Review: Dino King – Journey to Fire Mountain
DVD & Digital: Dino King – Journey to Fire Mountain (2019)
Speckles the Tarbosaurus is very disappointed with his son Junior. Speckles wants Junior to be fierce and fearless, but in reality, he’s a little wuss. One day Junior is kidnapped and held captive by a group of nasty Raptors. Speckles goes on an adventure meeting other dinosaurs and along the way learns to love his son despite his faults. At the same time Junior learns to find his courage and independence.
There’s a saying which goes something like “if you can’t say something nice then don’t say anything at all!” If I were to heed those words, then this would be a very short review.
First of all, hands up (and be honest) if you knew what a Tarbosaurus was? To me Speckles looked like a T-Rex. It’s a minor point, but it’s the first thing that annoyed me about the film. Quite a lot annoyed me in the end, so I’m going to get it off my chest. I imagine most people know what a T-Rex is, so why the big deal to get a Tarborsaurus on the map? Maybe the makers of the movie want to shed light on this particular dinosaur and felt T-Rex’s always get the limelight? Let me tell you now they failed, because I thought he was a T-Rex. If you are interested (and to save you looking it up) a Tarbosaurus is described as an Asian version of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. So basically a T-Rex!!!
The second thing to annoy me is the name of the hero dinosaur. Speckles! Fucking Speckles! Seriously! Speckles? He’s supposed to be a tough dinosaur that doesn’t take any shit….and he’s called Speckles. Why not Rex? Oh yes that would be because we’ve already established, he’s not a T-Rex for some reason!
Ok, I’m being a bit flippant, and in fairness when the movie started, I was initially impressed as the vistas and landscape looked incredible. I then realised the backgrounds looked so good because they are real locations. And then the dinosaurs appeared, and it shat all over my initial praise. The problem with using real locations is the animation must be great quality otherwise it makes it look even shitter than it is, and it’s not great to start with. To be blunt, I’ve seen better cut scenes in some video games!
And then there’s the voice acting and story. I’ve watched some animations that have brought me to tears and left me sobbing like a baby. This is due to the connection I felt to the characters which is brought to life by the performance of the actors. I honestly couldn’t give a toss about Speckles or his son Junior. In fact, I only know Speckles is called Speckles because I looked it up on IMDB after the film finished. I only remembered Junior because every time Speckles cried “Junior”, I had Sean Connery’s voice in my head from Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade. Come to think of it, they couldn’t even give his son a proper name! Would that make him Junior Speckles or Speckles Junior?
The whole thing is poor and I’m being generous. Even my 4 and 8-year-old gave up after 15 minutes which tells you all you need to know.
The back of the DVD says the movie combines Walking with Dinosaurs and Finding Nemo. Do yourself a favour and stick either of those on rather than waste your time with this.
Review by Chris from a disc kindly supplied by Dazzler Media via The Warrior Agency.
