Friday, December 18, 2015

The Good Dinosaur (a movie review post)

Dinosaurs were my first great love, from the moment I saw my very first one sometime around the age of four. Maybe three. I was instantly fascinated with them, and it was my goal for about 10 years to be a paleontologist when I grew up. But that's a story for another time.

Dinosaur movies, though, are not that fascinating. Inevitably, like in The Land Before Time, dinosaur movies deal with the dinosaur apocalypse and one small group trying to get to safety. So it was that The Good Dinosaur promised to be something different. A movie where the dinosaurs don't suffer an apocalypse. A movie where they live. A movie about what might have happened if they had not become extinct.

Unfortunately, that moment from the trailer, that moment when the asteroid misses Earth and the dinosaurs don't die, that moment happens with the opening credits and is over in a few minutes. The movie goes downhill from there. Downhill into being nothing original or new at all. It's just a weird hybrid of Ice Age (deliver the human baby to other humans), The Lion King, and a bunch of other stuff you've already seen.

That said, the animation, the background animation, is amazing. It's so amazing that at times I questioned whether it was CGI or not. The dinosaurs, though, are cartoony, and don't really fit their environment. They stick out like the proverbial sore thumb.

The other good thing is Sam Elliot as Butch, the cowboy T-Rex. The whole thing with the T-Rexes as cowboys and the Raptors as rustlers was fairly amusing, and Elliot is the cowboy. I mean, you can't really get more cowboy than Elliot. It just oozes out of his voice.

But that's about it for the good.

The problem is that Pixar should have just let this movie die. When you have to, essentially, fire the guy who came up with the idea because he can't put the story together, you should start to re-think whether you should be making that movie. When, after doing the voice recording for the entire movie, you decide to re-write the script and re-record everything, you need to be re-thinking whether this is a movie you should be doing. Then, when you decide to dump virtually all of the voice actors and replace them, you really need to be thinking about whether this is a movie you should be doing. The Good Dinosaur was not a movie Pixar should have been doing.

I suppose I'm glad I saw the movie. Well, I am. It is a Pixar movie, and I wouldn't have been able to deal with just not seeing it, but, then, I wish I hadn't seen it. I certainly won't be buying it. It's the first legitimate failure from Pixar. There's no "Pixar" quality to it at all. It's mediocre at best, just as a movie, but, from Pixar, it's a disappointment. Completely.

10 comments:

  1. The cartoon aspect of the dinosaurs didn't appeal to me. Pixar was so solid in the beginning, but they've had a lot of hit and misses lately.

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    1. Alex: The misses have come since Disney acquired them and John Lasseter has taken his attention away from it.

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  2. I imagine it's both good and bad to be Pixar: a mediocre movie being a huge disappointment is a mixed blessing, because it shows how good you HAVE been.

    Pixar got the landscape background through a pretty unique process:

    http://www.wired.com/2015/11/pixar-sharon-calahan/

    I kind of think that after they went to all that work they felt they had to release the movie to recoup some of the money and time they'd spent. A lot of the stories about this movie were about the rewrites and reshoots. I thought the storyline sounded a little iffy anyway. The idea of dinosaurs forming a civilization is a neat one to explore, but the problem is that we think they'd form a civilization just like ours more or less. One problem with trying to think like an animal is that we only think like people. I write those "Two Frogs" stories and the like to try to imagine what an ANIMAL would act like rather than a person transformed into an animal. It's really tough.

    I haven't seen Brave yet, so I'm a few Pixars behind. I'll watch this someday, maybe. Sweetie tried to take Mr Bunches to it in the theater, but he got really scared right a the opening and came home. He was really distraught both by the movie and by his feeling like he was too scared to see it (we of course told him it was okay, he just seemed to feel like he let himself down.)

    If you want a REALLY REALLY interesting set of books about a dinosaur civilization and humans, read the West of Eden series by Harry Harrison:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_of_Eden

    I read that a long time ago and have never forgotten it. The dinosaurs evolved into a civilization well before humans and have science and stuff, and one of the dinosaurs raises a human, Kerrick, who then goes to join his own people. It's fascinating.

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    1. Briane: I was disappointed with Brave, too.
      I've read some Harrison, and he's not an author I think I want to go back to. I'll take a look at it, though, if I remember.

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  3. I had heard it was a surprisingly mediocre movie coming from Pixar. I can't believe they let it get made. Like there aren't other stories out there.

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    1. Jeanne: Yeah, I don't know. I guess it can be hard just to drop something once you've started investing in it.

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  4. Maybe this is the real reason dinosaurs became extinct. I'm definitely not encouraged to see this film unless my grandkids are watching it or some situation like that.

    Arlee Bird
    Tossing It Out

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    1. Lee: I don't think it's your kind of thing at all.

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