Finally, a dinosaur movie that has dinosaurs that aren't genetically engineered and don't live on a fictional Costa Rican island.
Oh hey a new dinosaur movie not tied to the Jurassic World mess, maybe now we can get dinosaurs that actually look like the designers tried to make them halfway accurate and—-oh god dammit its just Jurassic World knockoffs.
I am shocked no one on here is talking about how this is pretty much the same premise as Beast Wars. Spaceship on an exploration mission appears to time warp onto prehistoric earth scattering stasis pods across the planet in the process.
Well, lucky me. It screened in my country a little earlier than the rest of the world so I got to see it earlier. It's a sequence of events with a start and finish. The dialogue is minimal and doesn't waste its time figuring out what the planet is or what the creatures are The "Dinosaurs" were also barely a note with probably 5 minutes of screen time in total. Spoiler Adam Driver is a space explorer from another planet in a time before mankind, so it's not a time travel plot, but a human looking alien from another planet who crashed on prehistoric earth. The focus of the movie is Driver's character "Mills" trying to reach an escape pod that got separated from his spaceship with a little girl who he found in the last working cryostatis pod. The girl speaks a different language from him so they can't rely on words to communicate. Note the movie was pretty short at 1 hour 35 minutes. We spend the majority of time seeing our 2 characters moving from point A to point B. All creatures encountered were more nuisance than life threatening since they have all the space tech and gun ready for everything. Ironically it was nature that tried to kill them more than the dinosaurs. Insects, trees, rocks, sandpits almost killed them more than once. Everything else just shoot at it to kill or scare. The dinosaurs that looked like dinosaurs were okay like the raptors, Oviraptor and Tyrannosaurus, but then you have the weird 4-legged reptiles that looked too alien for the world with their extremely long and thin limbs Ironically it was the Pterosaurs that looked the best
"It's the kind of film I'm not gonna remember, not in T-minus 1 day (Yep, already forgot)" Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 35% - "Sodden sci-fi that somehow finds a way to bungle Adam Driver fighting dinosaurs, 65 is closer to zero." Metacritic Score: 40 out of 100
How the heck can they make a movie that could have been almost like Turok so... boring? The added "we have 12 hours before the meteor hits that causes the extinction of dinosaurs" is also face-slappingly dumb. And no, they never explain what the hell humans are doing 65 million years ago on another planet. I wonder, would it have been too hard for the director to slap some prosthetics on the 2 actor's faces and make them Star Trek-y aliens? That was the only good thing in this movie. I hate the ugly chicken designs. Accurate or not. Oh so it is one of those movies where you have seen all the action scenes if you saw the trailer? Ouch. But this is apparently Earth since they even included the meteor and show a montage at the end on how life develops after Dinosaurs. So it is head-scratching why they put in some weird reptilian carnivore not based on a real creature. Maybe they had that model made for another movie already, LOL.
I like to headcanon that some dinosaurs were ugly chickens and some weren’t. Some feathered raptors look perfectly badass accurate or not, like the ones in Dinosaur Planet and When Dinosaurs Roamed America. Some non-feathered raptors admittedly feel more juvenile as time goes on, like, sadly, some of the Jurassic Park. I think I’m getting tired of dinosaurs being portrayed as psychopathic constantly hungry and constantly aggressive monsters more than anything. The Indominus Rex and Indoraptor were one thing, being Frankenstein’s monsters specifically made to be as psychotic as possible. But you have stuff like the Carnotaur in Fallen Kingdom still picking fights and trying to hunt humans when there’s a volcano in the background, Trevorrow claiming the Giganotosaurus is the Joker (it decidedly wasn’t). Even though this looked kinda cool, the idea of dinosaurs as monsters in a survival horror story just doesn’t do it for me anymore. Adam Driver, I’m not sure if this is his first bomb or not where he’s the lead, but he’s good enough that this won’t choke his career thankfully.
