Dinosaurs Alive

Don't just walk away from this clunker - run! There is nothing new at all covered in this sub par documentary styled fiasco. Any child that's studied dinosaurs in grade school already knows what this one's all about.

The opening sequence was a great indication of what was yet to come - cartoonish dinosaurs do battle - and manage to walk across a sandy plain without leaving a single footprint.

Then the movie resorts to shots we've all seen hundreds of times - yep dinosaur skeletons. Again, nothing new.

But wait, next we are going to go on a real dig - in Mongolia. At first you think at least the scenery shots will be fantastic, but they are out of focus, totally taking that away from the experience.

More disappointment as we move to Mexico and more blurry scenery and lack of story.

Intersperse these shots with incredibly horrible CGI shots of water and sand floods - I'm talking incredibly bad effects. First year students would do at least 20x better.

Also be warned before you shell out your hard earned money - this is one short movie.

Definite skip.

This movie is pretty good for kids and especially in 3D which is how we saw it. There is a lot of science but my two boys are now spending time on 'digs' in our yard. Thedinosaur fight scenes are great and the dinosaurs aren't too scary but are still very realistic. I've seen quite a few IMAX movies and this one is one of the better ones. My boys would say the best one. 3D is getting better with new technology and this movie proves that it has come a long way. Michael Douglas is OK with the narration. If you are a parent or teacher, I recommend this dinosaur movie, but see it in the theater because it works best to see the dinosaurs IMAX size(or close to it). Eight collective thumbs up from my family of four.

I think every young boy goes through the stage of dinosaur obsession at some point. I certainly did and my two boys can't get enough of them either. So along comes "Dinosaurs Alive! 3D." Now this should be a summer holiday winner - it's got dinosaurs...perfect. They are presented alive...tick that box. AND it's in 3D...should be awesome!! What could go wrong? Everything.

Firstly the Dinosaurs. A more appropriate title for this would be Palaeontologists Alive! This IMAX film spends way too much time following the exciting exploits of a couple of grad students travelling to deserts and digging holes. Sure, there are a few spots where we see some dinos - often just walking on the spot as some sort of graphic. But if you want wall to wall dinosaurs forget it. This is just a documentary mainly pitched at adults...and quite a boring one too.

Now for the "Alive!". Nah. They're dead. Really dead. Fossil dead. We see fossils. Lots of them. It's about finding fossils it the desert. Again we get a bit of dinosaur action here and there, but even that's to illustrate how they died. Putting the word Alive (with an exclamation mark if you don't mind) in the title is a bit rich.

And the 3D. The 3D effects are good as they always are at IMAX. There were a couple of good T-Rex roaring in your face moments and one bit had me jumping in my seat. But mainly the 3D is used to show titles, footage from the 20s in front of a desert, and how a palaeontologist uses a little brush to find a fossil. At one point is shows how far apart 5 palaeontologists sit from each other. Basically, there is no real point for this to be 3D. At one point one of my boys took the glasses off. I told him to put them back on. He replied "What for?" Enough said.

So, if your kid has a dinosaur obsession take him to this...if you want to stop it. This film engages in everything boring about dinosaurs. It's a stinker. Use your hard earned money to hire Jurassic Park or, if you want a doco, Walking With Dinosaurs. You'd probably go better with Land Before Time in fact. This just isn't worth it.

Checked this one out over the weekend trying to beat the heat. My time and money would have been better spent opening a hydrant and paying the fine. Out-of-focus boredom, from start to finish. The effects were pure 1991 Discovery Channel. Most of the film was spent watching paleontologists and students digging in the dirt. How utterly fascinating. I came away learning more about the canopies they use in Mongolian digs than I did about dinosaurs.

The kids in the audience seemed really bored, too. The advertising sets this up as being chockful of dinos, but they're few and far between.

Save your $10.50 (or whatever the overpriced IMAX tix run at your local science center). This is the "Battlefied Earth" of IMAX movies.

This movie shows about 2 minutes of recreations of dinosaurs actually being alive. My son, who loves dinosaurs, thought the movie was OK, at best. 95% of the 40 minute movie includes shots of deserts and badlands from the air or boring, staged interviews with scientists. Calling the film "Dinosaurs Alive" is misleading, to say the least. For me, it was the worst IMAX movie I've ever seen and hardly deserves to be even put on the screen.

We saw it at the Chabot Science Center in Oakland and it cost the two of us $25. Luckily that included entrance to the center which helped improve the experience (a bit - but that's for another review).