Dinosaurs Better Off Lost

Whether it’s The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield or Paranormal Activity, there’s one thing that unites all “found footage” films–the protagonists are idiots who blindly blunder into danger. More often than not, we meet an unsuspecting group of contented, naive teens or twenty-somethings just before something awful happens, and the addlepated idiots just make things worse. (If they made sensible choices and made it to safety, there wouldn’t be much of a movie.) According to an IGN review, the same can be said of The Dinosaur Project.

I mentioned the dinosaur-ridden pseudo-docudrama a few weeks back. The film’s trailer didn’t inspire much confidence. Between the tired format and the poorly-rendered prehistoric creatures, The Dinosaur Project looked best suited to a late-night drinking game. Every time you see a malformed dinosaur, take a shot! Even worse, IGN reports, the film’s acting is absolutely atrocious. “It’s probably bad to want the protagonist to die throughout a movie,” the review says, “but such is the grating nature of the main character in The Dinosaur Project, that it’s impossible to not wish ill upon him.” Even in fiction, where anything is possible, expeditions to find mythical dinosaurs in Africa end up being terrible disappointments.

The Dinosaur Project - Crypto Clip

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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.