So my good
friend and soon to be collaborator Srinath Bharadwaj posted his views on
Walking With Dinosaurs a little over 12 hours back and I threw back my head to
say, “He’s a new kid. He is obviously
over excited about a Dinosaur movie. It
will be yet another dinosaur tale with all sorts of corny puns that leave you a
tad exasperated but with good effects”. In
fact I had already written my summary line on that thought.
Less than 2 hours
later, I was eating my words – I was about 15 minutes into the narration of
Walking With Dinosaurs and I could not help but have a new found sense of admiration
for Barry Cook and Neil Nightingale. First
of all, making a Dinosaur story – when you have a trilogy that blew that pants
off everyone over a decade back must have taken a lot a guts.
Ergo, what could
Barry and Neil have done differently? They looked @ BBC’s Documentary
miniseries from 1999 and said, “Hey, how can we take something like this and
make it into a fun movie about Dinosaurs that will not put people off to sleep
(no offence to the BBC) and be enjoyed by kids and adults alike”? The answer
lies in a traditional Grandmother’s tale – or should I say a manner of
narration.
And so Barry and
Neil went about creating a hero in the form of Patchi (Justin Long) who is also
the underdog – the runt of a litter of Pachyrhinocerous. Now Patchi needs a best friend and in comes
the narrator – Alex (John Leguizamo) – an Alexornis. Then a heroine called Juniper (Tiya Sircar) and
a dominant bully of a brother Scowler (Skyler Stone).
Now how do we
weave all of this into a good story? We have to create a base that has these
characters in a herd. We have to give
Patchi a unique characteristic – so lets give him a large hole on his ear lobe
(I forget the technical term). We need a
father who is the leader of the pack but dies saving the young ones from a villain
– A Gorgosaurus pack. And then we have
to show traits such as migration, feeding, pack mentality etc.
Add to all of
this some really slick dialogue that keeps you entertained through the 90
minutes of the movie. There is so much
attention to detailing – which explains where the $80 million was spent when
making this movie. There is a human
element while describing the Dinosaurs and nice tidbits in the form of
scientific sidebars. Each of the 11
dinosaurs are introduced in a standard and yet unobtrusive manner.
To me
vindication came in the form of 3 kids who left the movie hall, roaring like
Patchi. And for a moment – I caught
myself roaring too. It was fun. And the movie was really really good. I kind of told Srinath to hold his horses
when he rates movies. But this one
definitely deserves a 7.5 on 10 (Srinath had given it a 9 J). Don’t miss it and don’t forget
to take your kids along. It is super
fun!!! And watch in 3D. Good stuff.
Decent pic
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed that almost 90 mins more than the 180mins of D3
Happy New Year Akira!!! Keep pinging your inputs in 2014 - more often than not if possible :D
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