Part Three of the Complete Cinematic History of Tyrannosaurus Rex

It’s time to finish off looking at T. rex in movies; check out parts one and two if you haven’t!

 

Modern Era (1990’s-2000’s)

The early 90’s was the time of a dinosaur renaissance in media and pop culture, and the dawning of a new era for the Mesozoic monsters on the big screen. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel was adapted once again with The Lost World (1992), but T. rex makes an even briefer appearance than in the 1925 version, and a sub-par animatronic head is all we see of it. There was a sequel made, Return to The Lost World (1992), released the same year and starring the same cast, as well as the same T. rex for about the same amount of screen time. It’s not worth commenting on further. An even briefer cameo happens in The Super Mario Bros. Movie (1993)...for some reason. Like I said, dinosaurs were more popular than ever and they were in everything.  

It’s funny that Tammy and the T-rex fell into the family-friendly category of dinosaur films despite being made with the intent of catering to audiences seeking a gore-filled horror-comedy, because one of the most famous (or rather infamous) examples of T. rex from the early 90’s comes from the R-rated sci-fi horror film Carnosaur (1993), produced by B-movie king Roger Corman. It put humans and dinosaurs together in the modern era, and existed just to capitalize on the success of another much-anticipated dinosaur movie being released only weeks after its own debut. Carnosaur’s Rex was a clunky animatronic that chewed up a few helpless scientists and battled a front-end loader in the climax, reminiscent of the ending of Dinosaurus! and the same ending was copied for the sequel, Carnosaur 2 (1995). A very similar-looking T. rex appears at the end of Dinosaur Island (1994). I cannot confirm or deny if it’s the same animatronic being reused. But you don’t want to hear about these movies. Let’s move on to our star attraction here!

On June 11^th 1993, both cinema and Tyrannosaurus rex itself made history, and things would never be the same for either ever again. Jurassic Park (1993) featured dinosaurs created for a theme park through state-of-the-art cloning, and the special effects crew brought them to life their own way, with a new form of cinematic technology: computer generated imagery. It had shown up before in movies before like The Abyss and Terminator 2, but never before had it been used to recreate a photorealistic living creature. It was a gamble, and director Steven Spielberg almost had Phil Tippett of Prehistoric Beast fame create the dinosaurs using his go-motion technique, but then the cgi artists created a short clip of the T. rex chasing a herd of Gallimimus, and suddenly Tippett was extinct (which became a line in the film). It wasn’t just the cgi that made the dinosaurs in Jurassic so incredible, it was the way the shots of the full dinosaurs were cut together with stunningly-realistic animatronics, courtesy of Stan Winston Studios, and the overall precise direction from Spielberg, making dinosaurs seem more real than they ever had.

The Tyrannosaurus rex was already the most famous dinosaur in the world. Its skeletal form was right there in the JP logo from the start, and Spielberg was wise to make the audience wait until nearly an hour into the film before seeing her in the flesh. The way the scene where she breaks through the fence and menaces the characters in the jeeps is expertly done. Even though the Jurassic Park T. rex is one of the best in all of cinema and arguably the real star of the movie, she is barely in it. After the breakout scene we see her chase the gas-powered jeep down the road, ambush the Gallimimus herd in the field (on-screen in this particular scene for only a few seconds), and we don’t see her again until the final moments of the film when she saves the surviving characters from the Velociraptors. She’s used to maximum effect, but naturally fans wanted more, so Spielberg gave them what they wanted in The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). This time there were two adult Rexes (plus an injured infant) and in the tradition of past Lost World stories (which Spielberg and author Michael Crichton both took inspiration from, albeit in different ways), the adult male is brought back to civilization and wreaks havoc in the city.

Speaking of The Lost World…there was another remake, once again just called The Lost World (1998), and as far as I can tell, it’s the first film adaptation of the novel to use cgi as part of the way to bring the dinosaurs to life. It was also one of the many examples of crappy cgi dinosaurs blending poorly with practical effects, and the T. rex here once again has a very small role. Tyrannosaurus made one more memorable appearance before the end of the century during that insane post-Jurassic Park prehistoric media pandemonium. The IMAX film T-rex: Back to the Cretaceous (1999) promised an immersive experience of going back to the end of the age of dinosaurs and seeing the beast as you had never seen it before on the biggest screen possible. Unfortunately, there was little actual footage of T. rex in the movie (which is short, too, less than an hour in length, and very boring) and the cgi didn’t rival the quality of Jurassic Park. In fact, few if any films since Jurassic Park have been able to recreate dinosaurs as realistically using cgi.

 

Postmodern Era (2000’s-present)

T. rex underwent a bit of a role change going into the 21^st century. It had almost been recast as an anti-hero of sorts, with the way it saved the day at the last second in Jurassic Park and went on to be a caring parent in the sequel. Paleontologist Jack Horner had different plans for the legendary monster, which he believed had spent more than enough time in the spotlight and needed to be exposed as something contrary to what the public had believed it to be for so long. Horner figured T. rex was more of a scavenger than an active predator, so through his influence the role of the Rex was not just reduced in Jurassic Park III (2001), it was effectively replaced, with a larger, newer carnivore: the Spinosaurus. Spino and Rexy have a short battle, ending with Rexy having its neck snapped. Spinosaurus remains the big bad for the rest of JP 3’s runtime, and many fans rioted. They did the Tyrant Lizard dirty.

Even going into what I’m calling this postmodern era, the dinosaur renaissance that began in the early 90’s was still going strong, so Rex still popped up in all kinds of movies. Many of them were aimed at kids, of course, including Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase (2001), Meet the Robinsons (2007), and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009), but one effect of this boom in paleontological fascination was Hollywood becoming more aware of new species of dinosaurs that had been discovered throughout the 1900s. For a long time, there was no other meat-eating dinosaur known to be larger than T. rex, so it was always viewed as the biggest, baddest dinosaur that ever lived. That wasn’t true anymore, and that fact coupled with this new notion that maybe it wasn’t a fast-running predator as depicted in the original Jurassic Park but a slower-moving carrion-eater made casting it as the main prehistoric antagonist less of a go-to. For example, in Journey to the Center of the Earth (2008), there’s a Giganotosaurus chasing the main characters, identifiable by its longer skull, greater size, and three-fingered hands (all in comparison to a tyrannosaur). Had the movie been made decades earlier, that three-fingered giant predator would have been branded a T. rex, but Hollywood and audiences had grown wiser. Poor T. rex wasn’t as special anymore.

The live-action roles didn’t get much better for ol’ Rex following that defeat in Jurassic Park III. A pack of them appeared as antagonists in the TV movie Dinotopia (2002), but with a total runtime of 250 minutes, they played a frustratingly small part. Then there was the bizarre Anonymous Rex (2004), which has this premise: dinosaurs survived extinction 65 million years ago and actually live amongst us disguised as humans. T. rex is among those disguised (others include two private investigators who are actually a Velociraptor and Triceratops), and the visual effects are abysmal, but that’s because it was produced ultra-cheap for the Sci-Fi Channel and was supposed to be a backdoor pilot for a TV show that never happened. The decline continued: T. rex appeared in The Eden Formula (2006) thanks to stock footage from Carnosaur, and was no more than an animated skeleton in Night at the Museum (2006).

You’re probably expecting me to discuss King Kong (2005), Peter Jackson’s epic three-hour remake, but actually, T. rex isn’t even in that movie. In behind-the-scenes featurettes and documentaries the creative team explain how Jackson wanted to expand on the Skull Island mythos and make it his own, so his vision included dinosaurs that had continued to evolve after the Cretaceous period ended. Though they look very much like their prehistoric cousins, the giant meat-eaters in his version of Kong are known as Vastatosaurus rex, or V-rex. This fictional species was specifically designed to be reminiscent of old-school depictions of T. rex, with crocodile-like hide and hyperextending jaws, so any scientific inaccuracies here are irrelevant.

T. rex made appearances in a couple higher-profile family adventures, but the trend had been set: big meat-eating dinosaurs were no longer represented by actors in suits or puppets or stop motion, they were almost exclusively cgi, which varied in quality. Land of the Lost (2009) was loosely based on the kids TV show of the same name from the 70’s and featured a Rex named “Grumpy”, but I’m sad to say this was about as good as it would get for The King for a while. Other pathetic low-budget efforts from this time include Aztec Rex (2008), Triassic Attack (2010), and Age of Dinosaurs (2013).

Even after a change in public image, the discovery of so many new, larger carnivorous dinosaurs, and decades of starring in movies ranging from amazing to downright embarrassing, T. rex was still everyone’s favourite big meat-eating dinosaur, and it would return to the spotlight in the 2010s. When Rexy (which is supposed to be the same one from the original Jurassic Park) returns in the finale of Jurassic World (2015), she crashes through the skeleton of a Spinosaurus before battling the genetic hybrid Indominous Rex and teaming up with a Velociraptor in order to defeat the aberration. It put the Rex (King) back in Tyrannosaurus rex, and she returned to devour more people in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018). Though not really comparable, it had another small role in The Jurassic Games (2018) and, despite being a low-budget endeavor, was one of the better-looking cgi iterations.

Even though the movie wasn’t a big hit, a really important role for T. rex came in Dinosaur Island (2014), which showed the first feathered tyrannosaur. Hollywood took a while to catch up with current paleontological evidence and research. For over a decade before this movie was made it was known that many dinosaurs were covered with feather-like down and fluff and quills. Whether an adult T. rex was fully feathered or partially feathered or just scaly isn’t currently known for sure, but it was a step in the right direction, scientifically speaking, for changing its physical appearance. Maybe audiences were tired seeing goofy portrayals, which could have been part of the reason The Good Dinosaur (2015) was Pixar’s first box-office bomb. Now, T. rex could be so many things—a hero, a villain, a garish nightmare monster, a lumbering jerk, a fast-moving predator, a bird-like creature, or a friendly pet.

Where will T. rex go next in the next era of dinosaur cinema? Well, we know Rexy is returning for Jurassic World: Dominion (2022), but hopefully we get to see more realistic portrayals, and the kinds of roles continue to diversify.  

 

Reviews:

Jurassic Park (1993): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2021/06/jurassic-park-1993-favourite-films.html

Carnosaur (1993): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/10/carnosaur-1993-review.html

Carnosaur 2 (1995): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/10/carnosaur-2-1995-review.html

Dinotopia (2002): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2020/07/dinotopia-2002-review.html

Part Two of the Complete Cinematic History of Tyrannosaurus Rex

Here’s part two of my spotlight on T. rex in movies. Check out part one if you haven’t already!

 

B-movie era (1950’s-1970’s)

For the first few decades of cinema, T. rex was cast as the ultimate villain: a bloodthirsty killer that would stop at nothing to eat every living thing in its path. Most of the stories to feature it were fantastical in nature, with humans discovering it amid other prehistoric creatures on remote islands or unexplored corners of the globe where time had stood still, or in ahistorical worlds, where humans and dinosaurs are shown to live at the same time in the ancient past (which, just to be clear, didn’t actually happen). Coming into the age of colour, though, T. rex would pop up in some more diverse tales, but would retain its status as an antagonist.

The first movie I have to talk about is Godzilla (1954). Of course it is, you might be saying. Godzilla is a made-up movie monster (one of the most iconic, at that), but the creators of Big G used real dinosaurs as their inspiration for his design. Originally producer Tomoyuki Tanaka envisioned a creature that was part whale and part gorilla, which is where the Japanese name Gojira comes from (gorira = gorilla, kujira = whale), but they decided to combine the features of Tyrannosaurus (a two-legged predator with a long tail and toothy jaws) with Stegosaurus (spikes along his back) and Iguanodon (a plant-eater with long arms and thumb spikes). So even though Godzilla isn’t a true T. rex, he carries part of one in his appearance and spirit.

When those vintage dinosaur films like The Lost World and King Kong were released, they were viewed as impressive displays of cutting-edge visual effects. If you think about it from the perspective of way back then, it’s understandable, but of course to a modern viewer those effects look dated. Well, there are a lot of movies from this era of dinosaur films with effects that not only don’t hold up today, they didn’t hold up back then, either. The Land Unknown (1957) features a T. rex that’s just a man in a rubber suit, lumbering along with a gaping jaw and blank white eyes (it does have the right number of fingers, though). Apparently, they spent so much of the budget on the suit that they couldn’t afford to film the movie in colour—not exactly money well spent. At least Dinosaurus! (1960) was in colour and had a mix of stop motion effects and puppets. I mean, the T. rex still looks kind of silly, but at least it has a great roar and many memorable scenes, including battles with a Brontosaurus and a heavy duty digging machine which topples it over a cliff at the end.

For most of the 1960’s T. rex was actually not used as often as the main villain, instead replaced with other species of giant meat-eaters like Ceratosaurus and Allosaurus in an effort to keep it fresh. The Tyrant Lizard King made a big comeback by the end of the decade in The Valley of Gwangi (1969). There is some discrepancy about whether Gwangi is a Rex or actually an Allosaurus. In the original script it was described as an Allosaurus, but stop motion maestro Ray Harryhausen based his design off the famous T. rex painting by paleo artist Charles R. Knight, and the influence is undeniable. Gwangi has three fingers as well, so since it’s never stated in the film, you could call Gwangi a Rex or an Allo, but to me, it’s a Rex. It looks a lot like the one from King Kong, too…which apparently they sometimes referred to as an Allosaurus on-set. C’mon, guys, stop mixing them up! Gwangi is also purple, making him the true first of his kind, even though most people think of Barney when they think of purple dinosaurs.

The special effects to bring T. rex to life were definitely all over the place during this era in terms of quality. After seeing the impressive stop-motion in Gwangi it’s hard to watch a man in a rubber T. rex suit fighting an equally phony-looking Triceratops in The Last Dinosaur (1977) and not laugh out loud. Planet of Dinosaurs (1978) reinstates T. rex as a main antagonist again, this time on another planet that’s millions of years behind in evolution. The stop motion effects are great, and this particular cinematic Rex is by far the best one from the 1970s.

 

Family Film Era (1980’s-1990’s)

Going into the 1980’s, T. rex underwent some changes. A very fat, stupid one pestered Ringo Starr in the comedic adventure Caveman (1981), and in one of the most memorable scenes accidentally eats some cannabis-like plants, which gets it so stoned it falls off a cliff. This is one of the most comedic portrayals of the Tyrant Lizard King, again realized through stop motion animation, but an even more ground-breaking version would emerge in the 80’s using a slightly different technique its developer referred to as “go-motion.” Prehistoric Beast (1984) is a short experimental film that was thought up by Phil Tippett, who used motion blur to make his stop motion dinosaurs move even smoother and appear more lifelike than any before. This short film would later be used and expanded upon for the CBS documentary Dinosaur! (1985), which is where I first saw footage from Prehistoric Beast, and it terrified me as much as it left me awestruck. A Tyrannosaurus ambushes a Monoclonius (relative of Triceratops) in a forest at night and kills it. While the short film still had multiple scientific inaccuracies, this tyrannosaur was one of the most realistic depictions up to that point, with a less upright posture and more accurate proportions.

But Prehistoric Beast was an exception to the way dinosaurs were predominantly portrayed on the big screen in this era. Family-oriented entertainment is where you would find them most often in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Easily the most famous is the children’s film The Land Before Time (1988), directed by one of the preeminent animators of his time, Don Bluth, and produced by Steven Spielberg (we’ll hear more about him in the next era). The T. rex returns with a similar look to Fantasia, sporting red eyes and dark scales, plus it acts comparably ruthless and bloodthirsty. This was the scariest the Rex would be in what would end up being a long running franchise; with the next direct-to-video sequel, the cute, youthful protagonists from Land Before Time would befriend an equally cute and harmless baby “sharptooth” named Chomper, and while his parents would remain the vicious antagonists for the sequel, they would never again be as bone chilling as in the original. When Chomper turns up again in The Land Before Time V: The Mysterious Island (1997) he can speak just like all the other herbivores. His mom and dad don’t speak words, still just roar and growl, but they are given subtitles this time, and to my knowledge, only this time.

Animation in general would keep the mighty predator toned down; We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993) was also produced by Spielberg and had a friendly Rex in the lead, and a toy version of the creature would try to act scary in Toy Story (1995) but was just another lovable resident in Andy’s toybox. But, T. rex had plenty of roles in live-action films during this era as well. There was My Science Project (1985), about teens tampering with time travel, and the scene where a Tyrannosaurus wanders through a portal into the modern day then is subsequently shot to death by the teens with machine guns is actually one of the better depictions (and most violent) from the 80’s. Prehysteria! (1993) took the king in a totally different direction, featuring a friendly miniature version of it affectionately named after The King of Rock and Roll (Elvis) with miniature versions of other famous species, all of them also named after famous singers. Elvis and his comrades were brought to life with puppets and stop motion, and while the movie is by no means a classic, he’s still a neat, unique-looking example, and would return for two sequels.

Unfortunately, most other depictions from this era were not so great. Adventures in Dinosaur City (1991), a made-for-TV movie, featured anthropomorphic dinos that really put the “terrible” in “terrible lizards” and featured a T. rex by the name of simply “Rex” (Wow! So creative!) but this embarrassment to the Tyrant Lizard King’s true nature pales in comparison to one of the worst depictions ever put to celluloid: Theodore Rex (1996), which is a buddy-cop-style comedy that teams up Whoopie Goldberg and the Cretaceous carnivore. Theodore Rex (A.K.A. T. rex—get it? Hilarious!) talks and looks very similar to the dinosaurs from the TV sitcom Dinosaurs which aired around the same time—that is to say he is clearly a guy in a suit.

The strangest one of all from this era has to be Tammy and the T-rex (1994): a movie that was made only because the director knew someone who owned a robotic Tyrannosaurus. Seriously. What’s weird about it is it was filmed with the intent of being an R-rated comedy/horror, but the gory scenes were cut and it was marketed as a more palatable family film. The long lost “gore cut” was released by Vinegar Syndrome in 2019. One of the funniest things about Tammy’s T. rex is a moment when it answers a payphone and its arms extend to five times their actual length.

Check out the conclusion to this epic cinematic history in part three!

 

PART THREE:

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2022/02/part-three-of-complete-cinematic.html

Reviews:

Dinosaurus! (1960): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/10/dinosaurus-1960-review.html

The Valley of Gwangi (1969): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-valley-of-gwangi-1969-review.html

Planet of Dinosaurs (1977): https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/10/planet-of-dinosaurs-1977-review.html