is as pointless as a movie gets. There's a start, then a complication then the end.
1. First of all, yeah another Disney movie where the dad/mom dies. What a flashing surprise... That's a stupid fad that's starting to get old. 70 years old by now, so we all should be used to it. However, for whatever subconscious reason this movie manages to bring up to the table how, old, stupid and needlessly this move is. Is predictable to no end by now.
In all honesty, it feels shoehorned into the movie, which could have been pretty much the same without the dad dying. Hell it could have been even better if the dad was alive since then you could have a story about him also looking for his son or something else, instead of the hour and half of magnificent digital paradises polluted by the most cartoonish and out of place characters ever (more on this ahead).
We get it, Walt Disney (presumably)felt guilty about his mom's death, GET fucking over it, the guy is already dead, you don't need to do his bidding any more, you are not Walt Disney. So unless his sitting upon the Frozen Throne and the studio gets orders via Walt's Tarot or something. Stop making the same fucking movie simply switching the settings.
Which bring me to the next point.
2. The movie set off with this great, what if scenario, and uses it to... nothing... No really, nothing comes out of this. The history would have been exactly the same with humans, monkeys, robots, aliens, bacteria, emos, muppets, anthropomorphic heavy machinery, rocks or a Eddie Murphy robot controlled by a tiny Eddie Murphy and a bunch of comedic relief idiots.
Beside showing us that had they not be vaporized by an asteroid, dinosaurs might have developed some really shady agriculture (they somehow managed to develop corn just like we did. Is this movie happening in Mexico? And how much food a gigantic dinosaur needs to keep itself alive through a winter? I bet that little silo didn't hold up enough even for the children, let alone the two adults) there's nothing much else to it.
3. Oh well it also show us that they would have devolved into cheap cartoonish creatures that are so remarkably different from the environment that makes you think they left character development and rendering to the last and ran out of money just before doing them. The characters look really.... stupid I have no other word for it. They are out of phase with the rest of the movie so hard that their looks are distracting to no end. Their heads are a testament that evolution is the survival of the squarest.
I'm not saying that the characters themselves are badly made, because they are not, and the production even keep details like bruisers constant and that's a nice detail. What I'm saying is that they feel out of place. Really hard. Imagine I don't know, if Saving Private Ryan was filmed with a repeating Hanna Barbera background of France with some baguettes and nazis dotted here and there and you should get an idea. The studio either should have made the dinosaurs and humans look better or the environment more cartoon like to match.
4. So far we have:
- A beautiful, beyond photo realistic world with majestic views.
- An interesting alternative history scenario.
- Dull and cheap looking(compared to everything else) out of place characters, but that still have potential and let's face it, is a children movie so some silliness is to be expected.
So let's make a great movie, something epic like The Land Before Time (the first one) or Men in the High Castle alternate history quality. But no, instead you end up with
Theodore Rex quality. Suddenly you expect that a cave woman Whoopi Goldberg will pop out any minute.
As already said not much happens on the movie. The dad dies (oh, I didn't saw that coming Disney, is nice to see you are keeping it fresh ._. ), the boy get lost, he encounters some mildly annoying problems, he overcomes his fears, get back home, credit rolls, Whoopi Goldberg doesn't appear.
If one watches this movie on mute, and somewhat removed the character layer from the video, you'll end up with a beautiful and stylish documentary about some beautiful natural scenarios, AND you'll still have seen pretty much the same movie anyway.
I guess the other only lesson is that humans would have evolved anyway, but just not that, but they would have evolved a sense of shame to cover themselves too. Something the dinosaurs, with those extra 64 million of evolution they got in this what if scenario didn't manage to do. How the fuck do you invent construction and agriculture but somehow forget pants along the way? Didn't they thought that some clothes could have helped to fare the winter better? Is evolution really the survival of the dressiest instead of the blockiest?