LONDON CITY NIGHTS: dinosaurs

Thursday, February 28, 2019

Review: 'Dinomania' at the New Diorama, 27th February 2019

Thursday, February 28, 2019 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Reviewed by David James
Rating: 4 Stars

There is no way in hell I'm going to miss a show called Dinomania. Perhaps understandably, there are few plays about dinosaurs on the London fringe, with cash-strapped theatre companies reluctant to blow their budget on rubber Velociraptor costumes. More's the pity, but as Dinomania proves, there is still room in theatre for palaeontology nerds...

I've been a big admirer of Kandinsky ever since their excellent Still Ill back in 2016 and their talents were only confirmed in last year's Trap Street. Those shows covered psychosomatic illness and post-war housing. Now, as if actively resisting being pigeon-holed, they've created a seriously engaging play about Victorian science and the birth of palaeontology.

I imagine that for most people the names Gideon Mantell, Richard Owen and Georges Cuvier don't mean a huge amount, but they're indelibly burned into my brain thanks to 5-year-old me spending hours poring over various Usborne and Kingfisher books about dinosaurs. These books generally had a section on the discovery and classification of dinosaurs, generally taking time to explain how country doctor Gideon Mantell unearthed one of the first dinosaurs while out walking in the English countryside.

You can imagine what learning something like that does to a five-year-old's imagination. Dinosaurs are not only real and incredibly cool but they are literally hidden under the ground in this country. What on earth is stopping me from going out into the woods and finding the most awesome dinosaur the world has ever seen? All of which led me to me begging for a hammer and chisel for my sixth birthday - which in retrospect must have made for a pretty cheap present.

Anyway, all that's to say that I was extremely geared up to see a show about Gideon Mantell. While the show is broadly biographical, following him from cradle to grave, his life becomes a prism through which we understand Victorian science. The Victorians made enormous leaps in our understanding of the natural world - though these revelations were by no means easily accepted.

And so Kandinsky dramatises the key rifts in Victorian science. This begins with the class divisions between upper-class gentlemen scientists like Owen and Cuvier and middle and working class fossil-hunters like Mantell and Mary Anning (who I was slightly disappointed not to see get a name-check here). This feeds into a more serious rift, with young-earth Christianity and Genesis not having room for extinct prehistoric species and the millions of years required to produce fossils.

One of the most fascinating observations Kandinsky make is to explain how the concept of a creature changing form over time and becoming extinct was anathema to the upper-class Victorian consciousness. The scientists of the day looked to nature to justify the supremacy of their way of life (also a great way of securing patronage) and in Dinomania we hear how the theory that 'a mollusc may become a man' can be viewed as an attack on the rigid class structures.

It's a perspective the show reflects in Mantell's life. The child of shoemakers, he's told by his parents that the Mantells were once a great family and throughout the play we see him struggling to gain gentlemanly respectability. But, much as the Royal Geographical Society resist any 'progressive' ideas about adaptability, they resist his very presence among them and do their best to minimise his role in the discovery and classification of Iguanadon.

Kandinsky stages these arguments with their usual razor-sharp precision. The march of scientific progress and the discarding of incorrect or politically untimely theories is depicted by scientists dispatching each other with a pistol shot to the forehead, religious thought is heralded with hilariously overblown latin chanting and, in the play's best moment, the villain of the piece crumbles as he receives a vision of the future: his hated rival Charles Darwin is venerated and he dies miserable and alone. (Ha-ha! Suck it, Richard Owen).

I was never not going to enjoy a play that sits at the intersection of so many things I'm into, but it takes some serious skills to make a potentially dry subject so gripping. I've read a tonne about these dusty old scientists and in my imagination they are always the rigid, stern-looking men you see in their lithograph portraits (or the photographs of them as corpse-like old guys). Dinomania brings them to lusty, passionate life, blood pumping through their veins and sweat on their faces as they decipher the evidence left in rocks.

I have no idea what subject Kandinsky are going to tackle next but I'll be there day one.

Dinomania is at the New Diorama Theatre until 23 March. Tickets here.

Friday, June 12, 2015

'Jurassic World' (2015) directed by Colin Trevorrow

Friday, June 12, 2015 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Much as I try not to be a sap for franchise nostalgia, Jurassic Park still tugs at my heartstrings. I vividly remember being an incredibly excited dinosaur obsessed ten year old in 1993, astonished and thrilled by what I saw on screen. Time has proved Jurassic Park to be a genuinely great film; a weird mixed-up science fiction monster movie that switches gears from adventure movie, to disaster movie, to slasher movie and finally back to adventure as the T-Rex boomingly roars and "When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth" fluttersdown around it. God-damn it's good.

Now, 22 years later, we're heading back. Jurassic World is essentially a direct sequel to the first film, paying little attention to the mediocre The Lost World and the godawful Jurassic Park III. The conceit is that while the original Jurassic Park may have ended in menaced children, severed arms and chewed up lawyers, the basic concept was sound. Now (with beefed up security) we have Jurassic World: John Hammond's dream fully realised.

Jurassic World is established, popular and successful; boasting thousands of visitors each day who're in thrall to a process now known as de-extinction. Cheering visitors sit in Seaworld-a-like auditoriums as a colossal mosasaur munches down great white sharks whole, children ride baby triceratops about in a petting zoo and visitors can roll between the legs of sauropods in transparent gyrospheres.

Though the visitors are happy, the shareholders aren't. Growth has begun to stagnate, so the board decides to cook up a new excitingly dangerous dinosaur. Working from a T-Rex base, the fiendish Dr Wu (BD Wong) stirs up a genetic soup and creates the I-Rex. Or, to give it its full name: the Verizon Wireless Indominus Rex. The park's manager, Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) has mixed feelings about this; on one hand the corporate sponsors are ecstatic, on the other she's now responsible for a psychotic murder monster that really, really, really wants to escape and start eating people.

No prizes for guessing what happens next. Fortunately Claire has the services of animal trainer Owen (Chris Pratt) who's gained the trust of the velociraptor pack. As chaos snowballs it's down to Owen to corral the raptors and hunt down the escaped I-Rex, and maybe save Claire's nephews if he's got a minute

Jurassic World is roughly half dumb and half perceptive. According to the director, the genesis of the film is "What people were kind of over seeing dinosaurs? We imagined a teenager texting his girlfriend with his back to a T-Rex behind protective glass." It's a clever way of looking at the Jurassic Park metatext; while realistic computer generated dinosaurs were astonishing in 1993, after 22 years of ever more clanging CGI we take these things for granted.

This makes Jurassic World a battleground between old and new; the bombastic and cynical modern blockbuster versus the sincere, nostalgic classic. The forces of the new are represented in part by omnipresent (and for once thematically appropriate) product placement, security Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), who wants to militarise the dinosaurs to use as living drones and; most obviously, the I-Rex itself.

Whereas the 'classic' Jurassic Park dinosaurs have a weird dignity; the I-Rex is a complete asshole. It indiscriminately kills the other dinosaurs, behaves in a straightforwardly villainous way (they should have engineered a moustache for it to twirl) and, most egregiously, isn't even a real dinosaur. Within the text it's an abomination, bloodily tearing its way through our nostalgia, dragging the film away from Spielbergian wonder to everything-exploding Bay-hem maximalism.

And boy oh boy does Jurassic World ever get silly. There's a tonne of ultra-cheesy dialogue throughout, though it becomes weirdly palatable when delivered by one-man charisma machine Chris Pratt. The idea of repurposing killer dinosaurs for military use is Saturday morning cartoon stupid - the highlight being Vincent D'Onofrio staring admiringly at the velociraptors and saying "can you imagine if we'd have had these things in Tora Bora?" You know what Vince, I actually can't.

Everything climaxes in a pro-wrestling match where the goodie dinosaur dukes it out with the baddie dinosaur. I could forgive anyone who's thrown up their hands in disbelief by this point - the dinosaurs are now less animals ripped from time and more toothy, leathery superheroes. But well, despite all this dumbness, I kinda enjoyed it.

Jurassic World wears its heart on its sleeve - it's a B-movie where a massive genetic dinosaur monster eats lots of people. It achieves the goals of the B-movie with aplomb; providing laughs, scares, excitement and lots of action. There's also the commentary on franchise-rot bubbling away in the background, which makes it just aware enough that it squeaks into 'good film' territory.

This is obviously nowhere near as good as Jurassic Park, but it's certainly better than the previous sequels. It's forgettable and perversely moronic, but at least it's fun.

★★★

Jurassic World is on wide release now.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

'Dinosaur 13' (2014) directed by Todd Douglas Miller

Wednesday, September 3, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

A ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex bares its jagged teeth on the poster. There's a quote describing it as "awe-inspiring". Perhaps that's why some hapless parent plumped to bring a gaggle of excited five year olds to Dinosaur 13. Unfortunately for her and the children, this is less a thrilling romp through the Mesozoic period and more a dry, analytical documentary about a complex legal battle, with a focus on the minutia of South Dakota land law.

Enjoyment of Dinosaur 13 hinges on two things. If you're interested in the commercial processes behind paleontology you're onto a winner. Similarly so if you like picking through legal logic puzzles. Fortunately I like both, so Dinosaur 13, though a pretty damn dry documentary, held my interest for the full two hours. The five-year olds lasted an hour, with one increasingly dismayed kid politely whispering "Mummy, when are the dinosaurs coming?"

The titular Dinosaur 13 is the most famous dinosaur fossil in the world; Sue. Discovered in the badlands of South Dakota in 1990 Sue is the thirteenth T.rex discovered, and the largest, most articulated and best preserved. A discovery like Sue is every paleontologist's fantasy and through grainy early 90s camcorder we track the excitement, amazement and sheer awe on the faces of those gently excavating her from the desert.

Peter Larson, Sue Hendrikson and Sue (and a dog).

Their leader is Peter Larson, fossil-mad since a child and infatuated with his discovery. He and his brother Neal co-founded the Black Hills Institute in 1974, a commercial paleontological company set up to unearth fossils and sell them to museums around the world. He speaks in movingly poetic terms about the thrill of his work, explaining that the light from the stars in the sky left their stars at the same time as the fossilised animal breathed its last, sandwiching him within hundreds of millions of years of history.

With Sue safely out of the ground and the landowner compensated the future was bright. Local spirits were high: children would regularly come to visit Sue and plans were afoot to raise money to construct a local museum to house her - a huge economic boost for this small town. Then, one day the FBI and the National Guard showed up, ordered everyone out of the offices, packed Sue into crates and bundled her into a dimly lit warehouse - her home for the the next four years.

The bulk of the film is devoted to the resulting legal battles between the US Government, Maurice Williams (the owner of the land Sue was found on) and the employees of the Black Hills Institute. Douglas is clearly on the side of Black Hills and the film treats the battle as an inherent perversion of the legal process; a tale replete with vindictive judges, hints of shadowy conspiracies and the overpowering bureaucracy of the US Government.

The mantra repeated throughout the film, whether it be in stock footage or talking heads, is "This the land of the free! How can this happen in America!?" This unified chorus against the depredations of 'big government' exposes the libertarianism embedded deep in Dinosaur 13, something best highlighted when the film uses a clip of Bill O'Reilly to support their case. Boiled to its core, Miller argues for the freedom of private enterprise; that a citizen should own the fruits of their labour and be able to dictate its commercial use.

Short shrift is given to the US Government's position that Sue, having been discovered on land held in trust for the Sioux tribe, legally belongs to them. There's a fascinating ruling midway through proceedings that dinosaur fossils are land. The paleontologists are unified in their indignance that Sue be regarded as "real estate". Ridiculous as that might seem it's a smart bit of legal reasoning: given that the original dinosaur bone has become mineralised over millions of years it is literally composed of 'land'. The crux of this is that in buying Sue, the Black Hill Institute was unknowingly negotiating for the purchase of land from Maurice Williams, land which he was legally unable to sell.

Dinosaur 13 never admits for a moment that its scrappy underdogs could be anything other than in the right - when the law defeats them they fall back on a position of moral superiority. Fortunately for Miller they can claim this ground much more successfully, with a subsequent criminal trial appearing to move into the realms of the genuinely vindictive.

It's a testament to the skills of Miller that, even though I'm opposed to the libertarian philosophy upon which Dinosaur 13 makes its case, I find it easy to sympathise with the people caught up in it. Peter Larson's devotion to Sue is hugely touching; their separation more reminiscent of a tragic love story than scientific endeavour. This passion gives the final shots of him striding purposefully back into the endless desert a great deal of gravitas.

On display to the public in Chicago.

But the heart of Dinosaur 13 is Sue. She is heart-wrenchingly beautiful, her enormous bones infused with regal dignity and a subtle sense of loss. When she's ultimately sold to the Field Museum in Chicago for a massive $8.4 million the paleontologists aren't surprised, saying "she's worth so much more". Sue is one of the most magnificent things ever drawn out from beneath the earth, beyond all the politics and law one thing is crystal clear: she was worth fighting for.

★★★

Friday, August 23, 2013

'Jurassic Park: An IMAX 3D Experience' (1993) directed by Steven Spielberg

Friday, August 23, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

The phenomenon known as infrasound has some very strange effects on human beings. These are sounds lower in frequency than 20 Hz, below the normal limit of human hearing. Infrasound has the effect of inducing anxiety, uneasiness, uncontrollable feelings of fear and awe. In nature they're found in the roar of the tiger and other large predators - the theory being that that human beings are hard-wired to experience a surge of adrenaline at hearing them - triggering a fight or flight response to escape a hungry predator. When the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the undisputed star of Jurassic Park, roared full blast through the BFI IMAX sound system I felt that instinctive, primal fear - an awe that cut past all intellectual analysis right to the animal core of my brain.

'All Yesterdays' at Conway Hall, 7th December 2012

Saturday, December 8, 2012 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

A peacefully snoozing T-Rex by John Conway

I want you to imagine a dinosaur. What image pops into your head? Something out of 'Jurassic Park'? Maybe a creature from the BBCs 'Walking with Dinosaurs'. Dinosaurs are ubiquitous in popular culture but no matter where you encounter them they tend to look pretty similar. You'll get scaly skin, drab colours and the same body types and prominent features right across the dinosaur spectrum. These images of dinosaurs are so pervasive that you'd be forgiven for assuming that a scientific consensus had been reached on what dinosaurs looked like.

What was argued at Conway Hall last night is that this assumption is almost certainly wrong. We can never really know what dinosaurs would have looked like, and popular images of them we have are very conservatively imagined. Speakers Darren Naish, John Conway and C.M. Kosemen are kicking back against this conservatism and imagining the wilder possibilities of dinosaur behaviour and appearance. To this end they've put together a fantastic book; 'All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Mammals'.

A camouflaged plesiosaur waiting for prey to drift by. By John Conway.

The book is a collection of amazing looking paleo art that explores more radical and experimental ideas in paleontology. Understandably, most paleo art focuses on making the skeletons prominent in the drawings. But what of the masses of soft tissue around the animals? Could dinosaurs have had their skeletons buried deep within round fatty bodies? Could they have had large soft tissue frills or even enormously outsized genitalias?

These brachiosaurs may look weird, but this is entirely plausible. By Brian Engh

The first speaker of the night was Darren Naish, paleontologist and author of the endlessly informative blog 'Tetrapod Zoology'. Firstly he gives us a grounding in why we shouldn't be conservative when it comes to dinosaur reconstructions. He shows us a variety of animals in nature that in his words "look freakin' ridiculous". We're acclimatised to seeing living animals with ridiculous body features, so why do we react with giggles when we see dinosaurs depicted in this fashion?

Much of this talk is concerned with a speedy run down of the history of paleo art. The first depictions of dinosaurs appeared in the Victorian era of paleontology, where they were depicted as slow, ponderous lumbering brutes, giant lizards so ungainly it seemed no wonder they'd gone extinct. My favourite example of these kinds of dinosaurs are the models at Crystal Palace.

If you get a chance do the dinosaur audio tour when you're at Crystal Palace, it's great.

As Naish points out, while these dinosaurs are way off the mark based on what we now know we have to bear in mind that these were constructed from very incomplete fossils and actually have a lot of nuance and intelligence in their poses. They may lazily slouch along the ground, but at least they're being lazy in a vaguely anatomically correct manner. On some level these Victorian dinosaurs reflect an over-literalisation of Darwin's concept of the 'survival of the fittest'. The thinking goes, if these animals aren't here any more, then by definition they must have been 'unfit' to live.

As more fossils were discovered, the depiction of dinosaurs began to evolve. It's these images from the 1920s and 30s that colour much of the 20th century's perception of what a dinosaur is. Charles Knight was one of the leaders of this field, and though his paintings are wildly inaccurate they remain beautiful in their own right. These depictions echo right through popular culture, through classics like 'King Kong' (1933) and 'Godzilla' (1954) to various 60s dinosaur v cavegirl b-schlock. You still occasionally see the remnants of this poking up in crappy children's toys, comics and cartoons.

So many things wrong here, but still a lovely piece of art by George Knight

The next major shift came with Robert Bakker and his quick, speedy, smart dinosaurs. This injection of life began to revolutionise the way people envisaged dinosaur behaviour, and therapods in particular began being assigned bird like qualities. At the same time skeletal analysis of sauropods and other large dinosaurs was leading to changes in opinion how these dinosaurs must have moved, grown and lived. As far as popular culture is concerned, these Bakker style dinosaurs made their debut in Steven Spielberg's 'Jurassic Park'.

Yes the film is scientifically out of date, but it still owns bones.

That was 20 years ago though, and in the interim period many new discoveries have been made. It's been conclusively established that dromaeosaurid therapods were feathered, and we're now discovering that even larger dinosaurs like ceratopsians had wiry and bristly hair-like structures running down the middle of their backs. These discoveries make it an exciting time for dinosaur illustration, the doors are wide open for paleo artists to use their full imagination while remaining within the realms of plausibility.

Fantastically coloured like this Majungasaurus crenatissiumus by C.M. Kosemen, showing off it's lovely wattles.

I agree wholeheartedly with the speakers when they explain that we should be more imaginative when envisioning dinosaurs and other extinct animals. The underlying philosophy of these illustrations is to make clear that there are things we will never know about dinosaurs. The science of paleontology can rule out some things, but even this leaves a vast spectrum of possibilitie and allows us to conduct thought experiments about dinosaur behaviour that can lead to great ideas like the tree-climbing Protoceratops seen below. The rationale for this is quite brilliant, we know goats can climb trees yet there would be no way of knowing this based on skeletal analysis. So why should we speculate that some dinosaurs may have behaved the same way?

Protoceratops climbing a tree by John Conway

I don't know who the audience were at tonight's talk, but they seemed like a pretty up-to-speed bunch. What I found interesting was the reaction when they saw some of the more wildly conceptualised paleo art: laughter. But why is art like this funny? We wouldn't laugh at a picture of a peacock, or at an elephant's trunk, yet it's these kinds of complicated and unlikely soft tissue formations that seem funny when placed on a dinosaur. Many people become dinosaur enthusiasts as children, and grow up imagining dinosaurs a certain way. It can be difficult to accept that those beloved old books and illustrations were wrong, particularly when you have an emotional attachment to them.

I asked a question at the end of the night as to whether there is any resistance from publishers towards depictions of feathered dinosaurs. Artist Luis Rey, sitting in the audience told us that he gets requests to get rid of feathers, but refuses to comply. It's a noble stance to take, if a generation of dinosaur-crazy children grow up with feathered dinosaurs fixed in their minds as the standard model, paleo art will have taken a step forwards. But sometime soon there must be another leap forward in popular culture, just as 'Jurassic Park' popularised the intelligent, fast-moving dinosaur, something will soon popularise the feathered, extravagantly coloured contemporary ideas about dinosaur appearance.

What the pictures and ideas presented tonight demonstrated is that what we think of as a 'dinosaur' is remarkably plastic. You would think that the more information we can glean from fossilised skeletons and impressions of dinosaur footprints the more we could narrow down a consensus on what these creatures looked like. The opposite seems true. The more we learn, the greater the possibilities. One of my favourite parts of the night was when were shown how a paleontologist might interpret the skeleton of a cat or a cow if they treated it in the same manner as they would a reconstruction from a dinosaur fossil. The animals are almost unrecognisable, looking emaciated and, as Naish put it, zombie-like.

John Conway's 'reconstruction' of a cow, based on its skeleton.

A domestic cat, 'reconstructed' from its skeleton - John Conway again.

Seeing dinosaurs presented like this can seem heretical, like the nobility has been drained from these animals. On some level, we've been culturally attuned to want animals like T-Rex to be fearsome looking scaly monsters, and when confronted with one covered in fluffy down we find it instinctively ridiculous. But what work like this underlines is that dinosaurs are not monsters, they're animals. A point made early in the night was that whenever we see illustrations of dinosaurs they're generally engaged in violence, killing, eating or fighting one another. It's understandable that we should want to see these creatures doing exciting, dynamic actions, but there should also be room to see them playing, sleeping or copulating.

A horny Stegosaurus by C.M. Kosemen

It's important to note that all of the ideas put forward are entirely speculative. These pictures are giving us an window into the past, just showing how they might have been. In an age of CG reconstructions that purport to show dinosaurs "as they were", it's important to remember that we could be wildly wrong about nearly everything about a dinosaur's appearance. A dinosaur enthusiast time traveller heading back to the late Cretaceous period might not recognise any of the animals he'd encounter. I deeply enjoy thinking about these "unknown unknowns", and pieces of art like the ones shown tonight help visualise the fantastical, alien and deeply weird world of the past.

Fat, downy and tufted Leaellynasaura by John Conway. I love this picture.

'All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Mammals' is on sale from Amazon on Kindle and in print from Lulu. Would make a great Christmas present.

(If I've got anything wrong in this article, please leave a comment and I'll correct it!)

LONDON CITY NIGHTS