Ice Age 3 Dawn of the Dinosaurs 2nd Trailer
Fox/Blue Sky Movie Stars Ray Romano, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah
Mar 26, 2009
Uh-oh. That's the only way to describe what Twentieth Century Fox/Blue Sky Animation is cooking up with Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. And no, that's not a good thing.
Let's forget that the dinosaurs were long dead when the real Ice Age hit (dinosaurs, being giant lizards, couldn't stand the cold).
MSN scored a new trailer for the flick and, while it does has its laugh-out-loud bits, there's a sense that the marketing folks dumped every funny joke they could find in this trailer, in the hopes that audiences will be seduced into seeing the flick.
It has that rapid-fire, cut-up quality to it in the way it jumps around from situation to situation: one bit where Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo) plays nursemaid to a pack of T-Rex babies, another where hapless Scrat is tormented by female flying squirrel Scraté.
Yes, there are some good sequences (Sid trying to milk a yak, or T-Rex versus piranhas) but the trailer as a whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Stars Ray Romano, Denis Leary, Queen Latifah
What else is wrong with this trailer?
How about the nods to Star Trek ("to boldly go") and 2001: A Space Odyssey (Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra) right off the top: two very over-used referential riffs. There's also Ellie (Queen Latifah) tells Manny the Mammoth (Ray Romano) off with "Talk to the trunk"; yep, we're reduced to referencing Fran Drescher in The Nanny, a TV series that went off the air 10 years ago
Ice Age 2 was a massive overseas hit, making $400 million in international box office, which is why Fox green-lit a threequel. That 2006 film also depicted the end of said Ice Age, hence why they subtitled it The Meltdown.
Which is partially why Dawn of the Dinosaurs appears to have a recycled, how-do-we-extend-the-franchise feel to it. The suits wanted another Ice Age movie and the scriptwriters, casting about for a new premise, thought, "Hey, let's throw in dinosaurs! Kids think dinosaurs are cool, like Jurassic Park!"
(Unfortunately, that flick came out in 1993. Fox appears stuck in the last decade, folks.)
Given that 2009 is so far promising to be an artistic high point for animated films, it was already concerning that Twentieth Century Fox and Blue Sky Animation hit up their biggest franchise to be this year's contender. Clearly the boardroom at Fox have decided not to pit Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs against Disney/Pixar's Toy Story 3 and DreamWorks Animation's Shrek Goes Fourth in the Franchise Showdown of 2010, and instead push it ahead to this summer. Were they right in thinking that this film couldn't hack it in the Pixar/DreamWorks showdown coming next year?
Will Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs chomp the box office, or slink off into the La Brea tar pits? Find out when it hits theatres July 4th.
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