I Hate To Say It, But Movie Dinosaurs Are Not Real
By Dan Brown Dinosaur movies are a thing of the past – and the future. Specifically the near future. This July will see the release of Jurassic World Rebirth, the latest chapter in the long-running series about the prehistoric creatures running amok in our time. This year will also see the debut of Primitive War, which is set in 1968 and fuses the dino flick with the Vietnam War genre (no release date has been set as of this writing). Then, down the road a little bit, Flowervale Street is among the Mesozoic Era offerings coming to the silver screen next year. There have been so many dinosaur pictures, you could trace the history of Hollywood using them, from the age of stop-motion animation to today’s CGI. They’ve gone from clumsy clay creatures to sophisticated computer creations. And that’s the problem. However much time and money the FX wizards in Tinseltown spend to convince us these monsters look like the genuine article, please refrain from calling them “real” or “lifelike.” We can do without any online comments this summer along the lines of, “The T-Rex in Jurassic World Rebirth is so realistic” or “I can’t believe how real that brontosaurus looked!” Because how would we know? There is no one alive on the planet today who has seen a velociraptor or stegosaurus in the wild. There are no photos of dinosaurs. There is no video. No primary-source records exist of how actual dinosaurs actually appeared. There are no dinosaurs in zoo settings for us to observe. They lived in the distant past, and while we have unearthed fossil proof of their existence, none of them left any Polaroids which humans can use to judge the “realism” factor of these movies. Unlike, say, the cowboys who populate the Western genre of movie – film fans can say with some confidence if a motion picture such as Tombstone or Wyatt Earp comes close to the mark. Photos of cowboys from the 1800s do exist. Now, to be fair, the people who say things like, “Steven Spielberg has created some authentic-looking dinosaurs” might not mean it literally. They might mean something else, such as “The dinosaurs in this movie accord with what experts currently theorize about the appearance of dinosaurs.” (And the emotions the screen lizards evoke – like fear and excitement – are certainly real.) But here’s the thing: Dinosaur experts who have predicted what these creatures looked like (and what the planet’s surface looked like back then) don’t always agree, nor do their opinions stay static. The thinking changes, and our shared concept of how dinosaurs appeared also changes. I am not a paleontologist, but I do recall there was a moment in the history of studying dinosaurs when the conventional wisdom changed – dinosaurs had more feathers, the media-consuming public was told some years ago. So the dinosaurs on screen changed with that shift in thinking. Guys like Spielberg want to get it right, they want to be up on the current theories. But experts can be wrong. I’m not trying to be conspiracy-minded. However, if the plot of Jurassic Park ever does come to pass in the real world, and humankind somehow manages to resurrect dinosaurs, it’s a safe bet we will discover that the conventional thinking is wrong in some important ways. For all we know, the fire-breathing Godzilla may be the most accurate depiction of a dinosaur that the movie industry has ever come up with. In which case, they better evacuate Tokyo as soon as possible! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
