On Dinosauria

So for my first post in nearly a year, I thought I should explore some philosophical ground, as it relates to popular culture, and see if I could sneak some science in too. To that end, I have come to the conclusion that any movie that involves time travel that does not include dinosaurs is a terrible, unforgivable waste of a perfectly good opportunity; namely, the opportunity to have dinosaurs in your movie, which is always awesome. Consider the following:

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

How could you cram even more awesomeness into this movie? It already has George Carlin, the untold potential of a youthful Keanu Reeves (who will come up later in this piece,) that other guy, a hot mom, Abraham Lincoln, and a jail-break! What more could it possibly need, you ask. Answer: DINOSAURS. Consider this: Bill and Ted accidentally travel back to the Cretaceous, where their time-machine-cum-phone-booth gets ingested by a Tyrannosaur. Quick thinking cultural saviors that they are, they quickly try to return to their own time, sans dinosaurs. But the machine brings them back with the T-Rex, who wreaks untold havoc, and earns them an A on their science project as well as history project.
Bonus Awesome: Socrates and Abraham Lincoln defeat the T-Rex by putting aside their differences and busting out grenade launchers.
Alternate Bonus Awesome: Genghis Khan tames and rides the T-Rex, and brings it back to his own time, thus ensuring the conquest of the known world by the Mongols.

Timeline

For both of you that saw this travesty of a movie, shredded from the pages of a rocking novel by global warming denialist Michael Crichton, I write the following. For the rest of you, rest assured there were myriad missed opportunities for a halfway decent movie, none of which Paul Walker managed to capitalize on. (Full disclosure: I went opening day to see it, two hours I will never get back.) The basic plot somehow involves a time-traveling project used by a group of attractive graduate students to go back to fourteenth century France, and save the world or something. It was a terrible movie, that could have been great if they’d bothered to read the novel.
But I digress. The main point is that this failed cinematic masterpiece could have used a handful of raptors (Utah- or veloci-, or even ovi- if that’s your thing.) A regiment of dromaeosaurs would have gone a long way towards either defending or attacking the castle in the climax of the film, which had something to do with French noblemen. Knights mounted on armored raptors would have thrown the whole balance of power in Europe off, resulting in some much more hardcore history, as well as thoughtful philosophical discussions. But alas, more wasted opportunities.

Star Trek: First Contact

Arguably the best of any Star Trek movie (fighting with the Wrath of Khan,) and unquestionably the best of the Next Generation movies, First Contact had everything. For the uninitiated, the plot involves a plan by the Borg, a cybernetic race that mixes organic bodies with mechanical augmentations, to travel back in time to Earth’s 21st century to take over the planet in the past in order to make everyone on Earth a Borg. Along the way, there’s a whole lot of shooting, an awesome zero-g fight scene, and a super-pissed android that is so awesome he literally melts the Borg queen at the end.
However, the one thing the movie lacked (for those of you joining us in progress) was dinosaurs! Firstly, the Borg seem to have the ability to travel through time at will. So why go to the past and assimilate humanity? Why not go even further back, and assimilate a T-Rex? Think of it: a tyrannosaur, standing twenty feet in the air, with laser eyes and robot arms. Hell, they could have even brought it back to the future, and used it to conquer humanity. In the movie, humanity is just recovering from a worldwide atomic holocaust; no one will have the technology or ability to deal with a half-robotic T-Rex.
Bonus Missed Opportunity: in the movie, Captain Picard uses the holodeck, an environment capable of simulating anything, to kill a Borg drone. The canonical explanation is that these holograms, with the "safety protocols" off, are capable of generating mass, and thus Picard can use holographic bullets to actually destroy a Borg. Scientifically plausible or not, the point is that Picard was thinking small with his machine gun. He could create literally anything. Why not lure all the Borg to the holodeck, then fill it with all sorts of carnivorous, super-pissed dinosaurs? Then, after the killing is done, just turn it off, and you’re set. Oh well.

Back to the Future

The proverbial grand-daddy of time traveling movies, this one is almost forgivable. Michael J. Fox (who was actually the same age as the actors that played his parents) travels around in time with a crazy scientist and his dog. The movie gets a win, not only for Huey Lewis’s (and the News) soundtrack, but also because it features a flying train, cowboys, and a horrible dystopian vision of the future in which everything is coated in the glistening veneer of the 1980's.
But it fails in the dinosaur department, again. As we have seen, film makers consistently ignore the possibilities presented by these creatures. Dr. Brown gives a listing of events he’d like to historically witness, including such staples as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the birth of Christ; the latter being set for December 25, 0000, indicating that whatever Dr. Brown’s doctorate is in, it’s not history, theology, or mathematics. But he doesn’t want to investigate anything outside the realm of human history. In further unforgivable error, he doesn’t build his time machine settings with more than four digits, meaning his range of time is only 19,999 years (since apparently the year 0000 exists). But no dinosaurs.
Coda: the Back to the Future Ride, at Universal Studies actually featured a dinosaur. In the plot of the ride, the villain from the movies stole a time machine, and ran reckless through time, requiring the audience to follow him in motion-simulated platforms. At one point, he traveled to the Cretaceous, nearly flying down the mouth of a Tyrannosaur. Needless to say, this was awesome.

Denouement:

The Matrix

Much has been discussed about the philosophical overtones in the first film of the series, and that won’t be elaborated upon. However, the movie states that in the Matrix, literally anything can be programmed to be used by the protagonists. This results in another oversight by the film makers. Neo, the hero, requests "guns, lots of guns," and a virtual room full of guns instantly appears. Not really a time travel, per se, but a poor investment of limitless possibilities.
In conclusion then, it seems that movie makers consistently fail to achieve their full potential, especially in light of the ease with which cinematic creatures are designed and implemented today. Let us hope that in the future, such artistes will be more likely to listen to the will of the people, and give us some friggin’ dinosaurs!