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Just when you thought there was nowhere new left for hungry dinosaurs to rampage, here come producer JJ Abrams and writer-director David Robert Mitchell (It Follows, Under the Silver Lake) with a fresh, fun spin on stompy saurian carnage. The wheeze here is that, thanks to a blissfully unexplained space-time hiccup, a sizeable chunk of 1982 middle-American suburbia is suddenly dumped in the distant prehistoric past, taking the residents on an overnight plummet several links down the food chain.
Interestingly, despite the full-on B-movie concept and the John Williams-style Amblin-adventure ebullience of the score (courtesy of Abrams regular Michael Giacchino), this is not some wisecracking romp. As you might expect from Mitchell’s previous outings, there are dark seams to mine, even before the residents of Flowervale (not to be confused with Cloverfield) hear the shrieks and screams outside their pointlessly locked doors.
This is harsh, brutal and, at times, traumatic stuff
The focus here is on a single nuclear family, the Platts. Dad Greg (Ewan McGregor, on good form) is struggling to make ends meet and keep it all together; mom Denise (Anne Hathaway, relishing the material) yearns to be an author and, well, anywhere but Flowervale. Divorce may be on the cards, though Greg’s in denial. Of course, their relationship (and their poor kids, ably played by Maisy Stella and Christian Convery) gets stress-tested in an impossible way when they wake up in 200 million BC. And while the outcome is easily predicted, there are a few shocking surprises along the way.
Mitchell smartly locks the action to the Platts’ perspective, keeping the early dino-sightings tantalisingly out of frame. Also, for the most part, he takes a ‘what if this really happened?’ approach, putting regular-folk realism before action-beat silliness. For example, Platt kid Brian (Convery) wields a bow and arrow, but he misses every shot, even when his life depends on it. And when Greg heroically tackles a carnosaur with a sledgehammer… well, things don’t go as movie logic might have you expect.
Mitchell’s prehistoric creatures are CGI-standard but, festooned with feathers, they at least seem up-to-date with modern palaeontology – a point that’s neatly underlined when Brian looks at quaint dinosaur drawings in an old encyclopaedia. Indeed, this ain’t your parents’ or grandparents’ monster movie. This is harsh, brutal and, at times, traumatic stuff. Though, thankfully, also entertaining enough to forgive the film’s rather cheesy (and plot-holey) coda. This is a B-movie, after all.
In cinemas worldwide Fri Aug 14.