A few months ago, I introduced my kids to Jurassic Park. I still remember how impressed I was with the realism of the dinosaurs when I saw it back in 1993 and, while none of the five Jurassic Park and Jurassic World sequels has quite lived up to the original, I have enjoyed them all to some extent. Would the original movie hold up to a modern kid who's been raised on Pokemon animation and Marvel movies?

Yes, actually, it did. My kids loved it, and over the next few weeks, they eagerly watched all six dino films. So, when with almost perfect timing the latest movie in the series -- Jurassic World: Rebirth -- opened in the theaters, I asked if they'd like to see one on the big screen. Of course they did.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is a fresh start to the franchise, with no returning characters or dangling plot points to connect to the earlier movies. Set five years after the conclusion of Jurassic World: Dominion, the world has moved on from its fascination with dinosaurs. People are, frankly, bored with them, and it turns out most dinosaurs can't survive in the modern world anyway. Many of them have died, and those that survive have congregated on islands close to the equator, where the climate more closely matches the climate of their former world. Travel to those islands is, of course, forbidden.

The movie opens -- after a tense opening scene, set 17 years prior in a laboratory on Ile Saint-Hubert, where doomed InGen scientists were busy gene-splicing and mutating dinosaurs to create new and interesting (and deadlier) models -- in New York City, where pharmaceutical mogul Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) is angrily detouring around a dying brachiosaurus while trying to persuade mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) to lead a team to that very same island to extract blood from three types of living dinosaurs for research into a cure for heart disease that will make Krebs and his investors very, very rich. Well, richer.

After appealing to her sense of compassion and basic human decency -- no, I'm kidding, he offers her a lot of money -- Krebs and Bennett head collect paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey) and head south to recruit their team. Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali) skippers the boat, and joining them on the mission are an assortment of characters you know will probably end the movie as dinosaur poop.

Meanwhile, dad Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is taking his daughters Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa's stoner boyfriend Xavier Dobbs (David Iacono) on a cross-ocean cruise when their sailboat is attacked by a spinosaurus -- you may recall that a spinosaurus was the primary villain in Jurassic Park III but, while that one was mostly land-bound, the spinosauruses in this movie are deep-sea fishers who hunt and cooperate with an even bigger mosasaurus (which was featured heavily as a Shamu-like attraction in Jurassic World). They all survive, and they are picked up by Bennett's team who happened to be passing by on their way to Ile Saint-Hubert and take them along for the ride.

It's at this point that Krebs, who was just kind of slimy, begins to show his hidden evil nature.

So, all three of the DNA samples required for their studies -- a sea-based mosasaurus, a land-based titanosauraus and an airborne quetzalcoatlus -- just happen to be available on or near Ile Saint-Hubert. Of course, the island is also the home to a bunch of dino-mutants, and they're all very hungry. Cue the running and the screaming.

My kids really enjoyed Rebirth, and I have to admit it's a lot of fun. It's nice to see the franchise go in a new direction -- although, let's face it, at its root the plot is still the basic rich-person's-greed-tries-to-profit-off-dinosaurs-and-causes-much-death motif that the series is based on. Johansson and Bailey deserve a lot of the credit for carrying the movie, her as the action hero and him as the voice of compassion and rationality.

Probably the best scene in the movie involves a t-rex and an inflatable raft. Attacks at sea by the mosasaurus and spinosaurus are also stunningly realized, as is the herd of amorous titanosaurauses (although how they all were able to hide in some tall grass is beyond me. Otherwise, you will see a bunch of familiar dinosaurs from previous movies -- the velociraptors this time are more of a punchline than a genuine threat -- but the mutations are much less interesting overall. When you have incredible actual dinosaurs in your sandbox, why do you need to play with jigsaw creations like the mutadons (a blend of raptor and pterosaur DNA) and the massive distortus rex, which looks less like a t-rex and more like Ray Harryhausen's kraken or Phil Tippett's rancor.

At the end of the day, Rebirth was another fun adventure in a world where stunningly real-looking dinosaurs exist alongside (and sometimes eat) human beings. There's no word yet if Rebirth will stand alone or start another Jurassic World trilogy, but I certainly wouldn't mind seeing Johansson and Bailey return for another installment.