If there’s one major issue that has prevented every “Jurassic Park” sequel from reaching the heights of the 1993 original, it’s the absence of a credible reason compelling us to suspend disbelief about why characters would repeat the same errors. Creating an even larger dinosaur theme park after past disasters? It’s inevitably doomed. Conducting guided tours on the deserted island where the hungry dinosaurs still roam? You’re likelier to survive a trip on the Titanic submersible.

And yet, despite no one claiming any sequel rivals Steven Spielberg’s first film, they continue to rake in billions at the box office with each new release; it’s an intrinsically flawed franchise that remains unchanged because there’s no perceived need for improvement. Some audiences might grumble about the increasing absurdity and implausibility of the films, but if viewers continue to pay for dinosaur mayhem, there’s little motivation to alter the established formula.

In this specific aspect (and this aspect alone), “Jurassic World Rebirth” serves as a return to the franchise’s roots, toning down the ridiculousness in favor of a straightforward mission where a diverse team of scientists must brave the world’s most perilous island. Screenwriter David Koepp, returning to the franchise after nearly three decades, attempts to recapture the formula of the original movie, taking a similar approach to his recent works with Steven Soderbergh. While there may not be much connection with the art horror “Presence” (as previously reviewed by Looper) or spy thriller “Black Bag,” you’ll find a similarly focused approach of boiling a genre down to its core essentials, limiting the expansive world-building to keep the action contained. In those instances, it might have seemed like a low-budget screenwriting exercise, but when the self-contained element is an island populated by unruly dinosaurs, this approach acts as a safeguard to prevent the film from becoming excessively exaggerated.

Unfortunately, this is still a “Jurassic Park” movie, and reverting to the simplicity of the original formula doesn’t hide the fact that it has long grown stale over decades of poor imitation; it’s inescapably derivative of an earlier film you’d rather be watching at any given moment. The mission this time sees paleontologist Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), covert ops expert Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), and Big Pharma rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) getting together to visit the no-go zone in the Atlantic where dinosaurs now reside.

Research has shown that, due to their long lifespans, dinosaur genetics may hold the cure to heart disease — and as that will affect 20% of the global population in their lifetimes, it’s worth the risk if it means a major step forward in battling a fatal condition. After meeting up with a team leader who will be guiding their expedition (Mahershala Ali) along the way, the movie cuts to the Delgado family, whose paths cross with the crew after their sailboat is attacked. In a film with countless genetically mutated dinosaurs, nothing was quite as farfetched to me as a family having sailed all the way to a dangerous island near the equator from the mainland U.S. as part of a last-minute family holiday before the eldest daughter goes to college.

There is no clear narrative purpose for the Delgados beyond mimicking the original “Jurassic Park” formula, where kids are along for the ride too; the two groups get split up very soon after arriving on the island, and the movie screeches to a halt each time we have to go back to spending time with the family. Quietly, they become the real leads of the film while being a footnote in the marketing. Elsewhere, a group of charismatic movie stars are going on a “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-style adventure into tombs and caves, on their hunt for miracle dino DNA — and we’re stuck with a bland family who bloats the movie beyond its simple adventure narrative and offers nothing beyond being subjected to dinosaur attacks we’ve seen staged identically and more effectively in the previous films. They become so disconnected from the main group during the second act that it’s obvious their presence was dictated entirely by a studio note during the script stage demanding younger characters be added to appeal to the whole family. I can’t imagine any young viewer thinking that their parts were better than the actual quest itself.

Of course, neither Scarlett Johansson nor Jonathan Bailey have well-written characters to play with, but they are the exact kind of movie stars that you need to humanize thinly-sketched out archetypes like this. Rupert Friend is far more memorable as the villain, with the movie even managing to sneak in some (admittedly, very soft) criticism of for-profit healthcare as our two heroes realize any cure for a disease that affects hundreds of millions shouldn’t be sold to a businessman looking to make a potential trillion dollar windfall. But then, “Jurassic World Dominion” offered similar – albeit far messier – social commentary on climate change which was forgotten as quickly as the credits rolled. Nobody comes to these movies for anything more than carnage, and like “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” director J.A. Bayona, Gareth Edwards does occasionally lean into the full-blooded horror potential of this material.

Writing this a couple of weeks after seeing it, however, it only becomes apparent how disjointed the movie is on this front; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that, like Marvel Studios, the action set pieces were filmed by a second unit in advance, with Edwards asked simply to stage all the sequences in between. Or it could be the other way around, as the grittier, high-stakes action scenes feel far more characteristic of the director’s previous franchise work, which aimed to ground their respective fantastical premises. There’s a goofiness to “Jurassic World Rebirth” that you won’t find elsewhere in his back catalogue and appears at odds with the large-scale spectacle most reminiscent of his earlier films.

Whereas I can still remember the smallest of grace notes from Steven Spielberg’s original years after I last saw it, everything but the biggest of the set pieces here has faded from my memory already. I suspect this sentiment will be shared by most critics, and is why Universal started screening the film for the public a full week before the critical embargo lifted — most general audiences will focus on how much fun they had in the moment, whereas critics will likely lament just how disposable the franchise increasingly continues to become. Yes, it will make a billion dollars, but by the end of the month you won’t be able to tell me a single thing that happened in it, no matter how much you enjoyed it.

“Jurassic World Rebirth” crashes into theaters on July 2.