The Dinosaur Project Review

So this week I have been watching The Dinosaur Project...never heard of it? Neither did I until I saw it in the listings on a website I use to stream movies. Yet apparently this movie hit UK cinemas last August, even though I never saw any trailers for it. Anyway, once you have watched it you’ll know why it didn’t receive any coverage.

The film starts with the recovery of video footage from a missing exhibition team which vanished without trace a few weeks before. Trying to imitate the style of hand-cam films like The Blair Witch Project but much more poorly, The Dinosaur Project retells what happened to the awry exhibition. 

Things kick-off with explorer Marchant, played by Richard Dillane, preparing his team to head off into the deepest recesses of the Congo in search of a mysterious lake creature (think Loch Ness monster) that has been sighted in recent months. 

The team end up stranded in the jungle after some ‘birds’ crash into the helicopter, sending it spinning downward into the depths of the Congo. Most of the team manage to escape alive before the helicopter goes up in flames and resolve to head out of the jungle and back to safety. 

They take shelter for the night in an abandoned village and are attacked by small, winged dinosaurs. The next day the team run into even more dinosaurs, become separated and then have to run from some more dinosaurs. While separated, Luke Marchant (Matt Kane) and Charlie Rutherford (Peter Brooke) discover a fabled gateway to a valley of dinosaurs - where the reptiles have somehow managed to survive for the last 65 million years. 

I’m not going to spoil the ending in case you do want to watch it but to be fair you see it coming from ten miles away. 

And I think that’s the main problem with this film. You know what’s going to happen all the way through. It is just like any other exhibition-gone-wrong film like Anaconda or...erm...Congo...but without the gorillas. There are no surprises and no clever twists, which is a shame, because that could have been what made the film. 

The CGI dinosaurs are also not up to scratch. They are alright but there are some creature films from ten years ago that had better special effects than in this. The dinosaurs aren’t terrible but they are not amazing either. That said though there is a scene near the end of the film where you see the valley of the dinosaurs and the quality of the backdrop is stunning. 

Another thing I will compliment in this film is the camera work. The scenes are shot well but that is also a problem for a film like this. If anything the cameras are a little too still. If you were running through the rainforest being chased by a dinosaur, there is no way that your hand would be that steady.

The Dinosaur Project gets 4/10.