ABC lays a (dinosaur) egg

Weak plot and weaker characters doom Dinotopia at a time when the network needs to show it can do something right.

By ERIC DEGGANS, Times TV Critic

© St. Petersburg Times
published May 12, 2002

[ABC photo]

Imagine the moment in time when you're watching a car headed toward an inevitable collision; that awful, electric moment when instinct tells you there's no turning back and there's an awful impact ahead.

Welcome to ABC's Dinotopia.

More than a misguided miniseries, this six-hour extravaganza is an $85-million bomb set to obliterate whatever is left of the reputations of ABC programmers who squandered Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and nearly dumped Nightline.

At a time when no one is pouring money into effects-laden mega-miniseries, ABC spent the equivalent of the last Arnold Schwarzenegger movie's budget to create a rambling tale about two brothers who stumble on an ancient civilization in which dinosaurs and humans live as equals.

A stinker like this couldn't come at a worse time for ABC, which in January fired its co-chairman of entertainment and on April 30 saw president Steve Bornstein quit -- just as the network scored ratings lower than Fox among viewers 18 to 49 for the first time in Nielsen Media Research history.

What ABC needs now is more buzz-heavy hits like its reality TV relationship show The Bachelor -- not a last-gasp, overpriced miniseries that hearkens back to the days when viewers turned out for Gulliver's Travels and Merlin.

Predictably, executive producer Robert Halmi Sr. -- a Hungarian native once considered a small-screen Cecil B. Demille for making epics such as Gulliver, Merlin, Noah's Ark and Cleopatra on a TV-size budget -- disagrees.

"Television needs something different than big, and I would call this not a miniseries . . . it's a megaseries," said Halmi, 78. "To get the audience back, you need to restart the whole process and come up with something spectacular . . . something that only television can do."

Riiight. Unfortunately, all Halmi's done in Dinotopia is present a gee-whiz, effects-laden production centered on visual stunts viewers saw rendered better in three Jurassic Park movies.

Like many Halmi epics, this one is based on a literary success -- specifically, the characters found in two books, Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time and Dinotopia: The World Beneath, by author/illustrator James Gurney.

Given the paper-thin plot, it makes sense that the Dinotopia books actually started as a series of illustrations Gurney drew in 1989, showing people riding prehistoric animals. But even though Gurney ultimately crafted two books from this elaborate, cinematic universe, Halmi and his cohorts at Hallmark Entertainment chose to use little of the books' plot in bringing Dinotopia to the screen.

Instead of chronicling the adventures of a father and son stuck in a wondrous utopia where dinosaurs live with humans, ABC's Dinotopia focuses on two clashing half-brothers, David and Karl Scott (Wentworth Miller and Tyron Leitso), who swim to the uncharted continent after crash landing in the ocean inside a small plane piloted by their father.

Turns out Dinotopia is a gentle land where people don't carry weapons and don't eat meat. They live their lives by a code of dreamy axioms such as "one raindrop raises the sea" and "weapons are enemies, even to their owners."

But even with a running time topping six hours, this miniseries leaves even the most rudimentary questions unanswered, including: How was this dinosaur/human civilization created in the first place? How did dinosaurs learn to walk, talk and read like humans? Why aren't the carnivorous dinosaurs outside the city as smart as the plant-eating ones that hang out with humans?

And why does every character except Karl and David speak with an English accent? (Must have something to do with the fact that much of it was filmed at London's Pinewood Studios.)

Before long, the boys are stuck in a class filled with elementary school children to prepare them for life in Dinotopia. Later, they're shuttled off to separate destinies -- Karl to raise a baby dinosaur and David to serve in a corps of soldiers who ride flying dinosaurs, known as the Skybax.

All this, and we haven't even gotten to the central story -- a crisis that threatens to expose Dinotopia to the carnivorous dinosaurs lurking outside their cities. (Of course, it can only be thwarted by our stalwart heroes, who somehow manage a feat of heroism no one else in Dinotopia can match.)

But the biggest problem with Dinotopia, besides its confusing and nonsensical plot, is the characters.

David and Karl in particular are stick figures, with David cast as the bookish stickler for following the rules, while Karl is the rebellious outsider, constantly chafing at Dinotopia's regulated lifestyle.

We see them in constant crises: David paralyzed with a fear of heights during his Skybax training; Karl jumping into the ocean to save a dinosaur he never wanted to raise; both boys betrayed by someone they trusted.

Love interests come and go with little explanation or background. Despite its epic length, Dinotopia moves so fast it's tough to know any character long enough to care about any of them.

Children may love the effects, which stop just short of impressive for those who have seen the state of big-budget movies these days. Adults may notice that actors rarely touch the dinosaurs they are acting with (many were digitally inserted after filming wrapped) and the huge background vistas look suspiciously like matte paintings.

Still, the effects team, which crafted the eye-popping effects for the Discovery Channel's landmark show Walking with Dinosaurs, looked forward to Dinotopia.

"The animators desperately wanted to get away from reality because we had been working with paleontologists and scientists for two years (learning) what a dinosaur can accurately do (for the Discovery Channel show)," said special effects producer Michael McGee. "This was a chance to do character animation . . . make dinosaurs talk, make them play table tennis, all sorts of new challenges."

Indeed, one character, the computer-generated Stenonychosarus called Zippo, gets the Jar Jar Binks/C-3PO Cartoonish Sidekick Award -- fretting and flopping about with little purpose other than comic relief. (Producers also spent more than $100,000 creating a radio-controlled puppet to portray the dinosaur Karl raises, dubbed 26.)

Critics (including this one) may say TV audiences won't carve out multiple nights to watch epic miniseries anymore, especially mediocre ones such as Dinotopia.

But Halmi remains convinced that his family-friendly story -- the visceral, dinosaur-chomping deaths of Jurassic Park have no place in this G-rated epic -- will garner the wide-ranging audience many networks have given up on reaching.

"The audience wants family entertainment . . . maybe some executives don't," the producer said, shrugging off the TV industry's current obsession with reality shows such as Fear Factor. "And if (they don't want) a family show, then maybe it's better to have a guy with worms all over his head. Maybe (they think) that's more exciting."

TV review

Dinotopia airs at 7 tonight, 8 p.m. Monday and 8 p.m. Tuesday on WFTS-Ch. 28. Grade: C-.

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