Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and… Dinosaurs?

What do Brad Pitt, Sean Penn and dinosaurs have in common? According to Hollywood scuttlebutt, the answer is a soon-to-be-released film called The Tree of Life, but it doesn't sound like it's going to be your usual prehistoric-monsters-run-amok film.

Details of what the movie is actually going to be about are minimal. Set in the midwestern United States in the 1950s, The Tree of Life is said to be a drama about the lead character's quest to find the meaning of his life. What dinosaurs have to do with that, we can only speculate. The presently favored hypothesis is that the dinosaurs are a holdover from an earlier film project by the director of The Tree of Life, a project that got scrapped. That unmade film, called Q, was meant to be about the life and death of the universe, and it appears that some elements of it has been brought into The Tree of Life.

Aside from the questions surrounding the plot of the film, however, it sounds like the dinosaur scenes will be quite impressive. As the movie will be presented in IMAX, the dinosaurs will be life-size, though I will wait to see some reviews before I shell out for a ticket.

Riley Black | | READ MORE

Riley Black is the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and many other books. She is a science correspondent for Smithsonian magazine covering fossils and natural history, and she writes about the prehistoric past for a variety of publications.