Everybody Walk The Dinosaur

Anonymous Rex

(2004)

2 Stars

So, I just finished the book, and figured that I may as well give the TV version a go.

I must say, there have been few Sci-Fi Channel TV movies that have really impressed me; Tin Man, the gothic Wizard of Oz was painfully bad to watch, whilst their recent attempt at Alice was only watchable for Andrew Lee Potts’ delightful portrayal of the Mad Hatter.

Thus, it was with some trepidation that I approached their 2004 production of Eric Garcia’s Anonymous Rex, which, if you didn’t catch my review of the book earlier this week, is basically detective noir meets Jurassic Park, and really bloody good fun.

Unfortunately, despite Garcia working as executive producer on the project, the final result has little of the books ubiquitous charm. Indeed it feels like the only things that have stuck are the main character’s name , and the concept of dinosaurs living among us.

Vincent Rubio (played with an eminent dullness by Sam Trammell) is no longer the degenerate herb-addicted private investigator mourning the death of his partner, but instead a suave and witty detective whose partner Ernie (Daniel Baldwin), still alive here, is actually a much more interesting and engaging character.

The twist and turn plot of the book is utterly scrapped, making way for a daft plan for world domination by dino extremists, and a bizarre dinosaur council, governed over by Isaac Hayes, who seem to spent their entire time playing mah-jong and giving crypticisms about “chance”. It’s just a little silly, and not in the good way.

On the plus side, there are some half decent CGI sequences, and the holographic guises, rather than the rubber ones of the book, are a little more believable (I did spend a lot of the book trying to figure out exactly how a dinosaur would fit into a rubber man suit), and the sub-plot involving Ernie’s human daughter is pretty fun.

There’s a lesson to be learned about adaptation which so few writers seem to heed; if something works, don’t fuck about with it! There’s a reason it works, so go with it! Anonymous Rex could have made a great TV show. Unfortunately, the pilot was so pants, it crashed and burned like a certain meteorite in the Gulf of Mexico.