Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey star in an entertaining new chapter in the dino-franchise

Any movie in the Jurassic Park/World franchise boils down to a filmmaker playing with scale, trying to make things that are preposterously big fit and function believably on the screen. So it’s something of a surprise — and a joke — that the terrific Jurassic World Rebirth introduces its first monster only after zeroing in on something teeny-tiny: a stray candy-bar wrapper falling to the floor.

The candy bar has just been consumed by a sloppy — fatally sloppy — technician at a secret laboratory compound. Apparently new, mutant dinosaurs for the Jurassic theme parks are being genetically engineered here. (No one wants to pay top dollar anymore to take a selfie with a T. rex looming in the background.)

But a small puff of air, stirred up as an enormous glass door to a dinosaur's cage slides open, drives that wrapper into a vent. This causes a malfunction and crashes the lab’s computers just long enough for the technician to become a meal for the specimen lurking inside the cage. (If only the deceased had remembered a gentle owl's advice: Give a hoot, don't pollute.) You barely glimpse the thing that eats the technician — its massive skull is obscured by lots of hissing steam and red light — but it must be about the size of 50 million wrappers.

Directed by Gareth Edwards (2014's Godzilla), Rebirth itself is one humongous piece of candy. It could easily feed all of America's movie-going children. And since they probably won't be getting more than a few dolls for Christmas, shouldn't they be allowed to enjoy this summer treat?

Rebirth begins, actually, with something more like redeath: A number of years after the reconstituted Jurassic dinosaurs were released into the world, they’ve just about all of them conked out again. The remaining species are clustered down around the equator with its more hospitable heat, humidity and lush, tangled vegetation.

The entire region has been declared off-limits for humans — you won't find any mention of it in Lonely Planet — but it's about to be visited by an illicit band of tourists. One of them is Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend), a shady pharmaceuticals bigwig who wants to develop the world’s most effective heart medication using dinosaur blood samples. (They may look like evolution's sad sacks, but those dinosaurs were impressively hardy while they ruled the earth. Have you ever heard of a brontosaurus keeling over from a stroke?)

This mission requires Krebs and a secret team to travel down to Dino Land and get those samples from three separate species — one aquatic, one land-based and one capable of flying. (Why? If there’d been a dinosaur that had wheels for feet, would that have to be studied too?)

The team is led by Scarlett Johansson as Zora Bennett, some sort of high-caliber, grade-A mercenary-operator (her name suggests an unusually exotic Jane Austen character). She’s joined by an eminent paleontologist, Dr. Henry Loomis (Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey, who's much less interesting out of knee breaches and buckled shoes), and riverboat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali, always interesting no matter what the role or film).

They all wind up being stuck on a tropical island, along with a family (led by papa Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) whose sailboat was destroyed by a monster that looked like a giant rancid pickle with teeth.

This island, by the way, happens to have been home to that secret Jurassic engineering lab. The employees are all long gone, perhaps eaten, and the mutants now roam freely. It’s a reptilian freaks’ paradise.

I apologize for that chunk of exposition, but Rebirth takes its own sweet time —about as long as the Pleistocene Age, it seemed to me — before it finally gets its story set up. Once that's accomplished, though, the movie is a happy thrill ride, a string of stupendous (and stupendously silly) scenes in which the mutants go after the castaways.

There’s no need to spell out these scenes out in any detail, other than to say that they’re as variedly and richly imaginative as anything you might have seen in the old 1961 classic Mysterious Island or 2005’s epic King Kong.

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In other words, this is where director Edwards’ grasp of visual scale comes into play so effectively and rewardingly. He’s a world-creator, a skill that hasn’t been as common in the Jurassic films as you might have wished.

Rebirth unfolds across a formidable, often beautiful landscape of crags, jungle, rivers and ruins, both modern and ancient. Edwards can generate a sense of awe and suspense — real emotional tension — with just a shot of Johansson and crew making their way through an enormous field of tall grasses. He has a gift for evocation.

And his work with the dinosaurs is inspired without being showy. The creatures move confidently across the island's terrain, both vast and cramped, and often emerge with a vampire's stealth from shadows, smoke and night itself. Or they swoop into view from up in the air, gobbling down the occasional human in a few lusty gulps.

You may be having too thumpingly good a time to even care about how much narrative thread remains to be spooled. I sure didn't. Rebirth is one of the best films in the whole Jurassic franchise.

It's turned out to be a lucky thing for modern civilization, and Hollywood, that dinosaurs, unlike most monsters, don’t seem to stir up any deep, primal discomfort. A Cro-Magnon zombie might.

Jurassic World Rebirth is in theaters July 2.