Early, turn-of-the-century motion pictures didn’t have to offer much in the way of story. The technology itself was such a novelty that a movie could show a man buying bread and audiences would be amazed. Subsequent advances in cinematic technology have generally showed a similar disinterest in plot; the first 3-D, Cinerama, and IMAX films were more about spectacle than storytelling. Then Pixar brought us the 1995 film Toy Story and blew the paradigm. As the first fully computer-animated feature film, Toy Story would’ve been a hit based on its appearance alone. But the Pixar crew also cooked up a funny, wise, and exciting scenario—thereby assuring that future computer animation would have to be high-quality entertainment.

There’s precedence for this—Walt Disney’s first feature-length animated film, Snow White, also set a standard for the artistic potential of its medium. Interestingly, Pixar’s films are distributed by Walt Disney Pictures, but they aren’t actually Disney films. The Disney studios have been late to enter the full computer animation arena, and have been beaten to the punch by rival Dreamworks, as well as a handful of mediocre straight-to-video productions.

Well, late they may be, but Disney makes a show of heavyweight muscle with its first computer-animated feature, Dinosaur, which reportedly cost around $300 million to make (although, to be fair, much of that budget includes the cost of building a complete computer animation facility). Whatever the price tag, Dinosaur is a visual marvel, as one would expect from the meticulous Disney staff. Using real-life filmed backgrounds and a jaw-droppingly realistic style, Disney has recreated the size, strength, and ritual of the mighty dinosaur. In look alone, Dinosaur makes Jurassic Park look like Winsor McCay’s Gertie.

But Jurassic Park’s screenplay makes Dinosaur look like Lumiere’s Train Arriving at the Station. There’s a painful incongruity to seeing these magnificent creatures brought so beautifully to life, only to engage in stale dialogue exchanges like:

Zini: I’ve still got it.

Aladar: I hope it’s not contagious.

That the dinosaurs talk at all is somewhat disappointing. In the initial teaser trailer for Dinosaur (attached, appropriately enough, to Toy Story 2), Disney set up the film’s story in a gripping wordless sequence. A dinosaur egg is left unattended when the mother is killed by a predator; the egg is stolen by a series of hungry dinosaurs until it ends up on a remote island, where it’s discovered by a tribe of monkeys. That five-minute teaser had mystery and poetry—it spoke to the vicious life of the dinosaur, and introduced the species that would survive the dinosaur’s inevitable extinction.

The second trailer, which started screening a few months ago, immediately dashed all expectations of a silent epic. Picking up where the teaser left off, the second trailer introduced Aladar, a dinosaur raised by those sassy monkeys (shades of both Tarzan and The Lion King), who meets up with fellow dinosaurs after a meteor shower destroys his home. The meteor shower—and a subsequent drought—foreshadows the cruel fate of Aladar’s kind, but this movie isn’t about the last days of an endangered species. It’s about a dinosaur herd trying to get to their nesting grounds and being undone by their own selfishness. What killed the dinosaurs? Lack of teamwork. Apparently, there is an ”I“ in ”dinosaur.“

It has been an odd experience to sit in theaters when the second Dinosaur trailer is playing. There’s an awkward silence that greets the talking giant lizards, as if the audience can’t figure out if they’ve seen this film before, either from Spielberg, or Don Bluth, or Disney itself. Even the little ones in the audience fail to ”ooh“ or ”aah.“ Nevertheless, I expect that Dinosaur should do well at the box office, despite the lack of buzz. It’s the only movie out right now that’s aimed at families (though the ”PG“ rating should be a warning to parents that some scenes might disturb children under 6). And the action sequences—of dinos fighting each other, or fleeing from the meteors, or trying to escape a cave-in—are genuinely thrilling. Plus, the movie has a happy ending, in which the dinosaur narrator says, ”I don’t know what’s going to happen to us in the years to come.“

But, um...I do. And so does most of the audience. Wouldn’t it make more sense, and be more profound, to show us why Aladar is doomed, but his monkey friends are not? Ah, but that might not appeal to the youngsters that Disney counts on to buy the merchandise and ride the roller coasters and help make back some of that $300 million budget. Craving for market dominance has always been the studio’s undoing—if Disney did an animated version of The Perfect Storm, they’d probably roll the closing credits just after the Andrea Gail hauled in a teeming net of fish.

As something to gawk at, Dinosaur is an impressive achievement—it’s like actually seeing color pictures of prehistory. But as a movie, Dinosaur is a timid, money-grubbing pack of lies. If we didn’t know better—if we hadn’t seen both Toy Story films and A Bug’s Life—the weakness of the plot and dialogue might be forgivable. If only we didn’t already know so much—that the dinosaurs will die out, and that the studios that don’t use technology artfully will soon follow them into the realm of the fossils.

—Noel Murray

Crap lousy

Battlefield Earth isn’t really a science-fiction adventure movie, despite what the trailers would have you believe. It’s a cleverly disguised tribute to 20th-century building techniques, which apparently are producing malls and miniature golf courses of such high quality that they will still be standing, with only slight paint damage, a thousand years from now. I was not aware that Cheops is supervising today’s construction industry.

Around this surprising bit of education, however, is a post-apocalyptic tale of scrappy underdog humans beating up on arrogant evil aliens. That was already an ancient plot in 1982, when L. Ron Hubbard used it as the basis of a novel that I checked out of the public library, as a sci-fi geek high schooler, solely on the basis of its kilopage length. Even though I remember none of its details, I could have written the screenplay to the movie version in one drunken weekend. Making sure that every alien reference to Earth is preceded by the adjectives ”miserable“ or ”stinking“ is the chief skill required.

John Travolta, Hollywood’s Scientologist-in-chief, stars in and produced this adaptation of the Founder’s late-period work. He plays Terl, Earth’s security chief for a corporation made up of Psychlos, aliens with stilts built into their calves and boots with Spice-Girl-height soles. Terl wears suspiciously less makeup than his underlings, including Forest Whitaker as an ambitious schemer and Shaun Austin-Olsen as ”Planetship“ (a functionary title that causes no end of viewer confusion as we wait for this ”ship“ to appear). Barry Pepper (the sniper in Saving Private Ryan) practices for a live-action version of Tarzan while playing Terl’s slave, a character who, mercifully, remains virtually nameless in the film. In a stunning display of poor planning, Terl indoctrinates this ”man-animal“ with all the Psychlo and human knowledge he needs to lead a successful revolt against the planetary overlords and save humankind from extinction.

Battlefield Earth might have been at least unintentionally funny. The dialogue is classic sci-fi camp. Travolta, as producer, apparently usurps the role of director (nominally credited to Roger Christian) in deciding that screaming ”Ready for lunch yet?“ in an overarticulated falsetto qualifies as his best take. The aliens’ favorite curse is ”crap lousy,“ as in ”Crap lousy ceilings!“ after Terl bumps his head. And the screenplay (by first-timer Corey Mandell and J.D. Shapiro) relies heavily on ironic semantic distinctions, e.g. ”You’re not going to stay on this miserable planet for five more cycles...you’re going to stay for fifty more cycles!“ This is inevitably followed by a round of evil laughter from every Psychlo in sight.

But the pleasures of inept writing and vanity acting are canceled out, alas, by the oily, grimy, monochromatic art direction and the half-hour of gunfire and explosions that constitute the ”climax.“ Some enjoyment can be gleaned from watching for the several occasions when shots of looting or cowering are reused in different scenes—a throwback to the days when cowboys and Indians rode past the same bend in the road over and over. But since every shot is calculated for maximum unpleasantness, even gaffe-spotting wears thin very quickly.

Everyone involved with this movie looks miserable except for Travolta. Despite the Hubbard connection, the movie has nothing to do with Scientologist beliefs. But his religion’s mandate to stay positive carries Travolta through dialogue and plot that utterly destroy his unbelieving costars. Maybe this is the key to Battlefield Earth: proselytization by demonstration that Scientology allows one to see the bright side in a black hole like this movie.

—Donna Bowman

Solar flair

Of the several hundred American movies cranked out each year by would-be indie auteurs, only a fraction make it to the festival circuit. Of the movies on the festival circuit each year, only a fraction get distribution. Of those movies that get distribution, only a fraction ever make it beyond the top major markets. Granted, audiences are lucky to be spared the vast majority of these films that fall by the wayside. But at each step, there’s the likelihood that something interesting will get lost undeservedly in the process.

Luckily, Eric Mendelsohn’s Judy Berlin didn’t. An audience favorite at last year’s Sundance festival, it went for several months without getting picked up, and it could have been lost in the shuffle of movies that are much easier to categorize, let alone market. It’s now showing around the country, though, as part of The Shooting Gallery’s imaginatively packaged series of six overlooked films from here and abroad. (One of those films, British director Mike Hodges’ noir thriller Croupier, will be among the first two movies to play the Belcourt Theatre when it reopens June 3.)

A seriocomic reverie about the secret longings of suburbanites in a Long Island town, Judy Berlin is the kind of movie that’s often denigrated as ”small.“ But it has a sweet, optimistic spirit personified by its title character, an aspiring actress (The Sopranos’ Edie Falco) who’s high on gumption but low on talent. On the day Judy’s chosen to leave town to seek her big break in Hollywood, she runs into a former high-school classmate, David Gold (Aaron Harnick), who’s more than a little skeptical about her chances. As it happens, it’s also the day of the freakiest of all freak occurrences, a solar eclipse that throws the entire community into darkness just after noon.

And yet neither of those incidents could really be described as the main plot of Judy Berlin. Mendelsohn follows a daisy chain of townspeople nursing unspoken hurts: the failed filmmaker David, who weeps in his parents’ house; his school-principal dad (Bob Dishy), who chafes under the nattering affection of his ditzy wife (Madeline Kahn); Judy’s mother (Barbara Barrie), a snippy schoolteacher who pines for the principal. The many subplots both connect and reflect upon each other: Thus David’s mother takes a ”spacewalk“ down her darkened, unfamiliar street, while a retired teacher (Bette Henritze) with apparent Alzheimer’s disease ventures outside unable to recognize the most common of objects. It’s during the eclipse, oddly enough, that all the characters’ hidden fears and desires come to light.

Despite the stark black-and-white cinematography and the Lynch-like ambient buzzing of streetlights, though, Mendelsohn has too much affection for his own Long Island roots to turn Judy Berlin into a suburban Gothic. The eclipse, a passing of false and temporary darkness, may be a mite precious as a symbol of his characters’ worries. But the writer-director, who’s worked on some of Woody Allen’s recent films, keeps it from appearing obvious: He creates a moonstruck mood that’s somewhere between the fond, autumnal regret of a Chekhov comedy and a sleepwalking ramble. He allows scenes to unfold in long two-character takes that develop an appealing intimacy—especially when the actors involved are as good as Dishy and Barrie, two familiar TV vets (from Barney Miller, Law & Order, et al.) whose moments together teem with truth and awkward tenderness. And many of the director’s incongruous peripheral details are flat-out funny, like a historical-reenactment milkmaid on smoke break.

A movie like Judy Berlin is as easy to overrate as underrate. While Mendelsohn’s unhurried attention to character is admirable, his pacing is exasperatingly slow, and the muted tone muffles some of the movie’s comic spark. And on occasion, Jeffrey Seckendorf’s expressive B&W camerawork lapses into grainy low-budget murk. None of these flaws spoil what is essentially an original and affecting film. Judy Berlin shows through Thursday at Green Hills.

—Jim Ridley