scarlett johansson

Hold on to your water glasses because you can hear the plot of “Jurassic World Rebirth” coming from a mile away. A ragtag group of adventurers land on a remote island planning to exploit dinosaur DNA — and some of them get chomped. The only new thing about this seventh installment is the cast: Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali as freelance covert operatives Zora and Duncan, Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Henry Loomis and Rupert Friend as a pharmaceutical titan named Martin who wants to treat coronary disease by harvesting samples from three massive reptile hearts. Gauging by the response every time this sequel has come up in conversation, it should have been subtitled: “This Time There’s No Chris Pratt.”

I went to the theater with my own heart as big as a Titanosaur’s. (Goofy name aside, it’s a real herbivore and you’ll see a herd of them.) After all, screenwriter David Koepp wrote the screenplay for the 1993 original and the franchise’s latest director, Gareth Edwards, made a serviceable “Godzilla.”

Alas, Edwards has made “Godzilla” again. “Jurassic World Rebirth” is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined. You’ll see a nod to the 1962 adventure “One Million Years B.C.” (you know: Raquel Welch, fur bikini), which is more of a template than a kitschy joke. There isn’t a shiver of surprise about who gets the chomp, only disappointment that the fatalities are so bloodless — they’re mild even for PG-13.

Some of this ennui is by design. The narrative backdrop is that after 32 years of who-coulda-thunk-it rampages, humankind is tired of dealing with the darned things. Audiences can relate.

To establish this miserliness of spirit, the present-day scenes start with a Brooklyn traffic jam caused by an escaped sauropod lying collapsed and dying on the side of the road. It’s the same species that transformed Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum into giddy, glassy-eyed children, only now drained of all majesty. Some creep has even spray-painted its hindquarters with graffiti.

Plenty more dinosaurs will arrive in the film’s two-hour-plus running time: swooping Quetzalcoatlus, splashing Mosasaurus, frilled Dilophosaurus and a bitty Whoknowswhatasaurus that Ali’s Duncan keeps in a bamboo birdcage by his boat dock in Suriname. But the only one that made me feel anything was that pathetic sauropod abandoned like a sidewalk sofa.

A beat later, “Rebirth” cuts to a shuttering museum exhibit where workmen are trashing their copy of that iconic banner that reads “When dinosaurs ruled the earth.” The original “Jurassic Park” inspired a generation of kids to dream of scientific discoveries. This era is throwing in the towel.

The action sets sail with a hefty oceanic sequence where Edwards leans on his expertise in sluicing fins and underwater ka-thumps. Our heroes also scoop up a rather ungrateful shipwrecked family: yachtsman Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), his daughters Isabella (Audrina Miranda) and Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Teresa’s good-for-nothing boyfriend, Xavier (David Iacono). Initially, we can’t wait for Iacono’s louse to get eaten but we come to treasure his comic relief, particularly when Xavier wanders off to relieve himself next to a nest of velociraptors. Danger lurks and the doofus just stands around with his johnson in his hand.

Eventually, the crew makes land on Ile Saint-Hubert near French Guinea, where a genetic dinosaur laboratory was evacuated 17 years earlier. In an opening flashback, we learn that a technician concocting a freakish T. rex littered a Snickers wrapper, causing a chain reaction that within two minutes resulted in the snacker becoming a snack.

You may consider yourself inured to product placement. Even so, its use here is brazen and strange, from this case of death by chocolate to an “E.T.” embezzlement in which Isabella befriends a baby Aquilops with red rope licorice. There’s even a scene in an abandoned convenience store which, despite a decade and a half left in the custody of pesky dinosaurs, the snack labels remain tidily pointed toward the camera. At least that setting has a modified raptor pausing at a soda cooler to admire its reflection.

I don’t think Johansson and Ali will take as much pride in “Rebirth,” assuming they bother to watch it. Both get through the film without embarrassing themselves, in part because neither is very committed. Johansson’s tough security expert swaggers, Ali smiles and our sturdy goodwill for both actors keeps us from holding the movie against them. Early on, the two get one scene together where they put on a pretense of speaking in shorthand about the emotional costs of a career in Blackwater-style skulduggery. It has the air of a stretch before buckling in for a long haul flight.

This is composer Alexandre Desplat’s “Jurassic” debut and he dutifully reworks John Williams’ famous notes of wonder and yearning a few ways, like a subtle tinkling when Bailey’s strapping science geek imagines the joy of witnessing a dinosaur not in a zoo or a theme park, but in the wild. Bailey is a fine actor and his Loomis would be the soul of the movie if he wasn’t battling for screen time. He’s the only character who seems to like dinosaurs — everyone else sees them as dollar signs or boogeymen.

The series itself has gotten so bored with the beasties that it continues to invent new ugly mutants. “Rebirth” unleashes the Distortus rex — imagine a parakeet’s head on a bodybuilding cockroach. All the dinos struggle to feel convincing as they seem to change size every time you look at them (and the CG backdrops are chintzy). Yet, I still prefer the trusty regulars like the amphibious Spinosaurs, who resemble dog-paddling hellhounds, the pecking Quetzalcoatlus that gulps people like sardines and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus rex, now striped and able to hide in ways that defy physics but at least get an audible chortle.

“Rebirth” is a confounding title for a downbeat entry that’s mostly preoccupied by death and neglect. Who knows whether we’re at the head or tail of the Anthropocene, but the movie seems weary of our dominion. “I doubt if we make it to even 1 million,” Loomis admits, adding that he hopes to die in shallow silt so he can become a fossil too. With the franchise officially out of ideas, how about skipping to “Jurassic Park: One Million Years A.D.” so a futuristic species can resurrect us for some malevolent fun and games?

For her seventh time hosting “Saturday Night Live” (the most times ever for a woman, NBC says), actor Scarlett Johansson closed the show’s historic 50th season.

It was a night that didn’t deliver any news on the rumors that Johansson’s husband, Colin Jost of “Weekend Update,” or his co-host Michael Che, would be leaving the show. Instead, the two engaged in their joke exchange ritual, and multiple guest stars showed up in sketches, including Mike Myers, Gina Gershon and Emily Ratajkowski in a video piece, and musical guest Bad Bunny.

Johansson did her usual ace job throughout the show, bringing her crisp delivery to sketches about a New York morning show where puns about hard-news stories land very badly, a Please Don’t Destroy video about a vacation flight to Newark Airport (it also lands badly), and a barroom sketch about two men (Marcello Hernández and Bad Bunny) who commiserate in Spanish about the terrible relationships they’re in with characters played by Johansson and Ego Nwodim.

The trio of sketches were followed by another video chapter in the “Bowen Yang’s Not Gay” series, in which Johansson has an affair with Yang before finding out how many other women he’s having sex with, including Gershon, Ratajkowski and cast members Nwodim and Heidi Gardner.

After a strong “Weekend Update” finale featuring Johansson in the joke exchange, the show took a hard dive with four sketches in a row that just didn’t work. There was a very dated and awkward elevator sketch about Mike Myers running into Kanye West (now Ye, played by Kenan Thompson), one about intimacy coordinators who don’t know how lesbians have sex, a TV interview panel in which female actors get asked more personal questions than their male co-star, and a gross-out season-ender about Victorian women eating disgusting foods including eels and BLTs (bunnies and little turtles).

On top of the bad run of sketches, Johansson was cut off while giving a tribute to Lorne Michaels as the show ended on broadcast and Peacock with no closing credits or cast hugs (the full goodnights were later posted online). That’s no fault of Johansson (who received a bouquet of roses and a kiss from her husband before that goodbye snafu), but it was a sloppy way to end an otherwise strong season of TV featuring a host who’s always proved solid.

Musical guest Bad Bunny, who appeared in the bar and Newark airport sketches, performed “NUEVAYoL” and “PERFuMITO NUEVO” with RaiNao.

The majority of Season 50’s cold opens have leaned on James Austin Johnson’s uncanny President Trump impression, and the finale followed suit. The president’s recent Middle East trip was the topic, with Trump having some friend time with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Emil Wakim). “We are vibing,” Trump said, “dipping our fingers into various goops and spreads,” although he says he ended up eating at a mobile McDonald’s set up for him nearby. Trump addressed the $400-million plane he wants to accept from Qatar (“It’s a pre-bribe”), saying he prefers it to flying an American plane. “No thanks, sonny. Have you seen what’s going on … screen is blank. Newark!” Trump narrated himself breaking the fourth wall by going out into the audience and commenting on the attractiveness of women in the front rows and promised audiences they wouldn’t forget him while “SNL” goes on summer hiatus. “I’m everywhere, even in your dreams, like the late, great Freddy Krueger. See you in the fall if we still have a country, right? It’s a coin toss.”

In her monologue, Johansson led the cast in a song with lyrics about the show set to the tune of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” “Sing us a song, it’s your monologue / sing us a song tonight. / ‘Cause we’ve made 50 years of great memories / every Saturday Night.” At one point it looked like Joel himself might join in when Johansson announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Joel… wrote this song!” The host took audience questions while still singing and jokes were made about a surprised Sarah Sherman finding out she’s leaving the show (it was a joke). The cast (with Jost and Che absent) concluded the song with, “The 50th season is through / it lasted forever / we did it together / and we got to spend it with you.”

Best sketch of the night: Let’s go home for some soup made from cow feet

Two men (Hernandez and Bad Bunny) on dates at a bar with women they don’t particularly want to be with (Nwodim and Johansson) get into a fight at their girlfriends’ urging, but instead they tell each other in Spanish about their problems and become friends. The two realize they’re both attracted to volatile relationships and will probably end up back in bed with the women they should break up with. The subtitles are on point and the attempts by the girlfriends to chime in with Spanish (“Nipple crazy cafeteria!”) also work nicely. For some reason, a couple of men (Andrew Dismukes and Johnson) sit at another table and serve as the sketch’s Greek chorus.

Also good: ‘Is something going on at Newark?’

The Please Don’t Destroy boys are visited by Johansson, who asks why they’re so down. “Are you sad the season’s over and you only did like two videos?” she asks. The actor invites them to fly first class with her and a Lonely Island-style rap video is interspersed with the reality of the situation: They’re on a very bad flight to Newark airport, which has been having some problems. There are some great visual jokes like a prayer symbol on the overhead panel and a Microsoft blue screen of death on the TV panels. But then Bad Bunny shows up as an air traffic controller who helps save the day all alone and on his first day at work. It might say something that the two best sketches this week featured Johansson as well as Bad Bunny; he didn’t get a chance to host this season but did a great job in 2023.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: Did Lorne Michaels know about this?

Miss Eggy (Nwodim) returned with another fire monologue similar to the one from last month, but it was the traditional joke exchange, in which Jost and Che force each other to read racist and/or embarrassing material that is taken to new heights (lows?) each time. Jost was forced to tell the show’s producer, “Retire, bitch, let me run the show,” while Che was given the line, “I haven’t been that excited since I saw a white woman drinking unattended.” Jost had to ridicule rap feud master Kendrick Lamar and with Jost’s wife sitting next to him, Che was forced to apologize and say about his time on the show, “I’ve told thousands of jokes and gotten dozens of laughs,” and of Jost, “I love you.” But it was Jost who got the worst of it, getting tricked into saying the name Nick Kerr, son of Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, and applying lipstick to tell Michaels, “I’ll do anything to run this show.” If this is the last time we see Jost and Che as “Update” hosts, at least we’ll know they left no depths unplumbed.