Its a movie.Ī Formidable masterpiece, especially Cyrus CrÃ¥bb!!!!! I thought it was amazing, I don't know why you have to be so negative.
The 2-star rating is more for the DVD's supplemental features than the actual movie. There are a handful of deleted scenes, various trailers for other Hallmark productions, the requisite cast & crew information, and silly little Maze Game, and a handful of DVD-ROM extras. One of the coolest features is the 3-D Photo Gallery, which delivers all the dino creatures in rotating 3-D graphics, complete with sounds. (Dare I say the features are more entertaining than the main feature?) There are three behind-the-scenes featurettes: The Making of Dinotopia which is precisely the interview-laden, wait-till-you-see-our-movie puff piece that the title implies, an Interview with Trevor Jones which offers a glimpse at how a lengthy piece of family entertainment is infused with the appropriately majestically soaring music, and a rather cool look at the Storyboards process.ĭino-freaks should enjoy the Dinotopia Encyclopedia, which offers a Travel through Dinotopia map, a wealth of actual Dinosaur Data, and a translation of the Saurian Alphabet used in the movie. Either way, Artisan Home Entertainment has packed some rather cool features onto this 2-disc set. If you’ve got kids who want to sift through some special features after a four-hour movie, then you have some amazingly well behaved children. Who knows? You could hit the Parent’s Jackpot: if your kids end up enjoying this mammoth affair, you just got a babysitter who works in four-hour blocks. The content is certainly family-friendly enough for the wee ones, but I’d say give it a rental first. I found Dinotopia a painfully trite and wholly silly affair, though there’s no telling how your kids may take to it.
The two leads offer precisely one emotion apeice: one’s moody, one’s awestruck. Katie Carr (as Dinotopia’s lilting princess) brings a fragile paleness to the proceedings the likes of which haven’t been seen since Jennifer Beals offered her interpretation of Frankenstein’s bride.
The acting is uniformly TV quality, though generally reliable actor David Thewlis manages to add some entertaining touches to his too-few scenes. and actually learn something in the process! Sure, there’s heaping helpings of CGI dinosaurs lurking here, there, and everywhere - but I can see that on a Discovery Channel special. just icky.) Subtle socio-political brainwashing aside, nothing in the script for Dinotopia comes close to being worthy of your attention. (And I haven’t even gotten to the scenes in which humans and dinos are emotionally linked. It would be a sweet idea if it weren’t so damn creepy. If that’s not enough to have your eyes rolling, just get a load of Dinotopia’s codes: nobody eats meat, nobody owns a weapon, everyone coos nicely, nobody ever disagrees. Sure, the concept might lend itself well to a novel or a comic strip, but in a movie - it’s just ridiculous. It seems that our two young heroes have surfaced on a land in which human beings and dinosaurs live together in perfect harmony. Their first encounter is with a devious scientist called Crabb, who offers them some information and some questionable advice. The lumbering plot centers around David and Karl, two bickering half-brothers who - courtesy of a poorly-photographed plane crash - end up stranded on the titular island. I think the commercials may be a slight improvement. I’d be willing to deal with a lot of advertisements for something of obvious quality…but in the case of Dinotopia.
Originally presented over three nights (2 hours each) on network TV, Dinotopia comes to home video on a 2-DVD set, and whaddaya know? The movie runs just under four hours! For those not real fluent in math, I’ll give you the short version: if you watched Dinotopia on television, then you withstood two full hours of TV commercials. Sure, you may have a few dino-loving rugrats who could embrace this bloated silliness solely due to the myriad creatures - but woe is any parent who’s forced to sit through this ridiculously plotted and criminally overlong spectacle. What a goofball idea this Dinotopia mini-series was, and it’s certainly no better in execution than it was in inception.