Dinosaur Island (2014) Reviews

• Jurassic Park this ain't

  chrismackey19722014-11-17

  Lucas, a young boy, finds a crystal among his dad's belongings in an old house that neither of his parents want to take care of any longer. When the boy gets on a plane, the crystal begins to interact with the aircraft, causing it to disappear. The boy awakens on a beach far back in pre-history and shortly thereafter finds himself pursued by three raptors. A young girl - Kate - saves Lucas and takes him to her makeshift house, where she tells him that she is 16, and her birth year is 1940. Lucas informs her that she would actually be closer to 70 since the year is 2014. Throughout the movie, the two find themselves going through a few adventures. This movie was geared up primarily for kids, as the two leads are teenagers. Be forewarned that the dinosaurs look like they fell in an Easter egg coloring kit. The raptors were interesting to look at, but the tyrannosaurus rex looked ridiculous with all those colors. I'm not sure if there was a color in the rainbow they didn't put on that dinosaur. Speaking of the dinosaurs, I think they spent the vast majority of the budget on the special effects for the dinos. They were pretty good. Mind you, Jurassic Park has nothing to worry about. In JP, those dinos looked real. In Dinosaur Island, they looked very CGI, but they were much better than anything the TV series Terra Nova ever offered. I won't watch this movie again. This movie didn't appeal to me, but as I said, it was geared up for kids, and I'm 42 years old. The story was...childlike, as was the dialogue. If you have kids, and they really like dinosaurs, this might be the movie that will keep them out of trouble for about 1.5 hours. However, if you're an adult, and you're looking for a movie that will appeal to your level of maturity, this probably won't be for you, but we all like different things. I've seen Jurassic Park at least 30 times, and I'll watch that many more times. I saw Dinosaur Island once, and that will do for me.

• A real stinker!

  childs_kate2015-01-25

  I live in Spain and bought this movie from Amazon UK for my eight year old. I'm really annoyed at the fake positive spin surrounding this movie. I watched about half of it with my daughter and had to turn it off because it was such rubbish. This is NOT Jurassic Park where the animation even some 20 years ago was brilliant! The dinosaurs looked like giant muppet canaries and floated along with no weight. The actors looked like they were in front of a blue screen staring un-focused at imagined objects - I've seen better acting in school plays. All of that aside, the director simply failed to get us to care about the characters, so I turned it off with simply no interest in how it ended. Don't waste your time and money on this film. (Is there a way to rate this movie less than 1?!)

• A missed opportunity

  gafmonger2015-05-04

  I'm reading a lot of reviews claiming that this is the "worst film ever". It's not. There are easily two or three worse films. The problem for this film is that it sells itself as a serious piece of dinosaur-themed sci-fi, as if going head-to-head with the JP franchise is something easily achieved. Unfortunately, we're now judging it against a tough set of criteria, and this film was never going to pull it off. In short, the acting is poor, the story is dull and the daft sci-fi approach doesn't gel with the scientific approach. The CGI isn't utterly terrible, but they overstretch themselves. There has been some effort to update dinosaur and pterosaur portrayals, but overall, they're flippin' awful. The 'azhdarchid', or whatever it is, is unbelievably bad. Seriously. See if it's on Youtube so that you don't have to sit through the whole thing. The tyrannosaur stands around yelling at everything, and only when everything is already half a mile away does it give chase. Your kids might like it, but just make sure you're not stuck watching it with them.

• Awful on many levels

  monkey_bean102014-10-30

  I bought this on a whim from a local shop as my 4 year old son loves dinosaurs. The storyline in his film is abysmal and the acting is even worse. It's not remotely enjoyable, it feels like a chore. I'm aware this film is aimed at children, but there are plenty of kids films out there that can be enjoyed by adults too. This isn't one of them, and even my son gets bored during this film. The special effects are terrible too - the dinosaurs look more like brightly coloured fluffy chickens than anything else. I can only assume this film was a straight to did release as it's become very clear as to why I hadn't heard of it before!

• A classic joke

  ushalg2014-10-24

  This is officially one of the funniest movies i have seen in a long while. What makes it even funnier is the fact that they are not aware of the great joke they have created. This could best pass as a kids movie but never the less it could have been better constructed. The actors were extremely disappointing even for kids, there was no substance in their acting. The main boy was so bland and fake i actually had to make sure i wasn't watching a very HD animation and he had the worst reactions and facial expressions for almost everything that happened in the movie. The dinosaurs were far from scary more like 2D paintings slapped on screen. Then the native tribe? LMMMMMAAAAAAOOOOOO the language sounded hilarious, like they got a bunch of African American kids to mutter gibberish( e.g Fasil loose when their team mate got lost), couldn't stop laughing. Would certainly recommend to anyone in search of something to make them laugh their head off.