Jonathan Bailey, left, and Scarlett Johansson in "Jurassic World Rebirth"

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The “Jurassic Park” franchise, which now numbers seven features, is a remarkable testament to the triumph of the human spirit — or, at least, the human ability to maintain optimism in the face of unwavering evidence to the contrary. Over and over again, in this universe, we meet otherwise reasonable-seeming people who believe that an encounter with enormous, angry and bloodthirsty dinosaurs will, somehow, turn out OK. Seriously! They think this! In “Jurassic World Rebirth,” the latest installment, a skeptical soldier of fortune (Mahershala Ali, earning what I truly hope was a hefty paycheck) intones, “Nobody’s dumb enough to go where we’re going.” And yet they all go there. It’ll work out perfectly this time, right?

Of course it doesn’t, and that’s why we watch the “Jurassic” movies: These are stressful days, and watching someone narrowly escape getting munched by an impressively CGI’d T. rex has a certain roller-coaster fun to it. “Jurassic World Rebirth,” which kick-starts the franchise with an all-new cast (goodbye, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard; thanks for playing!), follows the familiar formula. An operative-for-hire named Zora (Scarlett Johansson, properly badass) assembles a team to head into the forbidden island housing the original Jurassic Park’s abandoned research facility — now populated by free-roaming and mostly cranky dinosaurs of various species — to extract DNA for a Big Pharma client (Rupert Friend, properly evil) who believes that dinosaurs with big hearts hold the key to lucrative drug money, or something like that.

Along the way, our brave crew — which also includes Jonathan Bailey as a scientist, wearing cute glasses in case we didn’t get that he’s a scientist — meets up with a family whose solo trip across the Atlantic in a teeny-tiny sailboat has strayed into dinosaur-infested waters, as one does, and whose younger kid is now going to need an unspeakable amount of therapy. (She probably just wanted to go to Disneyland on her summer break, poor kid.) Various harrowing chase scenes ensue, a few people get munched and a pair of dinosaurs make out in a PG sort of way, which is not a phrase I ever expected to type.

The bottom line, for any movie that purports to be a thrill ride, is whether the end result is thrilling — and I’d give a definite yes to that. Director Gareth Edwards and screenwriter David Koepp (who wrote the original “Jurassic Park”) wisely keep the focus on the dinosaurs, and mix things up a bit: Much of “Jurassic World Rebirth” takes place in water, and I am here to tell you that seeing a massive dinosaur swim underneath a small wooden boat can cause even a weathered old-school movie critic to write a few all-caps expletives in her notebook. The effects are uniformly effective — we believe these dinosaurs, even as we don’t believe that any humans could be quite this clueless — and it all goes down perfectly nicely with popcorn, which is all you can ask of a Jurassic movie. Watch it on a huge screen, and enjoy the summer movie season; it, unlike dinosaurs, doesn’t last forever.

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'JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of violence/action, bloody images, some suggestive references, language and a drug reference)

Running time: 2:13

How to watch: Now in theaters

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