I'm not really sure what to say about this movie. On the one hand, it is squarely aimed at small kids, and not very sophisticated small kids at that, so any criticism might seem churlish. On the other hand, it has faults which make it a little painful for adults to watch. Cringe-inducing, mostly, rather than truly horrible. So I'm going to dive in and just say it like it is.

Horrible acting. Terrible dialogue.

The two main leads - both kids - are not very good. The girl is tolerable and has potential, but the little boy is just teeth-grittingly bad. It's an odd state of affairs that the two main characters weren't given better direction and coaching, since they occupy so much of the film's running time.

In addition, the dialogue has some truly awful moments that defy belief. Who wrote some of this stuff? Combined with the bad acting, it just makes for some truly cringe-inducing moments.

This is by far the worst element of the movie, which is otherwise quite well done. The production values, whilst not huge, are generally pretty good and the CGI, though not entirely convincing at all, at least has the benefit of being imaginative. Some very talented people came up with some very nice and original images, monsters and scenes. That the CGI isn't up to the task of convincingly delivering these ideas is not their fault and they should be commended for their efforts.

Again, it's a kid's film, so the budget probably wasn't there for anything more substantial. But, for what they did manage, it is pretty good.

The story is pretty imaginative too and, whilst it won't make you wonder what is going to happen next, neither will it make you go "Huh?" at any point.

As I say, the only thing which really let's the movie down is the acting, and the young leads can at least be forgiven for that. They are young, after all.

So is it worth watching? If you have kids, yes. But only young kids. Older ones will find it as badly acted as I did, I'm sure. If you don't have kids, then no, probably not. It is, however, a perfectly safe film to sit kids in front of at the weekend and drift off yourself.

SUMMARY: Poor acting in an otherwise imaginative film. Passable CGI and story. Really only for little kids, who won't mind the bad acting.

Virtually every review you'll find here for this film mentions that it's a movie made for kids, and I'm not going to dispute that. It's two principal characters are a pair of young teens, stranded at different times on a mysterious island shrouded in mists that have a unique ability to draw in outside influences, like planes bearing supplies, but once their mission is accomplished, they generally crash into a heap with no further contact with the outside world. The young girl Kate (Kate Rasmussen), born in 1940, is still a teenager on the present day island, while the newest arrival Lucas (Darius Williams), relies on her savvy to navigate early forays into the jungle like setting. The dinosaurs of the story stray from your typical T-Rexes, Brontosauri and the usual expected monsters in favor of feathered and rather psychedelically colored raptors, most of them resembling giant walking birds. The quest to get back home to the modern era falls to the scientific mind of Lucas, who concocts a plan using a magical crystal which leads them to a cave full of energy releasing formations that react to a specific sound, mimicked by Kate's pet sinothysaur Mimos (don't ask, you'll have to watch the picture).

While the story and graphics do tend toward the juvenile, it's not really a bad little film if you need something to keep the kiddies entertained. Young boys will probably gravitate to those yucky, scaly, crawling bugs, while girls will most likely find the colorful bird-like dinosaurs fashionable. There are worse dinosaur flicks out there, and of the ones I've seen, this one rates higher on IMDb than "Cowboys vs Dinosaurs" (which I liked for the goofy concept), and "Triassic Hunt" (which really is that bad)!

Journey To Dinosaur Island is an unpretentious kids film with colourful and feathered dinosaurs but a clunky script and under par acting.

Its entertaining and undemanding if watched with an audience of kids as an Australian boy named Lucas who finds himself marooned in a mysterious island with very colourful dinosaurs and finds a girl called Kate who has been on the island seemingly since the 1950s. They try to find a means to escape the island.

This production values are OK, the Australian setting makes the film more novel and at least it has an interesting beginning as Lucas goes one up on his school teacher at class.

The CGI makes this look more like a B picture the special effects are still better than the low grade output from the SyFy channel but you do wonder if visual effects colourist was on acid at the time.