DINOSAUR

by Peter Keough

Maybe it's just the Barney hater in me, but I prefer my dinosaurs without dialogue. Had Dinosaur kept mute, it might have been a terrific 30 minute IMAX movie, with its state-of-the-art CGI opening sequence introducing the eldritch landscape and life forms of the Cretaceous period, or later re-creating with terrifying beauty the cataclysmic crash of a meteor. Presumably it's the one that did in the big guys some 65 million years ago, but it barely spoils the afternoon of Aladar (voiced by D.B. Sweeney), a baby-faced iguanodon who's taken in as an egg by a clan of uppity lemurs. With his adopted family riding his back, Aladar hooks up with a motley herd of survivors crossing the blasted terrain for "the nesting grounds," a promised land reminiscent of The Prince of Egypt. Leading the herd is Kron (Samuel E. Wright), a hard-ass iguanodon whose Darwinian philosophy of survival of the fittest and submission to fate clashes with Aladar's new-age platitudes about cooperation and self-actualization. You'd think that after going to the trouble of giving these prehistoric creatures voices, Disney would at least throw in a few good songs or some funny jokes. But this $200 million Dinosaur is tuneless, humorless, and devoid of charm, another sign that such movie virtues as character, plot, and point are becoming extinct. At Cinema World, Entertainment Cinemas, Framingham, Framingham Premium, Gardner, the Hoyt Dayville, the Hoyt Westborough, Leominster, the Solomon Pond Hoyt, White City, and the Worcester North Showcase.