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Movies
10.20.2000 00:15
Run! Straight to 'T-Rex' for a roaring good time
By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer
Movie credits and review
Finally! Truth in advertising!
If you've seen the posters or newspaper ads for the New England premiere of the 3-D movie T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous, the toothy, drooling Tyrannosaurus Rex looks as though his head is right over the audience.
Happy to report that that's no huckster fantasy. There are a couple of moments in T-Rex when the Tyrannosaurus Rex really does seem to be popping off the screen, over the heads of the people in front of you and right in your face. All that's missing is hot dino-breath.
If you've already seen a film on the six-story screen at the Feinstein IMAX Theatre, you've probably felt as though you were in the picture -- climbing Mount Everest . . . going eyeball to eyeball with a blue whale.
T-Rex, which begins its 3-D run at the theater today, really does put you IN the picture.
You're soaring in a low-flying plane over the western plains of Canada, gliding and swooping and dizzyingly banking over rugged hills. It gives the sensation of being on an amusement park thrill ride. Hang on!
You're with paleontologists on a dig, hunting for bones. When a scientist hammers a rock and chips fly off, you'll want to duck.
You're at a natural history museum poking around three-dimensional dino skeletons when the T-Rex develops flesh and bones and comes roaring at you.
Best of all, in a long fantasy sequence, you're back 65 million years, awestruck as the mighty thunder lizard crashes through brush, a pteranodon soars overhead, a hungry little ornithomimus yaps at your ankles. Aaagh! It's like Jurassic Park really come to life.
The computer imagery that wowed us in the Jurassic Park movies has been ratcheted way up to the next plane for T-Rex. These monsters not only look real, they stick their noses inches from yours. You could almost reach out and . . . oops, watch that hand!
Unlike most IMAX movies, T-Rex is not a documentary. It has some moments about dinosaur history that are educational, although University of Rhode Island paleontologist David Fastovsky, who attended a recent screening, said some things in the film about the way paleontologists work in the field -- using jack-hammers and dynamite and climbing unsafely down mountainsides -- was Hollywood hokum.
T-Rex turns out to be a spin on the Alice in Wonderland story, with a heroine named Ally who finds herself in the Wonderland of the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Ally (Liz Stauber) longs to be at an Alberta dig with her father, Donald Hayden (Peter Horton), a renowned paleontologist.
It's not to be, however. Too dangerous, he tells her. And when the rope gives way on Hayden's companion, sending her falling down a mountainside amid a clatter of rocks that look as though they're about to rain down on you, you wouldn't argue.
But Hayden makes a find, a dinosaur egg in a cliffside. He brings it back to the museum where Ally, alone in the lab with it one night, knocks it off a desk. Gas swells out of a crack. This transports her back 65 million years to a tropical rainforest among dinosaurs. This is where the thrills really begin, in one adventure after the next for Ally.
T-Rex is great fun. The big 3-D glasses you must wear to get a lifelike effect are comfortable, even if wearing regular eyeglasses under them. The only odd thing, I found, was that in close shots the humans in the movie seemed slightly smaller than life. Strange in a movie where everything is big, big, BIG.
Nevertheless, T-Rex uses 3-D effects to good advantage in telling its story. Maybe for the first time, 3-D in a movie goes beyond being just a gimmick. T-Rex is something you won't want to miss.
****
T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous
Starring : Peter Horton, Liz Stauber, Kari Coleman.
Producers: An L2 Entertainment production written by Andrew Gellis, directed by Brett Leonard.
Playing : Feinstein IMAX Theatre.
Rated : G, contains scary moments.
Running time: 45 minutes.
Run! Straight to 'T-Rex' for a roaring good time
By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal Arts Writer
Movie credits and review
Finally! Truth in advertising!
If you've seen the posters or newspaper ads for the New England premiere of the 3-D movie T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous, the toothy, drooling Tyrannosaurus Rex looks as though his head is right over the audience.
Happy to report that that's no huckster fantasy. There are a couple of moments in T-Rex when the Tyrannosaurus Rex really does seem to be popping off the screen, over the heads of the people in front of you and right in your face. All that's missing is hot dino-breath.
If you've already seen a film on the six-story screen at the Feinstein IMAX Theatre, you've probably felt as though you were in the picture -- climbing Mount Everest . . . going eyeball to eyeball with a blue whale.
T-Rex, which begins its 3-D run at the theater today, really does put you IN the picture.
You're soaring in a low-flying plane over the western plains of Canada, gliding and swooping and dizzyingly banking over rugged hills. It gives the sensation of being on an amusement park thrill ride. Hang on!
You're with paleontologists on a dig, hunting for bones. When a scientist hammers a rock and chips fly off, you'll want to duck.
You're at a natural history museum poking around three-dimensional dino skeletons when the T-Rex develops flesh and bones and comes roaring at you.
Best of all, in a long fantasy sequence, you're back 65 million years, awestruck as the mighty thunder lizard crashes through brush, a pteranodon soars overhead, a hungry little ornithomimus yaps at your ankles. Aaagh! It's like Jurassic Park really come to life.
The computer imagery that wowed us in the Jurassic Park movies has been ratcheted way up to the next plane for T-Rex. These monsters not only look real, they stick their noses inches from yours. You could almost reach out and . . . oops, watch that hand!
Unlike most IMAX movies, T-Rex is not a documentary. It has some moments about dinosaur history that are educational, although University of Rhode Island paleontologist David Fastovsky, who attended a recent screening, said some things in the film about the way paleontologists work in the field -- using jack-hammers and dynamite and climbing unsafely down mountainsides -- was Hollywood hokum.
T-Rex turns out to be a spin on the Alice in Wonderland story, with a heroine named Ally who finds herself in the Wonderland of the Cretaceous Period when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Ally (Liz Stauber) longs to be at an Alberta dig with her father, Donald Hayden (Peter Horton), a renowned paleontologist.
It's not to be, however. Too dangerous, he tells her. And when the rope gives way on Hayden's companion, sending her falling down a mountainside amid a clatter of rocks that look as though they're about to rain down on you, you wouldn't argue.
But Hayden makes a find, a dinosaur egg in a cliffside. He brings it back to the museum where Ally, alone in the lab with it one night, knocks it off a desk. Gas swells out of a crack. This transports her back 65 million years to a tropical rainforest among dinosaurs. This is where the thrills really begin, in one adventure after the next for Ally.
T-Rex is great fun. The big 3-D glasses you must wear to get a lifelike effect are comfortable, even if wearing regular eyeglasses under them. The only odd thing, I found, was that in close shots the humans in the movie seemed slightly smaller than life. Strange in a movie where everything is big, big, BIG.
Nevertheless, T-Rex uses 3-D effects to good advantage in telling its story. Maybe for the first time, 3-D in a movie goes beyond being just a gimmick. T-Rex is something you won't want to miss.
****
T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous
Starring : Peter Horton, Liz Stauber, Kari Coleman.
Producers: An L2 Entertainment production written by Andrew Gellis, directed by Brett Leonard.
Playing : Feinstein IMAX Theatre.
Rated : G, contains scary moments.
Running time: 45 minutes.
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