Studio: A&e Home Video Release Date: 01/20/2009 Run time: 564 minutes
Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, but
Jurassic Fight Club offers ample evidence that our fascination with these mighty creatures is eternal. Sure, there will be those who will object to the various inaccuracies and generally flashy style and tone of the 12 episodes (on four discs) from this first season of the popular History Channel series. But this isn’t science class; it’s entertainment, and taken on its own terms, it’s both engaging
and informative. The show’s conceit--namely, that "new discoveries in forensic science bring to life the prehistoric art of war"--reveals itself through episodes focusing on particular dinosaurs, including their environments, their prey, and their adversaries. Thus we get Madagascar’s Majungatholus, the "Cannibal Dinosaur," an "apex predator" that weighed a ton and was thirty feet long; when a male of the species kills a youngster, the baby’s mother exacts her brutal revenge in graphic detail (it’s not for nothing that the show advises viewer discretion). Elsewhere, we meet Nanotyrannus, the "pygmy tyrant" (smaller and stealthier than the notorious T-Rex, this nasty customer feeds on the latter’s young), as well as Allosaurus, the enormous "Terror of the Jurassic," and Ceratosaurus, another huge predator. We see Megalodon, the 50-foot ancestor of the great white shark, attacked by an entire pod of sperm whales from the Miocene era, and the fearsome raptors, who hunted in packs and were smarter and stealthier than other hunters. And "Armageddon," one of the best episodes, chronicles the Mt. Everest-sized asteroid that landed on the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago, bringing the reign of the dinosaurs to a sudden and unimaginably violent end.
All of this is delivered quite convincingly and realistically by way of CGI, computer recreations of the actual "combat" scenes, charts, graphs, tables, maps, film footage of actual paleontologists and other scientists in the field, and interviews with numerous experts (principally the colorful "Dinosaur George" Blasing). The pounding, dramatic music is similar to that used for History productions like Battle 360 and The Universe, as is the macho narration (which favors overheated terminology like "crime scene," "suspect," and "investigators"). Bonus material is limited to some additional footage on one disc. --Sam Graham
