Behind its bland name, this dinosaur experience – which has set up round the corner from The O2 until the summer – is actually a solid piece of immersive theatre, with decent production values and a much stronger plot than is probably strictly necessary.
As we discover in a deft introductory room full of newspaper clippings, we are in a parallel universe in which time-travel technology was developed by a corporation called Chronotex in the twentieth century. Highly controversial, it has, nonetheless, reached a stage where it can be exploited commercially, and we take on the role of tourists making a leap back to TimeBase 67, a research base established 67 million years ago.
Our dinosaur watching takes two forms. During our visit to the base there are various animatronic beasties with a quasi-educational function as we journey through different labs: nothing is spectacular, but there are some cool flourishes like hatching dinosaur eggs and a sauropod heart comfortably bigger than a human being. The real stunners, though, are the 3D CGI sequences that bookend our lab visit. The Cretaceous landscapes don’t exactly look real, but they are beautifully detailed. There is a proper sense of a world, and the brightly coloured, feathered beasts reflect a bang-up-to-date understanding of what the Earth’s former rulers would have looked like.
Certainly it’s as convincing as ‘Jurassic Park’, and no doubt rather more accurate. Another thing ‘Dinosaurs in the Wild’ shares with ‘Jurassic Park’ is a story about man’s hubris in thinking he’s able to competently manage a T. rex. The tale that unfolds is a little predictable, and I’d probably have rather just had an hour of the CGI, but it’s all quite exciting. It’s just a shame that the ending feels flubbed, possibly because of the need to not terrify younger audience members – it all just sort of peters out, and there’s something a bit bathetic about escaping from the depths of the unimaginable past... only to stumble out into a pricy dinosaur gift shop. Still, it’s a mark of this show’s surprisingly engrossing story that I’m even talking about a disappointing end. It’s a journey worth taking.