There, paleontologists. You now have your feathered
dinosaurs. Happy now?
Similarly to my werewolf undertaking earlier this
year, it would seem that I have now found myself stumbling into yet another B
movie quest, this time in search of decent dinosaur movies.
“Dinosaur Island” sucks. It sucks, majorly. No
surprises there but the one thing that I found myself consistently focused on
during the hour and a half long test of patience through rapid fire irritation
that this flat out lazy production dares to call a film was how much I’d rather
be watching “Raptor Island,” a film so bad that it makes Roger Corman’s “Carnosaur”
look like “Jurassic Park.”
Perhaps I will someday cross paths with that
illusive prehistoric, scaly, and potentially feathered unicorn of a movie. Today,
however, is not that day.
“Dinosaur Island” follows Lucas, a boy that is apparently
a major geology nerd, who ends up on an unexpected adventure when he is
teleported from his plane ride onto an island that seems to exist as some sort of
nexus between time and space on earth, sucking in people and animal from all
sorts of different eras of history, including, of course dinosaurs. It’s here,
before even the 10 minute mark, that the film thoroughly begins to fall apart
on two ends that make no hesitation to turn the entire work into an irritating mess
from start to finish.
As the 5 or so pages of fake positive reviews
spammed on IMDB will repeatedly tell you, Dinosaur Island is inarguable a kids
movie. Ignoring the fact that none of the island’s mechanics are ever explained
in the slightest, on a conceptual level, it completely fails on that level of
escapism. Lucas has no interest in Dinosaurs at all. He has to be told by his
fellow castaway Kate, a paleontology expert despite barely even looking 16,
much less having the knowledge to carry out professional zoological study, that
the creatures out to eat him for lunch are dinosaurs.
That’s not even getting into the beyond laughable
CGI, sucking all fearsomeness out of the brightly feathered beasts and making
them look more like giant turkeys and ostriches than the fantastical
prehistoric predators that the film wants them to be so desperately accepted
as. It wouldn’t have even been so bad were it not for how much the filmmakers
seem to lavish in their interaction with the human children onscreen, leading
to moments abound of clipping and awkward physical interactions left and right.
You probably shouldn’t be so proud of your special
effects if they look worse than 9 year old episodes of “Doctor Who.”
So you have a movie about Dinosaurs in which, the
dinosaurs aren’t very impressive and have little bearing on the plot or predicament
of the characters. Add in the excruciating runtime and the only question left
to ask is, does it get any worse? As a matter of fact, it somehow does.
The acting in “Dinosaur Island” is downright atrocious.
I have seen modern Nickelodeon children’s sitcoms, with better performances
than the cue card line reads that these kids give.
Lucas looks like he’s constantly squinting to read
his lines off camera and Kate’s performance would be embarrassing in a Junior
High School Holiday pageant. These kids have a long ways to go before they’re
even passable but the adults aren’t exactly off the hook either. They alternated
between cartoonishly one note and dry as though to indicate how little they
really wanted to be here.
It would almost be hilarious were it not so heavily
focused on. Between these 2 badly acted leads lacking in any chemistry sitting
at the center of a package with nothing to enjoy, “Dinosaur Island” is a 90
minute experience that feels over 2 hours long because there’s almost no time
during its run that you don’t want it to just end.
And the less said about the offensive dark skinned
spear chucking tribe that arrives and leaves with no bearing on the plot
whatsoever, the better. What little credit I’m giving this movie for
unintentional mild comic value is probably overly generous.
½ Shatner
Bottom Line: Just go rewatch “Jurassic World” like
every other sane person on the planet.
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