millions of dollars in production costs either. "Jurassic World Rebirth" is a solid, slightly old-fashioned summer movie. It's not boring. But is that enough?

In a world more aware of its own finiteness than ever before, a film about extinct creatures should be different than it was 30 years ago. After all, according to the WWF, the Earth is experiencing the greatest extinction since the end of the dinosaur era. A quarter of mammal species, one in eight bird species, a third of sharks and rays, and almost half of all amphibian species are threatened. Never has extinction been so tangible. This would be just one possible reason to bring the series into the present day.

But despite the film's exploration of the public accessibility of scientific data and products, the script remains stuck in tried-and-true patterns. This is partly due to David Koepp, who also adapted Michael Crichton's novel for the original film and who, here, is more concerned with self-important nostalgia than with a new approach. People still live as if the future were infinite.

The relationship with the animals has only two registers in this film: humans either protect them or wage war on them. Their dominant role remains unquestioned. Discourses of the past decades seem to have passed the makers of "Jurassic World" by, even though their film moves precisely in the tension between the human instinct for preservation and ecological awareness for the future of the planet.

For all its entertainment, the film certainly succeeds in making the violence of a machine gun against a helpless creature tangible. But ultimately, this simply becomes the ruthlessness of one individual. According to the rules of a blockbuster, the inherent good in humanity cannot be compromised.

The film's ethical question boils down to the time-worn balancing act between fear of the monstrous and compassion for alien creatures. It is most convincingly posed in the sight of the mutated dinosaurs, victims of genetic testing once conducted on the island. They are gruesome to behold precisely because of human intervention in their DNA, and one never knows whether the disgust one feels at the sight of them is actually shame at human misdeeds.

With Dolores, a herbivorous young aquilop, the film reveals itself as naively as imaginable as a toy commercial. The creature, who forms a friendship with a girl, is so cute that you almost expect a price tag to appear as it staggers across the screen.

In general, there's a hierarchy of creatures that has to do with their appearance. The more monstrous, it seems, the easier it is to kill. Perhaps one can't expect more from such a Hollywood production. However, it remains unclear what the creators of the series themselves expect.

Compared to "Planet of the Apes" or "The Hunger Games," "Jurassic World" certainly doesn't dare to do much. Instead, it offers a peculiar self-congratulatory display of visual tropes, such as the silhouette of a T-Rex behind a wall of fog illuminated by spotlights.

It's also fitting that the film does its best to capture the childlike excitement associated with Spielberg, with shining eyes and wide-open mouths, as larger-than-life cinematic magic. In particular, a sequence featuring giant mating titanosaurs in an idyllic meadow somewhat labors to reach the realms of overwhelming.

This reclaiming of wonder is a strange preoccupation of the film. Implicitly, the enthusiasm for dinosaurs is equated with the love of cinema. As if cinema were merely a spectacle, as if one could only marvel at the unbelievable. The question is whether moviegoers have truly forgotten this sense of wonder, or whether it's simply impossible today to be awestruck by the sight of computer animation. Ultimately, one can only admire the technical brilliance; no one compares what one sees with reality these days.

The mysteries of the unimaginable are answered with computer effects. The way dinosaurs are animated is of less interest. Perhaps it's telling that it's precisely the mutants in the film who are meant to spread terror. The ordinary Velociraptor is no longer enough. Today, even extinct reality is too unspectacular for the cinema, where the rule still applies: only those who don't bring in enough money will die out.

In the cinema.