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