Area 407 & The Dinosaur Project

I love dinosaurs. And you might have noticed, I love found footage. So I was quite overjoyed to find out there were two dinosaur-themed found footage movies.

It turns out that while they're both found footage and feature dinosaurs, they're very, very different films. In fact, only one of them is horror.

Area 407

Area 407 is an old school, balls in the face found fooatge film, and I love it for that. The effects are simple but effective. For one thing, it features the most convincing plane crash scene I've ever seen, better than overly glossy depictions in films like The Grey and Jurassic Park 3. The storyline is simple and, let's be honest, very predictable. But the characters are actually interesting and sympathetic, which can be rare in found footage.

Basically, it's not the most brilliantly written film out there. It's pretty mediocre. But it's a pure, unadulterated genre film and that's why I'm the found footage afficionado. It instantly has established itself in my canon as my personal favorite out of the middle of the road FF films.

The Dinosaur Project

If Found Footage were my religion, this movie would be sacrilegious  It does everything on my list that indicates a weak, ineffectual found footage movie. The POV is inconsistent and impersonal, scattered over dozens of camera angels giving the film a scope and cinematography indistinguishable from a regular film (they have an in-universe explanation in the form of countless tiny cameras attached all over, but please, this format robs found footage of its stylistic strengths.) It's also not a horror film, and while it's admirable that found footage conintues to branch out, I've yet to see a truly effective found footage film that isn't horror.

But don't count the film out yet. It may be bad as a found footage "genre film," but as a regular film it's bloody fantastic. In fact, it's the best dinosaur movie to come out since Jurassic Park. It's the classic story of explorers finding a 'lost world' of prehistoric creatures, but it also cleverly turns some of the tropes on their head. The CGi is also surprisingly very good, and I rarely like CGI.

It admirably incorporates the Mokele mbembe myth, the most famous of dinosaur crytpids. For including it at all, I'll forgive them for switching the real legend of mbembe (which looks like a sauropod dinosaur), with your classic lake monster cryptids (resembling either a plesiosaur or an icthyosaur.)


Final verdict: They're both good dinosaur films, I'd prefer both to either of Jurassic Park's sequels. Only one of them is good as a found footage film, that's Area 407. However, The Dinosaur Project is a far better film overall.