THE DINOSAUR PROJECT (2012)

Genre: Adventure/Action
Director: Sid Bennett
Cast: Natasha Loring, Richard Dillane, Matt Kane, Peter Brooke, Stephen Jennings, Abena Ayivor, Andre Weideman, Sivu Nobongoza
RunTime: 1 hr 23 mins
Rating: PG13 (Some Frightening Scenes)
Released By: Shaw
Official Website:

Opening Day: 18 October 2012

Synopsis: And the world thought that dinosaurs were extinct... Brace yourself for a chilling ride into the heart of the Congo jungle, as an expedition accompanied by a film crew discovers that creatures thought to have been extinct for 65 million years are very much alive. This is the most exciting dinosaur movie since Jurassic Park! Following the disappearance of an expedition led by renowned explorer Jonathan Marchant, two Congolese fishermen discover a rucksack drifting in a river. Inside are tapes and hard drives containing over 100 hours of film. The footage tells the story of the expedition’s disappearance... Together with a TV crew and armed with an array of state-of-the-art mini cams, the expedition team from The British Cryptozoological Society had set out to track down Mokele Mbembe, a mythical monster believed to be descended from dinosaurs - Africa’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster. Recently expelled from school, Jonathan’s son, 15-year-old gadget freak Luke Marchant, stows away aboard the helicopter taking the expedition deep into the Congolese jungle. The mission almost ends before it begins when their chopper crashes deep in the heart of the Congo. What follows is a nerve-jangling adventure delving into mysterious places teeming with prehistoric creatures, both malevolent and benign…

Movie Review:

More typically associated with the horror genre, the found footage format has found its way into family friendly territory thanks to writer/ director Sid Bennett, who envisions a faux expedition led by the British Crypto-zoological Society into the African Congo in search of the Mokele Mbembe. That’s African for Loch Ness monster, but what the crew end up finding is a whole lost kingdom of dinosaurs – though as you might imagine, it pretty much goes downhill for the humans from there.

That is really as much plot as you are going to find in this thankfully brief film, which its production company StudioCanal had reportedly greenlit into production with an outline, a showreel, a budget, a VFX plan and a timetable but no script. The lack of the latter is awfully obvious, as this is as straightforward a movie as you are going to get – so if narrative is something you look out for in your movies, then you might as well stop here and give this one a miss.

Everyone else however should still proceed with caution, as Bennett uses the mould of Steven Spielberg’s ‘Jurassic Park’ to unfold a B-monster movie that is as generic as it gets.  The leader of the expedition is respected explorer Johnathan Marchant (Richard Dillane), the Sam Neill equivalent who like the latter goes about the movie perpetually grumpy. A helicopter crash early into the film leads his crew stranded in the middle of nowhere, outnumbered and pretty much defenceless against the myriad of prehistoric creatures in the dense African vegetation.

Their tale of survival is supposedly to be more thrilling from a first-person perspective, but Bennett uses the tools of the format - the wobbly camerawork and sudden cuts – too liberally for his film’s own good. Too many chase sequences end too abruptly, as harm either comes to the person holding the camera whose point of view we are watching or to the camera itself. As a result, there is no sense of sustained tension, and soon you’ll grow not to care about the characters (thinly written as they are) nor the few species of dinosaurs that we get to see up close.

And that is quite a pity, for this modestly budgeted movie actually boasts decent CGI. Certainly they won’t be on the scale of ‘Jurassic Park’, but for what they are worth, the monsters are surprisingly convincing. Impressive too is the way Bennett gets them to interact with the humans, especially a cute young one which Johnathan’s son Luke (Matt Kane) develops an unexpected affinity with. Then again, the money shots are pretty much wasted by the shaky cinematography, which obscures what you do get to see onscreen.

To Bennett’s credit, he does try to build some suspense into the movie in the form of Johnathan’s jealous right hand man Charlie as well as some human drama through the strained father-son bond between Johnathan and Luke. Nonetheless, these attempts at building more heft into the story largely fall flat – not only because they are clichéd (think ‘Sanctum’ or any other adventure movie), but also because Bennett doesn’t make enough effort to develop them fully.

The end result is that we care less about any of the characters than we should, and remain disengaged from their quest to survive no thanks to the found footage format the movie has so eagerly embraced. If ‘The Dinosaur Project’ is worth any mention, it should be as a cautionary tale to all filmmakers out there - trying to fit a certain genre into the format is like squeezing a square peg into a round hole, and will ultimately only lead the current wave of found footage films to extinction. 

Movie Rating:

(Generic and uninvolving, this tediously told story of survival is made even more dire by its blind embrace of the found footage genre)

Review by Gabriel Chong