Seems like a lot of movies are kicking off with disclaimers lately. This time we get “This film contains scenes with very large, very loud 3-D creatures, which may not be suitable for younger viewers. Parental discretion is advised.” We’re talking today about Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia, which the folks out at Image Entertainment sent out for me to review.

Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia is about exactly that: dinosaurs. We’ll follow their history, their evolution, and their eventual extinction as best regular people can piece it together. And of course, we’ll be doing it in mind-blowing 3D.

A word about that before we carry on into the movie itself–everything about this movie screams. More specifically, it screams both “big” and “loud”. This was originally geared toward IMAX presentations, but it’s been scaled down, just a bit, for our consumption. Naturally, this means that things will be very loud, and things will go flying at your monitor, sometimes screeching at you.

When we went diving into Panthalassa, I jumped just a bit. It was definitely a surprise, and worth watching.

But despite the big nature of what we’re watching here, there will be more than a few problems. Frankly, Donald Sutherland is hit or miss as a narrator–sometimes he’s downright compelling, and sometimes he sounds like he’s just so sick and tired of reading this script that he just wants someone to cut his check so he can get out of there. And backup narrator Dr. Rodolfo Coria  occasionally manages to sound like a man reading a script at gunpoint.

As for the graphics themselves, which are substantial portions of the movie (after all, they’re not going to get actual dinosaurs to play this) are no Jurassic Park, and Jurassic Park was around about fifteen, twenty years ago. It’s a dark sign that a big 3D movie actually features less believable dinosauria than a twenty year old adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel could pull off.

Oh, and one more thing–this has a total run time of forty minutes. It’s a little bit short, in all honesty, and though it’s certainly taking full advantage of 3D capability, it’s not putting up a whole lot in general.

If you’ve got kids who are dinosaur enthusiasts, you might do well here, especially if you have the proper home theater system to handle the 3D and the incredible soundtrack. Otherwise, you’ll likely want to skip this one.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia a five out of ten. It’s good, and for a variety of reasons, but there are entirely too many conditions to meet for many people to actually be able to enjoy this. You need the right components and the right audience in order to get the most out of it, and movies that come with strings attached just can’t get that much of a recommendation. Still though, if you’ve got the hardware, or something near it, it will make a decent rental.