DINOSAUR

Directed by Ralph Zondag and Eric Leighton. Starring a load of dinosaurs

Set during the late Cretaceous period, with a budget featuring almost as many noughts as the sixty-five million-year time lapse between then and now, this is among the five most expensive movies ever made. Dinosaur obviously comes with its own guaranteed audience, as this extinct animal will always occupy an eternal place in the hearts of very young boys, and it certainly does enough to send most of them home satisfied.

Despite all the unquestionably magnificent special effects - which certainly outdo any previous representations of our prehistoric heroes - the narrative is hardly as striking or original as the spectacle.

It's essentially the stuff of archetypal Disney: Aladar, an iguanadon, is an orphan separated from his family, who winds up as an unlikely adopted son in a friendly family of lemurs (see also last year's Tarzan, or Dumbo, or Bambi). It's all rather idyllic until a meteor shower destroys their home, and Aladar and clan find themselves among a mixed herd of migrating dinosaurs under the brutal Nietchzean leadership of fellow iguanadon Kron - where basically, if you can't keep up, you're tyrannosaur fodder.

Aladar, finding this regime unconscionable, winds up protecting the older and weaker members of this dinosaur parade, including an ancient brachiosaurus and a slow-moving styrachosaurus, who are constantly at risk from the terrifying carnotaurs and velociraptors who sense an easy lunch at hand. But circumstances conspire, as one somehow might expect, so that Aladar and his misfit crew can save the day, Aladar gets the girl, and all the dinosaurs decide (in time-honoured Disney fashion) that this caring altruistic lark is the way to go after all.

Almost inevitably, Dinosaur works best when it lets the special effects do the talking - the struggles against natural phenomena and the chase sequences involving rabid carnivores make for an extremely eye-popping opening half-hour. When focusing on the cuddly moralistic story, however, the film is considerably less effective. Nevertheless, this is enough of a technical triumph to make it pretty worthwhile matinee viewing, and its box-office takings (which have surpassed the $250mn mark to date) illustrate that there's life in these extinct beasts yet.