Dino King

Tarbosaurus was one of those movies where the technology was excellent but the movie wasn't. Right now, IMDb is running 3.8 points on this, and as I am a lover of dinosaurs I was merciful and gave it that much.

The movie comes from South Korea and their animation was really good. Their sound effects were generally good too. Unfortunately they ruined it all with an overly anthropomorphic set of cutesy characters. Oh, the fun dinosaur family. Single Mom, oldest son, younger two daughters and then the little boy. Oh how cute.

The dinosaurs were also far too intelligent. Note the boulder being used as a weapon against the ankylosaur. Tool using dinosaurs, come on! The motivations were not logical for predators. They took unnecessary chances and they wasted opportunities.

For a movie out within the last few years, they also messed up a lot on Dinosaur facts. They put the movie at 80 million years ago and have velociraptors. The velociraptor found were from 75 to 71 million years ago. The velociraptors also had big feathers on their arms. They showed them with a "mohawk punk rocker" bit of feathers but that's all. Worse yet, they showed protoceratops and pukyongosaurus. They were from the EARLY cretaceous, tens of millions of years earlier. They said the torosaurus (like a triceratops) broke off its horns and showed them as hollow. The "horns" of ceratopsians were solid bone, not hollow horn.

I could go on and on, but you get the picture. They were so close but they blew it.

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.

I haven't written any reviews, so this is my first.

I have no idea how to feel about this movie. Its presented in a childlike way, as if its pretending to be a kiddy movie. But I think this might be the most depressing and sad movie I've ever seen...

No it doesn't have blood, but it has child murder, genocide, starvation, drowning in tar, babies getting squished by rocks, whole family death, whole family death again, throwing babies off a cliff, pack hunting, killing of helpless dinos, stampedes of dinosaurs falling off cliffs, volcano erupting and balls of fire smashing running dinos, more stampedes of dinos running off cliffs, and abandoning your family to be feasted upon by rapters.

This is not a kids movie.

My 5 year old daughter really like Dino Dana on Nickelodeon. She watched this movie and it touched a nerve for her. She cried because of sadness and happiness. I allowed her to continue watching this movie because of it's great story and the realistic approach that was lacked in Dino Dana. Now my daughter got a glimpse of what the dinosaur world could have been really like instead of the imagination of a Dino Dana girl. I respect both shows.

This movie is really well made. I seen it a long time ago and i think that was really good. A sad and harsh story with hope and love. Dont miss it.