Review of The Dinosaur Project (2012) by Tom P — 07 Sep 2012

What an absolute let down. The makers of this film should seriously feel ashamed of themselves. They fail to create an interesting narrative or make a believable found footage film. The Dinosaur Project follows a group of documentary filmmakers and explorers as they travel into deep dark Africa to investigate a reported dinosaur sighting.

They soon find a whole society of dinosaurs roaming free. The film fails because it seems as though it wanted to have a conventional narrative, but chose the found footage genre to save some money. This leads to painful dialogue and the most obvious characters you could think of.

They even try shoehorning in a typical villain, which makes no sense given the danger everybody is in. The film doesn't seem to care too much about sticking to its premise, as camera shots appear from anywhere and all the action is captured perfectly.

We'll see somebody with a camera being filmed, and when it cuts to their perspective the person filming them has vanished. Is the main cameraman a Predator with a cloaking device, because I swear you manage to see him once.

We also have magical sound, where even when characters are standing far away from the camera we can pick up what they are saying perfectly. This is very much a kids film, in that we have a 'cool' young protagonist who is an exceptionally useful tech whiz.

He can even afford and operate devices the professional TV crew haven't even heard of. The film tries to be too good, when poor sound, lazy framing, and inconsistent lighting would have been a huge benefit.

The dinosaurs do look fantastic though and all credit should be given to those behind these creatures. It's such a shame that the film surrounding the effects had to be so poor.