Baby

Baby
Baby

Baby

The death of Sinbad the gorilla at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo last week reminded me of how we sentimentalize animals, turn them into incomplete, cute little humans rather than love them for what they are another thing. “Baby,” a comedy about an infant brontosaurus, is another tired example the glory of nature turned cliché man.

I mean, think about it: What if there were still dinosaurs roaming around someplace in deepest Africa? Wouldn’t that be a miracle? A real live dinosaur would be even more amazing than seeing a man walk on the moon. Technology doesn’t impress me as much as what life has done for itself.

With just a touch more wonder “Baby” could have been really special. The special effects in this movie give us dinosaurs that look almost believable, and if the screenplay had been half as good as those big lizards.

Instead, “Baby” is just one darned thing after another: One minute you’re waiting breathlessly for something to happen (like when you know somebody’s about to get hit by a car), and then you’re sitting there slack jawed because nothing does happen (like when nobody gets hit by the car).

Even that most certain moment in any brontosaurus movie the first sighting of the creature is blown here. There ought to be silence and awe, but instead there’s gee-whiz and Godzilla remake.

But maybe I shouldn’t have expected much. This movie doesn’t have an ounce of ambition; it’s perfectly content to stick its neat characters into situations that every kid in America has seen too many times before.

A family of dinosaurs? That’s great! Make ’em good guys and bad guys! And let’s bring back Peace Corps volunteers while we’re at it!

The Peace Corps volunteers are played by William Katt and Sean Young. They march off into the wilderness with noble intentions: They want to find the dinosaurs, and save them.

The bad guys are a greedy scientist (Patrick McGoohan), his greedy sidekick (Julian Fellowes) and an African mercenary so trigger-happy that he tries to shoot the male brontosaurus from a helicopter just seconds after he’s injected the female with a tranquilizer. The mind boggles. Is there supposed to be only one dinosaur?

While the husband and wife team try to drag their baby dinosaur back to civilization which is what any Peace Corps volunteer would do when faced with a baby dinosaur we’re treated to many lively discussions along the way.

She’s a feminist, and we learn from this movie that feminists have strong feelings about Brontosaurus Rights. Nothing wrong with that; I wish feminism could help Brontoses. But why did they have to give us such trivial falderal in between? All those thrilling scenes where the little dinosaur acts like a baby and playfully nuzzles people, or carelessly uproots their tent.

Is that all there is? A thousand special effects technicians went on strike over this picture, but can you imagine Spielberg fighting for it? Are we so starved for intelligent entertainment that we’ll settle for anything as long as it moves? The movie is subtitled “The Secret of the Lost Legend,” and doesn’t that sound like an exciting movie they might want to make sometime?

Watch Baby For Free On Gomovies.

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