DINOSAUR movie reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Dinosaurs Rule; Dinosaur Doesn't

In the earthshaking footsteps of Godzilla (various films, 1955-1998), Land Before Time (various films, 1988-1999), Jurassic Park (1993, 1997) and A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (a 1991 jewel that I somehow missed) comes the new Disney feature, titled Dinosaur, as if it encompassed, fulfilled, and concluded the whole genre of dinosaur movies. That’s quite a genre, beginning in 1914 with Gertie the Dinosaur and with a new Jurassic Park sequel planned for next year. The truth is, this film, as good as it is in some ways, suffers from several bad cases of split personality.

First, there is the split between the stunning computer graphics and the very disappointing story. "You have never seen anything like it," the ads trumpet, but the truth is, we have, just recently, for free, in the stunning BBC production, Walking with Dinosaurs, which has been shown several times on the Discovery Channel. Like the computer-generated dinosaurs of the movie, the digital dinos on television are placed in real settings photographed around the world. One reason to prefer the television version is that the producers tried to find sites with plants that match what we know about plants in the Mesozoic Era (the time of the dinosaurs). Mainly, that means sites with no grass. Also, the BBC dinosaurs seem to fit into the surroundings more realistically.

A special problem with the Disney dinosaurs is that since they talk, their faces have to have a softness and flexibility that is not appropriate. Also, there seem to be some problems with size and perspective. I am not sure about this, but some of the dinosaurs seemed to change size from scene to scene in relationship to each other. Still, there's no denying that the graphics are amazing, especially in the opening sequence that tracks the egg from the ravaged nest to the island.

Those graphics ended up costing over two million dollars a minute, but they are wasted on a story that is not even typical Disney fare: it's not that good. The hero Aladar is an iguanodon brought up by a family of lemurs. This is another of the peculiar splits in this film. As far as I know, this is the first time that a dinosaur movie has starrred iguanodons, very significant dinosaurs. The iguanodon was one of the first dinosaurs discovered, named, and studied in the early nineteenth century, and I believe it was the first dinosaur for which a complete skeleton was found. But, on the other hand, lemurs and dinosaurs did not exist at the same time.

Aladar and his adopted lemur family end up with an enormous herd of migrating herbivorous dinosaurs that provides some of the most incredible graphic effects in the film. I was especially impressed to see scurrying among the giants several specimens of stygimoloch, a dinosaur discovered only in the last decade or two and not yet a fixture in the popular imagination.

Now, of course, in a Disney movie, we are going to expect anthropomorphism, human emotions attributed to animals. But here, the extremely detailed graphics make that anthropomorphism (which isn't a problem in The Land Before Time, which has so shaped a generation's perception of dinosaurs) ludicrous. One problem with a dinosaur story is that just about all we know is who ate whom, and so the stories have to be violent. This film, for instance, more than earns its PG rating for images that I don't think would be appropriate for small children. I know that the afternoon I saw it, it sounded as if several kids in the auditorium were having problems.

With a plot as episodic and illogical as U-571--instead of another leak we just throw on another meteor shower--Dinosaur ambles on. It seems much longer than its eighty or so minutes. The herbivores, facing the wrath of Kron (a tyrannical iguanodon), are bullied on to the "nesting grounds" with some rather philosophical arguments about the good and the safety of the few or the many. With nary a tyrannosaurus rex in site, the carnivorous villain (of course, in a Disney film, the carnivores are villains) is the carnotaurus, the horned horror whose name means "meat-eating bull," certainly the stuff of nightmares.

There is young love, Disney-style, with Aladar meeting the lovely young iguanodon-na Neera, who in the film's climactic scene shows what girl power is all about. There are two memorable characterizations in the old friends, Baylene and Eema. Joan Plowright brings tea and crumpets to the personality of the enormous brachiosaurus Baylene, while Della Reese sounds positively angelic as the styrachosaurus Eema. Once again, I appreciate this film's dino-diversity, not relying on the brontosaurus (which we now should call apatosaurus) for the big dinosaur or the triceratops, the favorite of children and a close relative of the styrachosaurus, for her little buddy.

But, there is a serious problem with these two old gal-pals. Dinosaurs have been extinct for some sixty-five million years, but they roamed the earth almost three times as long. To have a brachiosaurus and a styrachosaurus ambling along together is as incongruous as to have a tyrannosaurus attack a car as in Jurassic Park. Dinosaur also has some geographical problems also. Iguanodons have been found only in Europe, and no brachiosaurus or styrachosaurus has been found there. Imagine a film about modern day animals that had polar bears stalking kangaroos on the plains of… Africa.

OK, just last week I was willing to overlook some historical inconsistencies in Gladiator. Am I just picking on the poor old Disney studios? At least in Gladiator, there is a consistency of mood, a general believability: this is the way people might have acted. But Dinosaur just stretches too many points.

And then, there are the lemurs. Oddly, in such a masterpiece of computer graphics, the lemurs look cartoonish. Unfortunately, they take up about as much screen time as the dinosaurs (why wasn't this called Lemur?), and they are serious contenders for the Jar Jar Binks award for the most obnoxious characters on film. Do we really need to hear that one of them "put the prime in primate" or that another refers to himself as the "love monkey"? For that matter, I could have done without Neera's dismissal of Aladar as a "jerk-osaurus." Somehow, I don't think these dinosaurs are going to be all that marketable, and Disney needed something cute and cuddly to pick up a few more millions with.

No matter which portrayals of dinosaurs you prefer, it’s interesting to remember that when the first iguanodon fossils were found, their spiked thumbs were so unlike anything ever before seen on an animal that they were drawn with horns. The stygimolochs darting in and out of the thundering herd in Dinosaur are in fact known only by part of one skull. So, we have to keep open minds about these things. Perhaps in a century, our current visions of stygimoloch will seem as strange as those old pictures of horned iguanodons seem to us.

While I have very mixed feelings about this film, I am very sure of my sadness on learning of the death of the great actor John Gielgud. Although his name has never been well-known to American movie audiences, except for his Oscar-winning turn in 1981’s Arthur, the Internet Movie DataBase, the source of all the information about dinosaur movies earlier, lists 130 films for the actor, ranging from 1924, when he was 20, until 1998. Keep your feet dry, not hard to do with the weather we’re having lately, your heart full of noble thoughts, and your ears rejoicing over the melodious voice of Sir John, which will live on, even though he does not.