My home dinosaur / Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, The / (2007)
adventure / family / fantasy
Directed by: Jay Russell
Cast: Brian Cox, Emily Watson, Ben Chaplin, David Morrissey, Geraldine Brophy, ...
"My home dinosaur," which tells the story of the friendship of a boy and a Loch Ness monster during the war, turned out to be a wise and bitter film - only five seconds. All the rest of the time this is a beautiful, albeit gloomy, family movie.
In Hollywood films, dogs usually behave like humans, and any other animals, regardless of their kind, kind and degree of breeding, behave like dogs - from the Tyrannosaurus skeleton in "Nights in the Museum" to one of the main dogs of Hollywood - the pig Baba . The hero of military fantasy "My home dinosaur" - also something like a dog, only very large, with a long neck and swims.
During the Second World War, in a small Scottish village, lives with his mother and elder sister boy Engus. He waits for his father from the front, almost does not smile, more and more away from his mother - the housekeeper of a large estate - and almost all the time he spends in his father's workshop. There he brings the egg found on the shore of the lake, from which immediately hatch a toothy lizard with paws and fish tail. And then the active military unit arrives at the estate: suddenly the Nazi submarine will surface in the lake, and then the valiant British army will strike at them.
Quite quickly it turns out that the boy brings up the "sea dinosaur" (why the dinosaur? - and the word is beautiful), and that there is only one such in the world, and before death this creature lays one egg from which the next sea snake hatch. Angus calls his pet Crusoe. The dinosaur eats a lot, grows very fast, quarrels with an army English bulldog called Churchill, and finally reaches such a size that it is no longer possible to keep it at home. It is necessary to release the animal to the lake, so in Scotland a legend about Nessie is born.
The film was filmed mostly in New Zealand, - in modern cinema, it increasingly plays the role of Netinebudet, the ideal fairy country. Adult actors - Emily Watson with his unearthly smile and Ben Chaplin with his gloomy masculinity - perfectly look in a realistic tale. And the dinosaur itself (the work of Weta Workshop, they were engaged in the special effects of "The Lord of the Rings") at the best moments of his hooligan life looks like this English bulldog in comparison with him seems not the most successful CGI-experiment. In general, the "Dinosaur" - a beautiful, gloomy, even closer to the end and an unnecessarily predictable family movie. Easy childish episodes, such as the bulldog races for the baby dinosaur or the joyful diving of Angus from Crusoe to the lake depths, are replaced by cruel adult stories, like bombing, which almost kills Crusoe.
And the pig Babe is not in vain recalled: "My home dinosaur" - a screen version of the story of Dick King-Smith, the author of the fairy tale "Babe". This writer-farmer writes a book after book about selfless animals, forced to exist in the cruel world of people, and that a goose can be friends with a pig, and a boy with a sea monster. And more that the world even the most stale adults is arranged after all by fairy-tale laws, it's just these adults most often take a water dinosaur for an enemy submarine and begin to shoot at it.
At some point, Mom Angus utters very terrible words: "This is the war in everything to blame, it's because of her you went crazy and came up with a dinosaur." In five seconds she will see Crusoe herself and will understand that everything that is happening is not madness, but reality. But these five seconds the audience will watch a completely different movie: a completely unheroic war, a very lonely boy and his imaginary friend. The fact that these five seconds in the film is, makes of the usual tale a wise and bitter film. The fact that the version with an imaginary friend turns out to be false shows how stupid and dull the adults are with their stupid adult logic. Mom is wrong. The dinosaur is real.