Sea Rex: Journey to a Prehistoric World 3D

Made for IMAX screens—and capable of being viewed in the 3D format at home with the proper equipment (a 3D-capable TV, compatible glasses, and a Blu-ray 3D player)—filmmakers' Pascal Vuong and Ronan Chapalain's quasi-documentary Sea Rex focuses on the period in Earth's prehistory when dinosaurs roamed the seas before migrating to land. Starting with an anecdote about a strange fossilized skeleton unearthed in France in the 1700s, the film quickly moves to the present, where a girl named Julie (Chloe Hollings) is visiting an aquarium. As she marvels at the exhibits, the ghost of a French paleontologist, Georges Cuvier (Richard Rider), appears and converses with her about the evolution of the dinos (including the Liopleurodon, the Elasmosaurus, and the Shonisaurus) during the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods. Animation is employed to visualize the beasts, while brief narratives—highly speculative, to be sure—describe various aspects of their behavior, including mating rituals. Periodically, actors playing scientists offer supposedly authoritative statements. Young viewers may well be entranced by CGI scenes of the creatures in action, but they're also likely to find the more verbose segments tedious. Older audiences will wonder what's fact and what's fiction here. Extras include a behind-the-scenes featurette, and brief filmmaker interviews. Not a necessary purchase. Aud: P. (F. Swietek)