While I don’t believe we are done with the found footage gimmick, films like The Dinosaur Project prove that there is a chasm of difference between a solid film and the also rans. An also ran like this.
The world is abuzz. A sighting of what is believed to be the first dinosaur in millions of years has been reported in deepest darkest Africa. With such a momentous announcement you would expect a massive investigative team financed by billions of corporate dollars must be inevitable… so it’s disappointing that it’s about 4 adults with a couple Go-Pros, and a kid that stowed away on the plane.
And that’s only where the disappointment begins.
When the plane crashes after a collision with some giant winged beasties leaves the team in dense unexplored jungle, criss crossed with meandering rivers and the deepest jagged ravines. With all means of communication lost, the crew seem to be woefully ill prepared, seemingly having read the Dummies Guide to Being a Dummy. They bicker and disagree, and that’s before the dinosaurs show up, small ones, medium ones and biiiig ones, and not every dinosaur is a herbivore.
Because of course there are dinosaurs. Everywhere dinosaurs. So many dinosaurs that it’s amazing to think no-one discovered them sooner. With teenagers, foolish adults, and a huge number of computer generated creatures from eons past, The Dinosaur Project is an inspired work of genius, bound to generate tens of millions of ticket sales from a delighted public… except for the fact that Jurassic Park did it twenty plus years ago, and even with the advances in technology in the past two decades J Park is 147 times better than this.
The CGI isn’t lamentable, just mediocre. It is the acting and plot that is cheap and nasty. Again if the film was the first of its kind you might forgive its shortcomings, but making a painfully thin rip-off of a genre classic, that’s a project doomed to fail.
Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. This is an extremely short film without much to discuss beyond the premise. Speaking of the premise watch Jurassic Park.
