STACK #167 Sept 2018

OPINION

of

5 GREAT DINOSAUR MOVIE MOMENTS

WHEN DINOSAURS RULE THE SCREEN They've been extinct for around 65 million years but dinosaurs have dominated the movies for almost a century now, continuing to evolve with each leap forward inVFX.

KING KONG (1933) Kong saves Ann Darrow from the jaws of a T-Rex – and a Pteranodon.

Words Scott Hocking

K ids love dinosaurs, and Kingdom (2018) currently sitting in fifth and twelfth position on the all-time global box office chart, respectively, it seems adults do too. It's something you never really grow out of, and everyone has a favourite, with Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Ankylosaurus, Allosaurus and Velociraptor usually topping a poll. As far back as the silent era, dinosaurs were capturing the imaginations of moviegoers in The Lost World (1925), thanks to the work of stop motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien, who would bring the prehistoric beasts back again eight years later to fight the mighty ape in Merian C. Cooper's classic King Kong . Today's audiences are spoiled with cutting edge CGI effects, but way back when, the brilliant stop motion creations of O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen exerted a similar 'wow' factor. Three of my all-time favourite dinosaur films feature the sterling work of Harryhausen: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), One Million with Jurassic World (2015) and Jurassic World: Fallen Stop motion wasn't the only way to bring dinosaurs to life on screen, with many films opting for the cheaper alternative of sticking a big fin or horns to the back of an angry iguana, and then enlarging it photographically. Needless to say, the effect was cheesy and couldn't compete with a finely sculpted Harryhausen Years B.C. (1966), and The Valley of Gwangi (1969).

dubious appearances, like the ridiculous teaming of a T-Rex and Whoopi Goldberg in the buddy cop comedy Theodore Rex (1995). When Jurassic Park opened in 1993, I was as excited as a six-year-old when that brachiosaur made its first appearance, and totally lost it when the T-Rex broke through the fence. This was the dinosaur movie I had always wanted to see as a kid. Moreover, the central idea of Michael Crichton's novel was genius – a dinosaur theme park created by extracting DNA from amber-preserved insects. Kudos to the combined efforts of Steven Spielberg, Stan Winston and ILM, who managed to achieve the impossible by bringing the book convincingly to the screen. The Jurassic sequels upped the species count before starting to invent their own, like the genetically

creation rampaging through a miniature set.

Old school effects look positively prehistoric to kids born in a post- Jurassic Park world, as nostalgic parents who've sat them in front of a Harryhausen classic will attest. But for the generation who grew up with these films, stop motion dinosaurs will always have a special place in our hearts. Dinosaurs continued to flourish in the interim between stop motion and the CGI revolution, becoming a film genre unto themselves. If there was a lost island to be explored, or a journey to the centre of the Earth to be undertaken, you could bet there would be dinosaurs involved. The animated variety were also popular, with the adventures of cute brontosaur Littlefoot in The Land Before Time (1988) spawning 13

KING KONG (2005) Kong tackles two T-Rexs in the best scene in Peter Jackson's remake.

THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS The Rhedosaurus rises from the depths to take a bite out of the Big Apple.

THE VALLEY OF GWANGI Allosaurus vs. elephant in a Wild West show with a difference.

sequels. There were also more

There are still so many cool dinosaurs we haven't seen yet...

engineered Indominus rex and the Indoraptor. With T-Rex now the hero and the raptors trained, these bespoke "abominations" provide

JURASSIC PARK "Where's the goat?" T-Rex makes an unforgettable entrance.

the franchise with its super-predators, but there are still so many cool dinosaurs that we haven't seen yet – Gigantosaurus, Dimetrodon, Iguanadon, Protoceratops, Plesiosaurus and other marine carnivores. So where next for the dinosaur film? Further Jurassic movies will follow, but how about an adaptation of Flesh from the pages of British comic

2000 AD ? The concept is a corker: time-travelling cowboys return to the past to harvest dinosaurs for their meat, in order to feed a hungry future. It's a movie just waiting to be made, although given the gory nature of the comic, HBO would probably be a better fit.

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