Repeatedly ignoring the small matter of some
sixty million years which irredeemably separated the two species,
films depicting the lives of our cave-dwelling forebears or the
adventures of intrepid modern explorers in uncharted territory
usually opt to pit humankind against dinosaurs in battles for
survival. Since an inherent condition of this sub-genre of action
film is the stripping away of the trappings of developed civilization,
dinosaur films allow basic anthropocentric assumptions to emerge
freely and in their most stark forms. We see a paranoid speciesism
read back into pop-cult pre-history which consistently takes the
form of humankind not in harmony with, but in opposition to, an
objectified natural world. Oddly, the immediate antagonism, which
rests on the assumption that the animal kingdom poses an ever-present
threat, frequently becomes a battle for supremacy in carnivorous
terms. Dinosaurs, even the vegetarian kinds in some cases, are
automatically cast in the role of the predatory aggressor voraciously
hungry for humans. Occasionally the dinosaur can be killed and
serve as food for the humans instead. Thus, survival comes to
mean domination, and that expressed in a culinary mode.
These films depict culture's anthropocentric contortion of the
"survival of the fittest" principle by focusing obsessively
on who succeeds in killing and eating whom. Persecute or perish
is the code of the cave. The dinosaur films arrogantly strive
to validate humankind as a categorically different and superior
kind of creature deservedly destined to outlive the other species.