When my son was born, I decided early that I was going to be attentive, but liberal about what I let him watch. In other words, there’s not much that I wouldn’t let him watch as long as a) I’m watching with him, and b) I’m very clued in to how he’s handling it. It’s not that I have no standards, but if there’s some blood or boobies on the screen, I’m not going to freak out or turn off the TV or even cover his eyes. I’d like him to not grow up with an unhealthy curiosity about violence and sex that was born of my making them taboo. As long as we can talk about what he sees and as long as he’s not freaking out over it, so be it. Whether that makes me an awesome dad or an awful one, I don’t know, but it’s the only way of doing it that I’m comfortable with.
Anyway, I say all that to say that my six-year-old son and I watched Turok: Son of Stone the other night. It’s a very bloody movie and I don’t know many parents who’d let their kindergartener watch it, but we watched it. And I watched him. And asked him lots of questions. And he was fine. He wasn’t so fine when we saw Horton Hears a Who at the theater and the kangaroo dropped the clover into a vat of boiling oil, but an abundance of cartoon blood gushing all over the place was fine with him.
I don’t know much about the Turok comics except that they’re about an Indian named Turok who fights dinosaurs. Really, that’s all I need to know. It’s certainly all my son needed to know.
In the Special Features documentary on the DVD, the filmmakers all claim to have been really faithful to the story though while updating it for modern audiences. That means it’s more graphic, but it also means that attention was paid to the way Natives are portrayed in the movie. I’m not Native, so I can’t say how successful they were at it, but I’m glad it was a concern for them on some level.
What was a concern for me is that the movie be cool and yes indeedy it was. Tony Bedard wrote the thing and I think it was him in the documentary who said they wanted it to be over-the-top. Not just in the violence, but with everything. If these guys had been in charge of 10,000 BC there’s no way that sabretooth would’ve gotten away without becoming a sidekick.
The animation’s clearly inspired by anime which means that the movement’s a bit choppy for my taste, but there are also some scenes that are amazing and overall the movie does a great job of sucking you into the story.
There’s one scene – right after Turok and pals get to the lost world – where they have to fight (i.e. “run away from”) a huge carnotaur and it’s as nicely choreographed as anything I’ve ever seen; live action or cartoon. At one point, the carnotaur gets Turok, his sister-in-law, and her son trapped in a tree next to a white-water river, and Turok’s enemy starts shooting at the good guys with a rifle from horseback on the other side of the river. It’s one of those “how the hell are they going to get out of this” scenarios and it was beautifully done with just the right camera angles and music and sound. I’m going to remember that scene for a long, long time.
It’s not often that I’m watching something and I suddenly become overwhelmed by how cool it is, but I love it when it happens and it happened at least four times during Turok. The other times (except for the one with the waterfall) happened during dinosaur fights where just when I thought the scene was reaching its climax, they took it up another level and made it even cooler. I’ll leave the specifics for you to discover.
It might have been a little less bloody for my taste, but I’m hesitant to second guess the filmmakers on that point. I’m not sure enough that bringing down the violence wouldn’t have toned down the overall tension of the thing and it was that tension and the sudden release of it with “Oh, cool!” moments that really makes Turok special.
Five out of five carnotaurs.
