Leaping lizards

>>The IMAX 3-D doc Dinosaurs Alive! is heavy on the facts, light on the dinosaur fights

by MALCOLM FRASER

Along with magic, paranormal phenomena and outer space, dinosaurs are one of the universal phases that little boys (and a few of the nerdier girls) go through, before the deep jock-nerd chasm rears its head in pre-adolescence. Relatively few of us actually go on to pursue a career in palaeontology, but we’ve all put in the hours obsessing over dinosaur trivia and exercising our little brains imagining how cool it would have been to see the big lizards in action. So if there’s anyone in your family who’s going through this stage, you can bet they’ll be interested in Dinosaurs Alive!, the new IMAX 3-D movie showing at the Montreal Science Centre.

The first IMAX dinosaur film (at least since The Rolling Stones at the Max—sorry, couldn’t help it) is advertised with a giant, screaming T. rex head, but the actual sequences of dinosaur fights (which was the main attraction at least for me) are few and far between. Most of the film concentrates on the efforts of a team of palaeontologists to dig out new fossils from the Gobi desert and the badlands of New Mexico.

Along with copious beauty shots of these locations, a good deal of time is devoted to paying tribute to dinosaur hunters, including archival footage of Roy Chapman Andrews, a 1920s-era explorer believed to be the inspiration for Indiana Jones. Michael Douglas’s narration gives a breakdown of major dinosaur news in recent years, including updated theories on fossil preservation and the discovery that birds descended from dinosaurs (surely the cause of much consternation in the intelligent-design crowd).

There’s no denying that IMAX 3-D technology is pretty spectacular; you won’t find yourself recoiling to avoid getting smacked in the head by a swinging dinosaur tail in any other circumstance. I personally could have used more of such moments and less ponderous narration of scientific facts, but then my expectations of an IMAX 3-D film were forever altered by Siegfried and Roy: The Magic Box, one of the most thrillingly bizarre cinematic experiences I’ve ever had. Dinosaurs Alive! is really an educational film; for better or worse, it’s more broccoli than popcorn for the dinosaur fan in your life.

runs through September at
the Montreal Science Centre

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