Smithsonian.com

Paleontologists continue to find fascinating dinosaurs, such as this young Teratophoneus on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah. But will we ever see such creatures featured in a great dinosaur movie? Photo by the author.

It has been almost 20 years since Jurassic Park came out. That film—a heavy-handed morality fable about leaving Nature well enough alone—remains the best dinosaur film ever made. Even the two sequels didn’t come close to the quality of the increasingly dated first installment. And all this makes me wonder: Will there ever be another great dinosaur movie?

Most dinosaur movies are awful. That much is beyond dispute. (If you disagree, watch the Carnosaur series and get back to me.) The fact that dinosaurs are made-to-order movie monsters—easily accessed through conceits of time travel, lost worlds and increasingly, genetic engineering—has made them top picks for films in need of charismatic creatures. And more often than not, the dinosaurs are only there to threaten our protagonists as the embodiment of nature’s wrath. The only thing that changes is exactly how humans and dinosaurs are brought in contact with one another. And that’s the critical element so many screenwriters and directors have skimped on.

I have no doubt that dinosaurs will always have a place in Hollywood. The more we learn about them, the stranger and more wonderful they become. And despite being discovered over a century ago, Tyrannosaurus rex remains the uncontested symbol of prehistoric ferocity. As much as I love dinosaurs, though, I can’t help but feel that the creatures are poorly served by the scripts and plotlines that invoke them. Jurassic Park, based on Michael Crichton’s bestselling novel, was magnificent because it outlined a new route for dinosaurs to come stomping back into our world. The film gradually traced the story of how the dinosaurs came to exist and used that premise to present further mysteries about how creatures that were supposedly under human control could come back to power so quickly. The movie, like the book, wasn’t so much about dinosaurs as it was about our desire to control nature and the unexpected consequences that come out of that compulsion.

Jurassic Park worked as well as it did because of the human story. As ham-fisted as the plot was, the overarching commentary about the manipulation of nature drove the story. (The original Gojira trod similar ground before. New, powerful technology spawned horrific consequences.) The film wasn’t perfect by any means, but it’s still the best of what prehistoric cinema has to offer. Dinosaurs served the storyline. The storyline didn’t serve the dinosaurs. And that’s where so many dinosaur features have failed. Spend enough money and hire the right experts, and you can have the best dinosaurs money can buy. But without a compelling story, those monsters will aimlessly wander the screen, chomping up whoever blunders into their path. Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong featured a slew of dinosaurs, for example, but the computer-generated creatures were only there for massive set pieces. And while the virtual dinosaurs ably fulfilled their roles as ferocious antagonists, they were there only to threaten Kong and the imperiled human crew.

Well-rendered, carefully crafted dinosaurs are an important part of any movie featuring the prehistoric creatures. But a good story is just as important, if not more so. What’s the good of bringing dinosaurs to life if you’re constantly rooting for them to thin out the annoying and aimless cast? That’s the way I felt about Jurassic Park III—I kept wishing that the Velociraptor pack would enact swift vengeance on most of the film’s principal players. And during Disney’s cloyingly anthropomorphic Dinosaur, all I wanted was for the silent Carnotaurus to dispatch some of the yammering herbivores.

With the exception of movies that feature only dinosaurs, such as the aforementioned Dinosaur, dinosaur films are about the relationship between humans and creatures like Triceratops. Like any other monsters or creatures, dinosaurs are best used when exploring grander themes—often about time, evolution, extinction and how we interact with nature. Without that component, you might as well be watching a violent video game that you can’t actually play. A monster works only if it means something—if there’s some lesson to be learned from the curved claws and ragged jaws.

I certainly hope that there will be another great dinosaur film—a movie that isn’t just a hit with fans of the prehistoric but that can stand on its own merits as art. A new way to bring people and dinosaurs into contact would certainly help open new possibilities, but even among the classic subgenres, there’s still plenty of opportunity to write human-centered stories that employ dinosaurs to keep the narrative moving along at a brisk pace. I don’t think that Jurassic Park IV, if it ever comes to be, is going to do much to revitalize dinosaurs in cinema—especially since it seems the story is going to revolve around genetically engineered abberations—but we are only really limited by what we can think of. Dinosaurs don’t have to be kitsch, kid’s stuff, or ineffectual monsters. In the right hands, they can again embody our fascinations and fears. I eagerly await the day when such dramatic and deadly creatures once again stomp across the screen.

Are you excited for Battle Lizard?

Remember “Dino-Riders”? The super-cheesy cartoon—with oodles of toy tie-ins, of course—about aliens which battled each other on the backs of laser-mounted dinosaurs? The show went off the air long ago, but now a Kickstarter film project has revived the notion of dinosaurs as weapons of futuristic war. The project is called Battle Lizard.

Details about the film are scant. According to the short’s Kickstarter page, Battle Lizard is set in “a time-twisted post-apocalypse, where a cavalry soldier (played by Gil Darnell) tries to lure his steed out of hiding so they can confront their fate together. And by ‘steed,’ we mean dinosaur.” The video shows off some of the completed shots, although the project is still trying to raise funds for the special effects work required to bring the dinosaur to life.

The concept sounds like fun, although I’m not especially enamored of the dinosaurian steed’s design. Surprise, surprise, the dinosaur’s basic shape is that of a Velociraptor, but with a big nose horn and an array of spikes that make the animal look more like a dragon than a dinosaur. I adore Jurassic Park as much as the next dinosaur-loving cinephile, but with so many strange and wonderful theropods to choose from, yet another augmented dromaeosaur feels a bit bland. And then there’s the meme that just won’t die—dinosaur bunny hands. This may seem like a relatively small complaint, but there’s a big visual difference between a dinosaur that holds its hands in the silly, palm-down position and a more bird-like animal with the proper wrist articulation. It’s the difference between a generic monster and a creature that more closely approaches what dinosaurs were actually like.

Dinosaurs have been stomping and roaring across the screen for as long as there have been movies. Stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien made a career out of bringing dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures to life. Most of O’Brien’s early efforts were short films, but he was also behind the first major paleo-film, 1925′s The Lost World, based on a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. Taking cues from the work of artists like Charles R. Knight, O’Brien made Allosaurus, “Trachodon,” Triceratops, “Agathaumas” and other dinosaurs dance for the camera.

I have often heard that audiences were so blown away by the special effects of The Lost World that they thought real dinosaurs had been captured on film. An oft-cited 1922 article in the New York Times about a screening of a test reel for the movie gushed that Doyle’s “monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces.” But this wasn’t a review of the film itself. The reference to “the ether” is a clue.

The hyperbolic New York Times article was an account of Doyle’s stop at a meeting of the Society of American Magicians in Manhattan. His interest in supposedly supernatural phenomena created a synergy with the magic of cinema. After losing many close family members, including his wife, Louisa, and his son Kingsley, Doyle sought out comfort in the popular spiritualist movement of the early 20th century. He often pondered the prospect of life after death, the existence of fairies and other paranormal gobbledegook, although Doyle did make some discernment about what he believed. At the meeting where he showed off the animated dinosaurs, he expressed his gratitude to magicians such as Harry Houdini who debunked the claims of “false mediums” and other frauds, even though Doyle felt that skeptics who tried to debunk the spiritualist movement as a whole were dealing with a subject they did not understand.

Doyle knew that the footage he previewed had been created for the upcoming movie, but he refused to answer any detailed questions about what he showed. Were the dinosaurs just special effects? Or did Doyle truly have some way to project images from a prehistoric past? He wanted to keep his sympathetic audience guessing. Doyle said the clips were “psychic” and “imaginative,” the breathless reporter wrote, but that’s all the author had to say about them.

When the finished film premiered in 1925, New York Times film critic Mordaunt Hall submitted a mixed review. The Lost World suffered from “the unnecessary inclusion of countless protestations of affection by both hero and the heroine at inopportune moments,” Hall lamented. “[T]o hear a young man mattering about his infatuation for a girl in the midst of [battling dinosaurs] is grotesque,” he wrote, though he noted that the problem “can be remedied by generous cutting of such scenes.” This is a lesson for those who feel modern movies are only a pale shadow of the great films of the past—what is true of Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean series and Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise today was also true of The Lost World.

Hall had kinder words for O’Brien’s dinosaurs. “[S]ome of the scenes are as awesome as anything that has ever been shown in shadow form,” Hall wrote. But he didn’t think he was seeing images captured in a real lost world or transmitted to the screen from another time. After all, dinosaurs had already made several appearances in short films, courtesy of O’Brien, and Hall recognized them as the special effects they were. He even mentioned how certain techniques helped to create the illusion that the dinosaurs were actually huge. “In the initial scenes these monsters were shown without any double exposure effects, and therefore their supposed huge dimensions could not be contrasted with human beings,” Hall wrote, “But later, in the double exposures, the effect is remarkable.” (Furthermore, after the 1922 article about Doyle’s stunt, the Times issued another article in which it mentioned that Willis O’Brien was creating the dinosaurs for the film. By the time the film was out, people already knew the dinosaurs were fabrications.)

The Lost World was remarkable for the detail of its dinosaur stars, as well as the diversity of the prehistoric cast. But, even though cinema dinosaurs were relatively new, they were not unprecedented creatures—no more magical than cinema itself. The trick, which remains a challenge to this day, is getting viewers to forget they are looking at special effects wizardry and wonder, just for a moment, if those movie monsters are still roaming around somewhere.

Terra Nova's dopey Carnotaurus. Despite being sold as a prehistoric extravaganza, the show never really delivered on the promise of fantastic dinosaurs.

I heard the news late last night. After just one season, Fox has cancelled the prehistoric family drama Terra Nova. I can’t say I’m especially surprised or saddened by the decision. Terra Nova was the epitome of mediocrity right from the start. The series was heavily hyped—”Spared no expense!” the commercials seemed to shout—but it immediately became bogged down in cloyingly cute family values storylines that dictated that everything turn out okay for the Shannon family at the close of each episode.

But this may not be the end of Terra Nova. The show’s creators are shopping the series around to other networks. Who knows? The Shannon family might continue its mundane exploits on the SyFy channel or elsewhere. Even though the show has been removed from its original habitat, it is not necessarily extinct—Terra Nova may yet find a niche elsewhere.

If the series does continue, it would be the perfect time to give Terra Nova an overhaul. There are plenty of broken bits that need fixing. One squeaky wheel, identified by University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz, was that “[W]e are given a glimpse at the world and society of the 22nd Century, but the colonists show no signs of having grown up in that society. Instead they (surprise, surprise) act just like early 21st Century suburbanites!” None of the characters behave as if they came from an oppressive future or were dumped in an unfamiliar past.

The show’s dinosaurs didn’t do much to help the situation. The reason the show was set 84 million years ago, during the Santonian stage of the Cretaceous, is that very few dinosaurs are known from this span of time. Creature creators had free reign to create new, magnificent dinosaurs. Instead, we mostly got familiar faces—brachiosaurs and Carnotaurus—with a mixed-bag of all-purpose raptors. Even worse, the show’s creators didn’t know what to do with the dinosaurs. While dinosaurs regularly featured in early episodes, they all but stepped aside in the final story arc. Dinosaurs appeared only when it was convenient to the story for them to do so, and they looked like terrible lumps of digitized flesh and bone when they did.

Terra Nova’s poorly envisioned dinosaurs would have been forgivable if the rest of the show was strong. It wasn’t. The show was hampered by a chronic lack of originality. From the very beginning, Terra Nova had a bad habit of lifting bits and pieces of setting and plot from other shows and films. Near the end of the show’s initial run, I outlined the following recipe for Terra Nova: “Take all the cringeworthy gooshiness of a 1990s family drama; borrow some plot points from LOST; apply liberal spoonfuls of science fiction tidbits from Avatar, ALIENS and Star Trek; then hit ‘liquefy’ and pour out a show that is so overly sweet that you think your teeth are going to fall out of your head.”

And when the show wasn’t lifting tidbits from other sources, what were intended to be major story twists were painfully obvious. The big reveal at the climax of the first season was that people of the future had set up Terra Nova as a way to exploit the resources of an untapped prehistoric past. The plot point closely echoes a story Poul Anderson published in 1958 called “Wildcat,” in which an oil company maintains a base to collect resources from the Jurassic and send them to the energy-starved future. I predicted that Terra Nova was moving in the same direction after the very first episode. Terra Nova was so painfully intentional with every step that viewers could always stay ahead of the plot.

A comparison with The Walking Dead might be helpful here. Granted, a primetime network drama would never be able to get away with the gore that weekly splutters all over the place on the zombie-infested AMC show, but The Walking Dead still shares some essential characters with Terra Nova. Both series center on families placed into unfamiliar worlds in which they must contend with monsters outside the gates and threats from the people they have taken up with. What makes The Walking Dead different is that the show is willing to explore the hardships of trying to survive in a very different world, and everyone struggles. Major characters are injured, die, or wrestle with dilemmas over the course of multiple episodes. Not so with Terra Nova. The show was fully committed to everything turning out just fine at the end of each episode. Not that I’m saying Terra Nova should have been as dark as The Walking Dead, but how you can possibly develop characters if the show’s primary goal is to have everyone end up safe and sound at the conclusion of each episode?

Terra Nova never reached the potential of its premise. The worst part of this, as TIME‘s TV critic James Poniewozik rightly notes, is that the show’s failure might have a chilling effect on networks when other big-budget science fiction shows come up for consideration. Could Terra Nova be the last LOST wannabe, the one that effectively erases science fiction from primetime for a while? Maybe.

If Terra Nova eventually reappears, I can’t imagine that it will be the same. Costs will probably be cut and we might see some shakeups in the cast. This could be a good thing. The failure of the first run could act as an impetus to reconfigure the program into something worthy of the show’s setup. Even if not, at least dinosaur fans will still be able to see badly rendered cgi dinosaurs on screen. Basic cable science channels will undoubtedly keep serving us ugly pixelated dinosaurs.

I’ve never been a “Doctor Who” fan, but any show that devotes an episode to dinosaurs is  alright in my book. In the above video, Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks talk about how the clunky, stiff dinosaurs in the 1970s episode “Invasion of the Dinosaurs” came to life (or, as it were, not).