I Am T-Rex

Everyone who loves dinosaurs gets excited about how big they were, but of course, only a successful few will ever have grown to their maximum size. Every big dinosaur started small, and in a prehistoric world, even if you’re a T-rex, that can make you look dangerously like a snack. Young Jared gets by okay because he has the protection of his dad, Logan, the king of Green Valley. But when fierce rival Fang and his gang of mean raptor friends move in on Logan’s territory, leading to his doom, Jared’s life changes dramatically.

Kids will find plenty to engage with in this story about growing up and taking on adult responsibilities. Adults will be able to make more sense of it if they realise that it was made in China, and follows a very distinct, traditional path. Yes, this is a kung-fu hero’s journey with dinosaurs. Our nervous young protagonist, lost and hungry, is fortunate enough to attract the sympathy of a powerful young adult ceratosaur, Lucas, who lets him scavenge from his kills, despairs of his terrible hunting skills, listens to his story and eventually agrees to train him. Under his tutelage, this hapless creature will become a hero capable of avenging his father and restoring justice in Green Valley – but not before he has helped Lucas to overcome problems of his own.

It’s high spirited stuff, spurred on by a suitably grandiose score. The animation is pretty crude and the acting isn’t great, but it understands its target audience and strikes a good balance between scary or stressful moments and various kinds of triumph. There’s a moral code at work which one can imagine a group of predator pals coming up with. Killing for food is acceptable, even respectable (we see it a few times, though there’s never any blood) but it’s not okay to kill baby animals (a lot of predators instinctively refrain from this unless desperate – letting them grow up means more food later on). Naturally, the bad guys don’t care about this, even picking on Lex, a poor little brachiosaurus who has lost his mum, but Jared stands up for the vulnerable even when he’s still vulnerable himself, and it pays off when he finds himself in trouble later (all “My dad could beat up your dad” playground arguments are moot when someone’s mum weighs 28 tons).

You may notice that I’m listing an odd assortment of dinosaurs here and it’s fair to say that the film does not pay much attention to established palaeontological facts. It’s more interesting in bringing in whatever big beast seems cool at the time. Everybody is naked (which is also true in the Jurassic World films, to be fair) despite the fact that we now know that many would have been covered in feathers or down, and to make this odder, Jared becomes friends with a fully feathered bird. If you watch this with kids who love dinosaurs, be prepared for complaints, or get ready to supply them with some more accurate material afterwards. Of course, one might reasonably note that we don’t have any extant scientific proof that dinosaurs did not teach junior members of other species to use ninja moves.

Although most of it is pretty predictable, the film has a more complex plot than some of its ilk. The Shaw Brothers would have approved of the level of the double-crossing, though this never results in a breach of the type of trust which children need to feel they can rely on. Raptor bad guys Dan, Stan and Mike (twice the size they should be, following Jurassic Park’s lead) have sinister schemes of their own and things are not quite as they seem when Jared returns to Green Valley, allowing for a final lesson about honour, shame and the importance of doing the right thing.

All in all it’s an amiable little film. Jared whines a lot early on, to the point where even kids may find him irritating, but that’s understandable in context, and he does get his act together. Some of the jokes work better if you’re familiar with the genre, but kids won’t need that to enjoy it, and the numerous fight scenes provide ample inspiration for playing with plastic dinosaurs later. This is not great cinema by any means, but you might be pleasantly surprised by how watchable it is.