Bloody hell, it's T. rex Autopsy

If you happened to dislike a certain highly profitable movie that was released recently (and I know a few people who would have good reason to), you may be consoled that there is an antidote at hand. Someone's only gone and made a TV show that involves the intricate dissection of an anatomically correct Tyrannosaurus carcass - a programme that combines the most up-to-date science with stunning practical effects work. It also features Steve Brusatte digging his way through gory theropod innards, which I will accept as fair penitence for that horrible coffee table book. It's National Geographic's T. rex Autopsy!

The life-size T. rex model. Photo from Nat Geo's official site, copyright Nat Geo Channels/Christopher Albert, and used on the assumption that they'll probably be cool with it...

Most dinosaur documentaries concern themselves with sensationalist, noisy battles between computer-generated beasties with a bloodlust only matched by one of George W Bush and Tony Blair's quiet meetings at Camp David. Very occasionally, something good does break through, as it did with the well-researched, John Hurt-narrated Planet Dinosaur from four years ago (Christ, where did the time go?). The best dino-docus are able to thrill the viewers with science; you've seen an incredible event happen, now see how scientists know it happened. T. rex Autopsy did just that.

The premise of the show was that a T. rex carcass had been found...somewhere (Costa Rica was not mentioned), and the government (seemingly the British government) and spirited it away to a hangar on a military base somewhere, never to be seen again by anyone except a select band of ne'er-do-wells. These included 'all-action vet' Luke Gamble; palaeontologists Steve Brusatte and the amazingly named Matthew T. Mossbrucker; and palaeo-biologist Tori Herridge. Together, they would literally delve into the belly of the beast (and the leg, and the face) to figure out how it lived and why it died.

This show is catnip for dinosaur enthusiasts, and especially those who are still thrilled at the sight of a T. rex skeleton in a museum, who will well know that a dinosaur doesn't have to be alive to take your breath away. Each section of the creature was created in astonishing detail; one of the consultants for the show, Dave Hone (for it is he), has interviewed visual effects maestro Jez Gibson-Harris on the creature's creation, and it's well worth a read. The realisation of this model can be regarded as an enormous (in every sense) achievement for everyone involved - 13 metres long, and filled with blood, guts, muscle, bone, partly-digested food, eggs and even eyeballs.

The team. L to R: Matthew Mossbrucker, Steve Brusatte, Luke Gamble, and Toni Herridge. Photo by Nat Geo Channels/Stuart Freedman.

 As a dinosaur geek, part of the thrill of this show is guessing exactly what the crew will happen upon next. I felt genuine glee when they encountered the animal's gastralia, never mind its avian-style respiratory system, complete with numerous air sacs. There is no compromise made for what Andrea Cau would call the 'dinomaniaco' crowd - this is a beast that has legs like an overgrown chicken, a carefully explained avian through-lung, and, yes, simple feathers over much of its body. While there is a little informed speculation, the majority of what is found in the beast's body is related to solid fossil evidence.

There was also a delight in having a lot of very neat, but often overlooked, dinosaurian features explained to a lay audience. At one point, Mossbrucker pointed Gamble to the animal's caudofemoralis muscle, a secret behind the dinosaurs' locomotory success. There was talk of Tyrannosaurus' keen sense of smell, but also of its superb eyesight. Indeed, the dissection of the eyeball was a wonderfully unexpected highlight of the show. Much was made of the fact that the animal was a sophisticated predator that was highly adapted to the ecosystem in which it lived. It wasn't a monster, or some sort of laughable reptilian throwback - it was real, and made to seem all the more tangibly real thanks to this programme.

Any downsides? Well, some of the CG life reconstructions felt like they were tacked on from a less worthy show, featuring as they did an awkward-looking tyrannosaur with eyes like the Cookie Monster (or '60s Godzilla) that took on a flock of incredibly foolish dromaeosaurs (nice plumage, though). But these hardly detracted from the main event.

If you haven't seen this yet, then please seek it out as soon as you can. It definitely doesn't keep popping up on YouTube in flagrant violation of copyright, ahem ahem. Upon watching it, you'll grin as widely as Steve Brusatte when he explores the tyrannosaur's intestines, or Tori Berridge when she rams her hand up the animal's cloaca, only to find that the theropd was fertile. First class, immensely enjoyable stuff, and a credit to everyone involved.

Marc's Jurassic World review: not your father's de-extinction theme park

Aptly enough, Jurassic World feels like a theme park ride, and certainly not one of the sedate, trundle-along-in-a-gyrosphere variety. It's a high-tech, towering, gleaming steel roller coaster, with a breakneck pace that very rarely relents (only when they need to force a little character development in). It's certainly enormous fun, a spectacle worthy of being seen on the biggest screen possible. What it isn't is a Jurassic Park movie.

I've tried to keep it brief, but as a warning, this might get unusually wordy.

Granted, the name change was probably for a good reason. Jurassic World breaks from the franchise thus far in numerous ways. The slow build-up of the first film and The Lost World is dispensed with. There's no need for characters to be coerced or manipulated in order to turn up on Dino Doom Island; the place is now a fully fledged tourist attraction. The film begins with two (largely forgettable) kiddiwinks, played by Nick Robinson and Ty Simpkins as the older one and the younger one, respectively, already on their way to an island just off the coast of Costa Rica.

Handily, they're off to visit their Aunt Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard), who seems to virtually run the place single-handedly. She also happens to be an especially uptight corporate bigshot who has walked in from a Paul Verhoeven movie, and is unwilling to see just how much of a better person she could be if only she would embrace motherhood and child-rearing and blahblahblah. Yes, the gender politics are indeed a little dubious in this one, but fortunately this stuff is mostly dispensed with near the start.

Naturally, Claire can't be arsed looking after her sister's lazily sketched children, so she sends her ever-so-English assistant to pick them up instead (yeah, thanks Hollywood). While Younger One (OK, Gray) is a wide-eyed dinosaur enthusiast, Older One (Zach) is a Surly Teenager who'd rather stare creepily at girls and check his mobile than deign to get a close-up look at a Tyrannosaurus devouring a live goat. And so the self-satirising begins.

You see, resurrected dinosaurs just aren't that big enough of a draw any more; like Zach, people have grown jaded, and falling profits are alarming the park's corporate sponsors. In conversation with expert dino-wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), Claire reveals in suitably business-bot tones how the park's management have decided to fix this problem - and, yes, it's with an oversized, extra-toothy monstro-dinosaur spliced with a smorgasbord of genes from different creatures.

I'm sure you've all seen the usual stills dozens of times, so here's something a bit different. Constantijn van Cauwenberge contacted us on Facebook, asking if we'd be interested in sharing his images of the JW raptors, but with feathers painted on. Sure would!

Much has been made in the online palaeo community* of the hybrid dinosaur, the 'Indominus rex' (or 'Verizon Wireless presents Indominus rex', as Claire would have it). Mostly, it's been criticised for being an unimaginative 'big mean theropod' with a mouth wide enough to drive a bus into, a rather sunken head and opposable thumbs, for some reason. However, as a misbegotten creation literally designed by committee, its design sort of makes sense. Of course it's unimaginative - it was cooked up by the marketing department.

Naturally, Owen is the first to point out that deliberately creating an animal with exaggerated predatory characteristics, and then keeping it in isolation for its entire life, is the worst idea in the long, sad history of bad ideas. It's not long before Indubitablus has outsmarted its captors and, with the help of its gene-spliced superpowers, busted out of its confinement. And that's when the fun starts.

For me, the most effective scenes in the movie are those that take place in the earlier stages of the Indiabolus' rampage. Quickly sprinting off into the jungle and tearing out its tracking implant, the creature has numerous thrilling encounters with the two kids (whom you don't really care about), Owen (whom you do - Chris Pratt on top eminently likeable form yet again), Claire and a host of ill-equipped InGen security goons, who are apparently deliciously crispity crunchety on the inside. Mmm.

There are some surprisingly potent moments of tension as the Indianapolus, which apparently kills for the sheer thrill of it, stalks its human victims - superior to anything seen in the other two sequels, and almost up there with the Main Road sequence from the original. There's even room for a good dinosaur-on-dinosaur setpiece, as the hybrid freak takes on an ankylosaur. Furthermore, a scene that could quite easily have been inadvertently amusing - Owen and Claire coming upon a trail of slaughtered apatosaurs in what was formerly Happy Herbivore Valley - manages to be genuinely rather sad. Poor old bronto.

This being LITC and all, I should probably go into more detail about the animal reconstructions. Basically, from a scientific perspective, they are pretty much all atrocious. Even the aforementioned Apatosaurus lack the real animal's absurdly fat neck, and have skin that is best described as pachyderm-meets-Gurche. Stegosaurus have correctly upright tails in one scene (a la The Lost World), only to have droopy Burian tails in the next. The raptors long ago ceased resembling real animals, and are now firmly entrenched sci-fi monster characters - they've even shed their JP3 quills. By far the worst are the pterosaurs, which are skeletal, screaming nightmare banshees seemingly based on William Stout's earlier work, with added monsterising.

Another of Constantijn's tweaked screenshots. The feathers aren't strictly accurate, of course, but then they're GENETICALLY ENGINEERED WITH FROG DNA and there is science FICTION, gawd. When in doubt, stick key words in uppercase. Anyway, check out Constantijn's site, Conz Comics!

 Now, much is made in the movie about how the dinosaurs aren't real dinosaurs, or in the words of lead geneticist Dr Wu (a role reprised by B D Wong, who has not aged a day), not 'pure'. Reflecting what many apologists...uh, fans have been saying on t'internet, Wu points out to hilariously absent-minded CEO and inept helicopter pilot Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan) that his creations are built on a hodgepodge of DNA from different animals, and don't represent reality. "You didn't want reality - you wanted more teeth." Fair enough, but also rather lame. The techniques have been refined since the first film - we should be closer to the Real Deal. And it would just be so, excuse me, awesome to see more up-to-date dinosaurs on the big screen - it would replicate the thrill felt when seeing Jurassic Park for the first time.

But this isn't a Jurassic Park movie. The dinosaurs are avowed freaks and monsters - the movie declares itself a monster flick, and then sits back and watches the carnage unfold. Sure, the carnage is a hoot - especially when the freak-o-pterosaurs descend on a crowd of tourists in Hitchcockian fashion, or InGen troopers take on mere reptiles with rocket launchers - but the wonder is gone. The film wants to have its cake and eat it, with characters popping up that are essentially stand-ins for sceptical audience members** - "the original park was legit, they were content with real dinosaurs" - but in the process becomes a little too knowing and clever-clever.

I want to see dinosaurs in my dinosaur movie, damn it. Godzilla was last year.

So, yes, you will be entertained. It's well-paced, thrilling, and manages the odd humorous beat, too. You'll grin at just how far Colin Trevorrow is willing to push at the limits of what is acceptably absurd, and clearly everyone involved thoroughly enjoyed making this movie. But, sadly, the Jurassic series has ceased to be a dinosaur franchise. I'd be tempted to say that it's eaten itself, but that's not quite true. It has lost much of the ethos that made the original so memorable, and that's a little sad. Go and see it, but don't expect the world.

Finally, I'd like to discuss the film's ending, which is when it goes completely batshit crazy. Of course, serious spoilers will be involved, so anyone who hasn't seen the film should probably stop reading now.

*See Brian Engh's Twitter hasthtag #buildabetterfaketheropod, and all the art that spawned, much of it excellent, the rest (intentionally) hilarious.
**Thanks to Niroot for astutely noting that one.

...

Right - the ending. Good grief. It was to be expected that Indubbelus would not be stopped by mere ordinary dinosaurs, least of all a gaggle of puny raptors. However, the treatment of the T. rex as the true hero of the franchise has now reached new levels of hilarious absurdity. As the giant door of Paddock Nine rose inexorably upwards, and the grand old dame slowly lumbered forth, eyes glinting in the darkness, the scene was only missing a Spaghetti Western flourish on the soundtrack. And then...and then, it teams up with the lone surviving raptor. And then...that still isn't enough to finish off the Inkillablus, which by this point has endured attacks from high-powered tasers, bullets, an ankylosaur club and a near-direct hit from a bloody rocket launcher.

So we require a squamate-ex-machina, as Charles Knight's steroidal mosasaur (which must weigh about 200 tonnes) beaches itself in order to drag Incredidiblus to a watery grave.

And then...the T. rex and raptor, those former foes, give each other a mutual look of respect, before wandering off.

I'm just surprised they didn't go further. Where was Spinosaurus? T. rex could have tag-teamed with her, putting aside old animosities in order to take down the GM impostor. And then, as it collapsed to the ground, it could have been swarmed over by a horde of Compsognathus land piranha. All set to one of the WAR! themes from Serious Sam. Maybe something for the sequels, along with making sure that King Ghidorah turns up - haven't seen him in a while. Crossover, anyone?

Forewarned is forearmed

Image courtesy of SimplyWallpaper.net

I was with Marc on that solemn journey to the 'Shiny Multiplex Enormodome' to see the Walking with Dinosaurs film. There is very little that I can add to his review, given that we are pretty much in exact agreement and Marc has already mentioned all the points he and I discussed in the post-movie debriefing. Nor do our opinions differ greatly from the near-universal verdict that it is, in effect, a stunning visual treat marred by inane dialogue.

Having gone to it with this already in mind, however, I didn't find that dialogue quite as intolerable as I had anticipated (though, make no mistake, I would have longed for its absence to begin with), a view shared by some reports, including those of Darren Naish and Gareth Monger. The latter found it easy enough to mentally 'switch off'. Like Marc, I even found Alex's narration surprisingly palatable in some parts, and perhaps that should have been the extent of the script, if it was felt necessary at all. The whole was fairly endurable enough until the fight between Patchi and his brother, Scowler, during which the exchange took an evisceratingly embarrassing turn in resembling a scene from a dreadful high school drama. The sequence, much like so many others, would have been entirely spared this indignity had it been speech-free. Even the arguably sillier visual jokes and slapstick would have worked organically and induced fewer groans if the silent storytelling had been left untouched. The soundtrack complaint extends to a degree to the music. My genuine enjoyment of the orchestral score was abruptly bridled by the sudden introduction of Barry White when Patchi first encounters Juniper amid a cloud of butterflies, for example. Incidentally, later in this sequence -- and quite after the Barry White had been dispensed with -- I was amused to recall David's mention of Cyrano de Bergerac as the pudgy young Patchi trotted back day after day to the waterfall in hopes of meeting the rosy Juniper again, but I digress...

 It might be superfluous of me to say more with regard to the beauty of the animals and the animation, but it is worth emphasizing once more. I refer you once again to Marc's description in lieu of my gushing further on the rendering of skin, scales, and feathers, or the palpably alive movement of flesh and muscle.

If the bathos between the sublime visuals and the ridiculous soundtrack is galling for dino-geeks, then, how much more so is it for the artists behind the creation? If it is true that the executive Pooh-Bahs bowed to the opinion of test screen audiences in the retroactive introduction of the script, then my heart is doubly heavy. My frustrations with the greater public's penchant for turning tea into soda are too great to mention and certainly too close to home in my own profession. Nobody can be at a loss to follow so simple a story, or to identify -- and identify with -- the characters, so well conceived and delineated in their designs. I wonder, were folks always so dense when they watched the numerous dialogue-free Pixar shorts? And what of Wall-E? Or what of Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed? The list goes on.

I conclude by reiterating Marc that 'the artistic and scientific talent behind this film do deserve our support'. The plain fact of the matter is that the hope of more such films being made in future does rest upon sales, and perhaps we may hope, however feebly, that the collective intelligent response to this film may bend a few ears of the powers-that-be. Thus forewarned, go and see this film, and hold fast to its merits.

Missing Kenneth Branagh

I never thought I'd miss Kenneth Branagh quite as much as I do now. Nevertheless, having solemnly journeyed to my local Shiny Multiplex Enormodome to see the Walking With Dinosaurs movie, it's the slightly over-earnest tones of thespian Kenny that I long for. For you see - and forgive me if you've heard this already - WWD 3D features dinosaurs that talk. And talk. And talk.

Talk v teeth. Image from here.

Apparently the victim of test screenings attended by morons and/or jittery studio heads, WWD 3D is, as every other review thus far has noted, a film spoiled by disastrous dire-logue. If only the apparently telepathic dino-speak were occasional, they might have got away with it. Alas, the pachyrhinosaur protagonists of the piece see fit to yammer away over absolutely everything. It's as if the writers are afraid that kids today are so psyched up on refined sugar and Moshi Monsters that they'll lose interest if so much as a minute passes without a character sounding off.

What's most galling about it, for us dino geeks, is that underneath the dialogue-by-machine and misplaced pop music, there is an absolutely stunning piece of palaeoart in motion. Make no mistake - these are far and away the most accurate dinosaurs yet to appear on film, and more than that they are a convincing presence in the world they inhabit. The backgrounds are live action, and yet the CG animals appear completely at home. They are also rendered with the utmost love down to the tiniest scaly (or feathery) detail, which is hardly surprising given the artistic talent involved. Animals only have to walk into frame for one to be struck by the realistic movement of muscles beneath skin, and when they bellow, their flesh strains and their guts shake beautifully. The feathered animals - and there are plenty of them, including dromaeosaurs and troodonts - are gorgeous, and easily the best yet seen on screen.

It's a pity, then, that the animals aren't allowed to simply be animals. As has been noted elsewhere, it's often dishearteningly obvious that the film was never intended to have such extensive dialogue. Of course, there is a very light level of anthropomorphism evident in the character design - real reptiles never have such expressive, mammalian eyes (with white sclerae and all) - but the animals nevertheless have a highly realistic appearance, and were all real-world contemporaries. Disney's Dinosaur this ain't, and a little artistic license is certainly forgiveable to sell the narrative to an audience with a built-in mammalian bias.

What's less forgiveable is the characters' need to narrate every aspect of their lives, as if children in the audience would be too stupid to figure out what's going on, or what the characters' motives are. I'm not known for being especially fond of children, but I feel the need to stick up for them here - they're really not that dumb. Furthermore, most child dinomaniacs want to see dinosaurs being dinosaurs - fighting and stomping and just looking grand - not chatting away like schoolkids. Even when protagonist Patchi goes nose-to-nose with his bullying brother Scowler - a perfect moment to let the audience revel in the spectacle - Scowler persists in chastising Patchi for "trying to steal his girl". Awful, cringeworthy stuff.

At various points, the creatures' constant chatter jars with what was obviously intended to be an animalistic response to a situation. When Littlefoot's mother dies in The Land Before Time, he is, as an anthropomorphised cartoon character with a human personality, expectedly distraught. When (spoilers) Patchi's father is killed by a tyrannosaur right in front of him, he and his brother appear to breezily brush it off within about five minutes. It doesn't make sense - but it would have done if the characters didn't speak, and were treated more like animals. Likewise for a stampede scene, in which the characters appear to blindly panic in contradiction of the dialogue - like animals would.

The simplistic plot would be a breeze to follow without the dialogue, and it's clear that this is what was originally intended. Take the speech away (save perhaps for John Leguizamo's surprisingly likeable narrator), and I have no doubt that a far more charming film would result. Tellingly, the audience's favourite moments at the screening I attended were completely dialogue-free (including an amusing trio of bickering azhdarchid pterosaurs).

There is much to savour in this film. Dinosaur enthusiasts will delight in the (all too brief) opportunities to gaze upon stunning vistas teeming with impeccably realised and researched prehistoric lifeforms. The dinosaurs are impressive, the landscapes are impressive - it's a visual treat. The artistic and scientific talent behind this film do deserve our support, and if it weren't for the moronic jabbering, I'd recommend it unreservedly. As things are, I'm crossing my fingers for a 'dialogue-free' option on the DVD. Or perhaps a replacement Kenneth Branagh track.