Customer Reviews

T-Rex - Back to the Cretaceous (IMAX) [VHS]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Picture if you will excited little me hunched in front of the TV set playing "T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous" on my DVD player. The film starts with a boring story of a neglected daughter whose dad is a paleontologist...oops, I nod off here for a while, then the story continues as I watch the time counter on the DVD ticking past 20 minutes, then 25 minutes and I'm thinking, "HEY! WHERE ARE THE FREAKING DINOSAURS, MAN?" Next I pick up a magazine...still waiting for DINOSAURS then HOLD ON! There's a couple of seconds of dino action then...THE CREDITS? This movie is a complete waste of time! There are probably about two minutes of dinosaur action tops among the boring, modern-day boring (did I say that already) incredibly boring story! .... This is really a total [disappointment].

Stick to the Discovery Channel series on Dinosaurs and Prehistoric beasts. They are much more informational and done much better. This is a story about a girl's desire to please and impress her father rather than about dinosaurs. The actual segments with dinosaurs in them are fleeting. It attempts to make a point about proving and disproving theories but that gets a little lost in the story line and is never really clarified.

I suppose that a young girl's hallucinatory wanderings (after she gets a whiff of petrified dinosaur egg dust) was meant to be entertaining and informative. Her after hours ‘trip’ through a natural history museum trying to justify her T-REX laid eggs theory turns out to be just boring. Wow, look at all these plants. Whoa! Hey! We do actually get to see a couple (five or so) of the critters for a few minutes, and in their original 3D IMAX presentation they might have been quite startling leaping out at you from the screen. I wanted to know more about dinosaurs, not get 3D thrills which were confined to the original IMAX presentation. These dinosaurs don’t have much impact on the home video screen. The lone T-REX even turns out to be friendly enough to get a pat on the nose from our tripped out heroine. And wait! The petrified rock hatches! Now that’s really informative science for the kids, I’ve been around for 6 decades and even I had not known that petrified eggs could actually hatch (and of course the hatchling leaps out at you from the screen). Maybe I should get to the museum more often. I guess that might make 6 dinosaurs in the movie with two T-REXs.....

I saw this when it was at the local IMAX. Don't even bother. Poor story line. Too much time on the young girl. Just wasn't worth it.

Better would be to see the Discovery Video series: Walking with Dinosaurs (1,2,3) or When Dinosaurs Walked America.

This boring IMAX movie scared our 3-year-old so much that we had to leave before it ended. Less plot than a 1950s drive-in monster movie, but the same concept: human vs. monster, accented by dark creepy scenes giving you the feeling that a deadly beast is hiding behind the next tree. We expected interesting visual science, not this movie that may forever distort our son's feelings about nature and the unknown. Bah!

I went to see T-Rex thinking I would gain a little knowledge about dinosaurs, but was completely wrong. Within the first five minutes, and seeing about 10 closeups of the girl's face, I was counting down the time until it was over. I almost started laughing in the theater when the girl ran along side the T-Rex after another egg-stealing dinosaur yelling "Leave that egg alone! Thats not your egg!" Did they think that this senario was realistic?

What a total piece of crap! It's hard to imagine that even the special effects in an IMAX theatre could have redeemed this disaster. For one thing, how would there have been time to have all that many special dinosaur effects when most of the movie revolves around one very uninteresting little girl?

Apparently, someone thought that it would be a great idea to pass off a juvenile feminist tract as a dinosaur adventure. It was not a great idea. Anyone expecting to learn anything about dinosaurs or even see all that many dinosaurs in this production is going to be very disappointed and is going to feel very deceived indeed.

To give this DVD even one star is an insult to movies which do deserve at least one star. This rotten piece of work doesn't even deserve one star.

Save your money and buy one of the truly well-done DVD's out there about dinosaurs and the prehistoric world. "Walking With Dinosaurs," "Walking With Prehistoric Beasts," "When Dinosaurs Roamed America" and "Prehistoric America" are all very good. Don't waste even a penny on "T-Rex - Back to the Cretaceous!"

This is one of the few IMAX "educational" films to have a storytelling presentation. It's 3-D was well shot for the IMAX format (70mm film). An IMAX 1.44 format is close enough to a standard 1.33 TV video, that it should translate to DVD well. It also comes with a "making of" short featurette.

The film centers around the daughter of a paleontologist, who's induced imagination brings the museum's displays to life. A few (good) educational encounters with historic figures, and realistic (though brief) prehistoric lifeforms, are interwoven by a father/daughter storyline and a contrived, disoriented, hallucinatory run through the museum.

So, why only 2 stars? An attempt to add storytelling to education, without being firmly committed to either (or both), leaves everyone expecting more than this film provides. Little boys will find very little dinosaur sightings here, along with too little action to hold their attention. Little girls might identify with the lead character, but it's not likely to have enough storyline to be their favorite DVD. Adults will find the children's "edu-drama" well under their heads (something you'd like to show your child, but too dull to watch by yourself). This is not at all a bad film, but there's just too little of the good stuff.

Film fans will be disappointed that the well done 3-D isn't presented here...even though the film is only 45 mins long, and the DVD could easily have included a field sequential 3-D "bonus" version, which would've sold the DVD the same way 3-D sold this IMAX film in theaters. This film was written to be shot in 3-D, and technically executed flawlessly for IMAX 3-D presentation. I'd buy a 3-D version of this DVD in a heart-beat!

IMAX is HUGE, so the impressive size is lost on a TV...and 70mm film versus DVD quality is like illustrating an atomic blast with a BB gun.

The only thing that could be of value is if there was a thorough "making of" focusing of the rules of 3-D filmmaking (and IMAX) versus standard filmmaking, which would pull in the 3-D lovers and film students.

I saw this at an Imax theatre, I was thinking what awesome potential seeing dinosaurs in 3D would provide. Boy was I wrong, there was around 10 seconds of CG dinosaurs in this, and they were badly animated. The rest is the most banal story imagineable about a girl and her quest to find an egg or something (I forget, it was _that_ dull).

Check out Walking with Dinosaurs instead.

I saw this in the Smithsonian with my kids, and even with the novelty of seeing a movie in 3D it was *boring*. It was a complete waste of time and money.

If you are looking for eye candy, there are very few scenes that actually have "live" dinosaurs. If you are looking for science, and you're over 5, I doubt you'll learn anything new.