The Land that Time Forgot: A Review

I love dinosaur movies. You can't pry me away from BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs trilogy or any of the Jurassic Park films. Imagine my excitement when I picked up C. Thomas Howell's version of The Land that Time Forgot. There's a tyrannosaurus rex right on the cover!

Unfortunately, the dinos are middle-shelf CGI. They're fun to watch, but not at all as impressive as I had hoped. There is a limited amount of beasties: a pterodactyl, the mighty t-rex and an unidentified herbivore that the rex is seen dining on. There is also some kind of water creature that is briefly glimpsed. Later, a mysterious tentacled critter makes a dramatic entrance. It could be that they are the same creature. It's a pity. I'm frightened of aquatic dinosaurs and would have loved a good scare.

The acting is decent. I can believe that the marooned boaters would behave as they did. Their emotions show through the dialogue. Lindsey and Cole (Lindsey McKeon and Darren Dalton) have some chemistry.

As with any film, you must suspend your disbelief. Accept that people from different eras can be pulled through a bright light and land on a prehistoric island at different times. And that women can't survive in the wilderness. And that Germans who still believe that WWII is in progress would make base camp in a cave that has an obvious back entrance. And that they would appear to be busy bees but leave basic repairs on their u-boat for the last second. And that crude oil can be run through a still and magically become diesel fuel. And that a jittery tour-boat captain knows how to make and operate said machine. And that you can herd dinosaurs. The only piece of real science that I saw was the three-foot dragonfly. There really were giant insects in the earth's past, and they really were made possible by a large quantity of oxygen in the atmosphere. (Like I said, the Walking With documentaries are permanently burned into my brain.)

The Land that Time Forgot is not a dinosaur movie after all. It's a movie about survival, love and the drive to escape. It has some dramatic moments, a few explosions and a few plot twists to keep your attention. All in all, it's a moderately interesting film for a boring Sunday afternoon. But it isn't a film I'll be buying or going out of my way to watch. And neither, in my opinion, should you.