Film Review: The Good Dinosaur
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The Good Dinosaur, Pixar’s second animated film of the year, starts off with an asteroid missing the earth allowing the dinosaurs who roamed this earth to continue living. Unfortunately that asteroid could also be a stand-in for this film, as The Good Dinosaur so badly misses the mark that it will leave you sitting in your seat wondering what happened.
For what it’s worth, I believe that The Good Dinosaur contains probably the best animation I have ever seen committed to the screen. The artists and animators at Pixar have outdone themselves, creating photrealistic landscapes (the shots of the water are breathtaking) and unique characters.
But being pretty will only take you so far, as the plot and story continually fail the film. The movie is an unequivocal mess from start to finish. It starts off pretty promising, with Arlo, our main character being born into a family of brontosaurus and struggling to overcome his fears of basically everything. He wants so desperately to make his mark but he can’t. His father gives him a task to catch the critter eating all of the food, however when he lets Spot go, his father gets enraged. The two take off and when Arlo gets hurt (an annoying recurring theme in the film) his papa stops. Unfortunately, a flood is about to happen which takes dear old dad out of the picture and sets Arlo on a bit of a path to revenge. He reluctantly has to team up with Spot in order to find his way home, along the way having many adventures.
It’s from this moment on that the movie starts to lose momentum and all sense of kinetic storytelling. Is this a movie about a kid learning to overcome his fears? A revenge tale (against what or whom its never really clear)? A road trip movie? A battle against nature (it is after all the reason why tragedy struck)? The Good Dinosaur has such a difficult time figuring out what it wants to be. I mean consider that there’s never a moment in the story when you will doubt Arlo’s will to return home but was that really the point of the film? I can’t really grasp how everything that happened led to Arlo making his mark, a goal he long had. I mean he had many exploits that allowed him to make a mark but they feel so disjointed that it is impossible to feel triumphant or emotional at the end. A few days since seeing it and I’m really trying to figure out what the driving force of the movie was. How do you come out of a children’s film and not understand the message?
The tone of the film is also all over the place. If I were a parent, I’m unsure I would take my kid to this cause it’s shocking in many respects with regards to death, violence and drugs. More importantly, this movie uses violent moments to move the plot forward in a way that feels inorganic. Arlo is a clumsy dinosaur, but the amount of times he fell down, got hurt, or hit his head on a rock was more than necessary. And they used these to move the plot forward or reset the tale! It’s one of the laziest devices I’ve ever seen in a movie and honestly makes us doubt Arlo to the point we can’t suspend disbelief when he succeeds.
It’s disappointing that The Good Dinosaur is so bad because the animation was there. Maybe the next film will combine the visuals and the story better, and not serve as a reminder that Pixar can make bad movies too.
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