Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the third of the Ice Age movies. It’s directed by Carlos Saldanha and stars the voices of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Queen Latifah, Seann William Scott, Simon Pegg and Denis Leary.

Plot:
Manny (Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah) expect their first baby. Diego (Denis Leary) decides that he should be going back to his single ways. That leaves Sid (John Leguizamo) who starts to feel lonely. When he happens upon 3 eggs, he decides to be their mother. Unfortunately, those are dinosaur eggs, and Mummy Rex is not too happy to have lost them. So she tries to take them back and takes Sid with them. Manny, Ellie and Diego go after them and find an underground cave system, where the dinosaurs are still alive.

The Ice Age movies are one of the few series that were not planned as such who manage to not get worse with every sequel. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs was funny (for me and for kids) and very sweet, just like the first two. I saw it in 3D, which is always awesome, but therefore also in German. That means I won’t be able to say anything about the actors.

Actually, I don’t have that much to say about the movie itself. I just wanted to point out a few things.

First, I loved Buck (Simon Pegg). He was absolutely awesome and a great addition to the regular characters.

Second, as a child I loved The Land Before Time. There was a time when I read everything about dinosaurs that I could get my hands on (there’s probably not a child on this earth who hadn’t had this phase). Anyway, ever since the research suggested that dinosaurs were actually pretty colourful, I felt like I was kind of deprived by having unicolour dinosaurs in my childhood. But now, things are good. Dawn of the Dinosaurs hase beautiful, colourful dinosaurs and it’s glorious. It just was a special kind of … gratification, really, to be able to see that.

I know that might sound weird.

The third thing was Sid. Sid keeps refering to himself as the mother of the dinosaur babies. I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, it was not really played for laughs. I mean, it was completely irrelevant that Sid is actually a guy. He just sees himself as the mother, whyever not? Which is kind of cool in the gender department.

On the other hand, why wouldn’t he be the father of the kids? It’s not like Sid sees himself as not male in any other department. But apparently, you can’t be a single father of three adopted children, so he has to be the mother. Which kind of sucks in the feminism department.

Of course, gender and feminism are not unrelated, quite to the contrary, but one way to look at it is the blurring of the, imo, much too rigid gender lines and another way is the emancipation of women.

Anyways, feministically speaking this movie is a general fail. But nevertheless it’s a nice watch.