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The huge IMAX screen was made for dinos, as 1998's T-Rex: Back To The Cretaceous showed. So it's no surprise that Dinosaurs 3D: Giants Of Patagonia proves such an eye-popping spectacle, even if its impressively rendered beasties do take a back seat at times to fiddly science bits that will have toddlers fidgeting in their seats. For adults, however, the real wow factor will be Patagonia itself, a majestic landscape of startling topography that makes Middle-earth look like Kent.
Sonorously narrated by Donald Sutherland, Marc Fafard's film focuses Argentinian paleontologist Rodolfo Coria's groundbreaking research into such mighty critters as the Giganotosaurus Carolinii and the Argentinosaurus Huinculensis, described as the largest creature ever to walk the earth. Their fossilised skeletons, on display in the main exhibit room of the Carmen Funes Museum in Plaza Hunicul, seem impressive enough. But it's only when the movie switches to CGI that their true scale becomes clear, typified by a thrilling sequence where three Giganotosaurs join forces to bring an Argentinosaur down. Throw in the odd feathered velociraptor and swooping pterodactyl and the result leaves you agape.
"INSTRUCTIONAL FOOTAGE NECESSARY BUT DEATHLY DULL"
Less effective, though, is the staged footage of Coria dusting bones and poring over dinosaur footprints - necessary perhaps for the film to meet its instructional remit, but deathly dull to sit through. And while Fafard ends by recreating the meteor meltdown that caused his heroes' annihilation, his prim refusal to equip his quadrupeds with anything resembling genitalia suggests a more prosaic reason for their eventual extinction.
Dinosaurs 3D: Giants Of Patagonia is showing at BFI IMAX on 29th June 2007.
