It's hard for me to review this movie as it's allegedly a sort of quasi- children's film with some very harsh elements of prehistoric life shown. As such the film has this kind of odd intent of wanting to show how competitive life was during the age of dinosaurs, but at the same time inject a kind of family friendly children's fair to the whole thing.
So it is that we see Pangea as seen through the eyes of Speckles, the Tarbosaurus, a breed of Tyrannosaur, as he and his family struggle to survive the the very unforgiving environment of the late Cretaceous period, where supersized hyper-predators hunt and prey off of equally gigantic sauropods. We are spared the bloodshed, but not the hunt and the bite.
And this is kind of the odd thing about this movie; all the violence is there, but not the explicit element that makes violence so abhorrent; shedding blood. Which, for a children's film, is a good thing, but one is hard pressed to gauge the violence as the actual attacks and bites are shown, as well as dinosaurs (friendly, non-friendly, and hapless prey) are shown dying, attacking, or being attacked.
That's kind of the duel edged nature of a movie like this. The film makers put in the presence of a family, even a romance and the rebuilding of a family to give the film a kind of life that we mere humans can relate to, but the reality of the dinosaur era was that the "monsters" often so referred to by scientists, were, in reality, truly monsters. They were predators that knew only one thing; they needed to kill to eat. when you go to a museum and see the skeletons of creatures of epochs long since gone, we tend to marvel at them from a distance and then put them out of our minds. But if you really thought about those times, and what the behaviors of the creatures that lived back then would have been like, it should make your shiver a little. There was no more violent time to be alive than to be a dinosaur in the mix of a predator prey relationship.
So the film is successful in presenting an honest look at dinosaur lives, and doesn't pull too many punches to deliver us a children's tale. The film is, on its own level, a resounding success. But I wonder if it was wise to make such a film in the first place, one where we see dinosaurs killing other dinosaurs. Then again I thin of all the Westerns I saw as a child, and all of the gunfights and all of the actors and stunt-men who played people getting shot in those movies and TV shows, and I think perhaps I'm worrying too much about this film.
All in all it's a decent watch. I'm still out to lunch on deciding whether I'd let any of my children watch it. So I guess my best advice to any parent reading this review is to watch the movie yourself first, and then decide whether you think your young one can handle the action in the film.
Then again, remember, hey are dinosaurs, creatures that lived a long time ago, and are thankfully gone (mostly anyway).
Give it shot, and see what you think.
Overall a decent movie.
