Popcorn Perspectives with Danny Minton
Week of June 30, 2025
Jurassic World Rebirth
Rated PG-13 for a drug reference, action, some suggestive references, bloody images, intense sequences of violence, and language
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 52%
In Theaters
Rogue One director Gareth Edwards brings us this new reboot for the Jurassic Park world which features Scarlett Johansson who plays a mercenary who is hired by a pharmaceutical company to assemble a team of experts who can travel to a secret island to capture DNA from still existent and very much alive dinosaurs left there. Once on the island, they discover that this was where scientists secretly did crossbreeding experiments, creating new types of dinosaurs never found in nature. This film has one heck of a pedigree with Edwards at the helm, a script by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man), a score by Alexandre Desplat (The Shape of Water, The Grand Budapest Hotel) and a strong enough cast including Johansson and Oscar-winner Mehershala Ali (Moonlight, Green Book). Much of it has real potential, especially the concept of a Jurassic World with monsters instead of just dinosaurs. The creations they come up with here are creative and capable of being quite frightening. But while most of the elements work, this movie proves that one broken element in a production can bring the whole thing down, and in this case it’s the script. Koepp is typically a very good writer, whose mostly action-packed adventures are thrilling and intelligent. But here, his script is just lousy, filled with stupid, clichéd dialog and predictable, stereotypical turns. It’s almost as if he didn’t write it himself (as I give him much too much credit to be this bad) but rather relied on AI to create such a sloppy screenplay. And when your eyes are too busy rolling into the back of your head to focus on the positives of the film, it really takes you out of what could have been a decent enough summer tentpole. The film makes a point of presenting that no one cares about dinosaurs anymore, and therefore the love of them is going extinct enough to really make them go away. With such a beloved franchise like this treating the material so trite, this rebirth is very likely to not go anywhere, and may hurt our chances of good adventures in the future. C+
Ironheart
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 86%
Streaming on Disney+
Introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is a poor but brilliant young MIT student who is given the boot from school, and thus steals her homemade Iron-man suit project to continue her work at home. Since she doesn’t have funding, she finds a local criminal (Anthony Ramos) to team up with until she discovers that he is a dangerous super villain that needs to be taken down. Much of what Disney has been doing with Marvel lately has been completely underwhelming. Fortunately, this 6-episode adventure makes for a nice diversion within the Marvel universe that is worth a watch for fans. I’m not certain if this character has much of a future within the MCU, but at least the series is entertaining and not so intricately tied into an over-arching storyline that is distracting and confusing. B