Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs arrived on July 1, 2009, the third entry in a franchise that had already proven it could move tickets. Carlos Saldanha directed. Michael Berg, Peter Ackerman, Jason Carter Eaton, Yoni Brenner and Mike Reiss wrote it. The film runs 94 minutes and carries a tagline that promises more than it delivers: “What killed the dinosaurs?”
The answer, in this case, is a script that never settles on what it wants to be.
Trailer, via Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers.
Manny, Ellie and a Baby on the Way
Twenty-two months after the events of Ice Age: The Meltdown, Ellie is pregnant. Manny, voiced by Ray Romano, responds by trying to make every inch of the world safe for the child. He does not want Ellie or the baby to meet the same fate as his previous wife and child.
That fear is the emotional engine of the film. It is also the part that works. Romano plays the anxiety straight, and the movie treats Manny’s desperation as a real problem rather than a gag. His worry alienates Diego, voiced by Denis Leary, who starts to feel like he is losing his hunter instincts and thinks about leaving the herd.
Diego’s drift is the most interesting thread in Dawn of the Dinosaurs. It is also the one the film drops fastest.
Sid Finds Three Eggs Underground
Sid, voiced by John Leguizamo, is anxious about being abandoned. He discovers three apparently abandoned eggs underground and decides to adopt them. Manny tells him to put them back. Sid ignores him.
The eggs hatch into baby Tyrannosaurus the following day. Sid tries to raise them. Their behavior scares away the younger animals and destroys the playground Manny built for his child. That is the film’s first real collision between Sid’s need and Manny’s plan, and it lands.
Then the mother Tyrannosaurus arrives. Sid refuses to hand over her children, so she carries him and the babies underground. Manny, Ellie and the possums follow.
A Lost World Under the Ice
The icy cave opens into a vast subterranean lost world populated by dinosaurs. That is the premise the title sells, and it is where the movie’s ambitions outrun its script.
The herd escapes a territorial Ankylosaurus and reunites with Diego. More dinosaurs surround them. A one-eyed weasel named Buck, voiced by Simon Pegg, saves them.
Buck has lived in the jungle a long time. He is hunting Rudy, a monstrous albino Baryonyx who took his missing eye. He agrees to lead the group through the jungle to Lava Falls, where the mother dinosaur has taken Sid and her babies.
Pegg is the best thing in the film. Buck is a new character with a clear want and a clear enemy, and Pegg plays him with a manic edge the rest of the cast is not given room to match.
The Mother Tyrannosaurus Grows Attached
Meanwhile, the mother Tyrannosaurus tries to get rid of Sid. Several attempts fail. Slowly, she grows attached to him. That reversal is the film’s warmest stretch.
The following day, Sid is separated and chased by Rudy. He escapes but ends up stranded on a loose rock floating on a river.
From there the movie moves toward its rescue set piece. Buck’s hunt for Rudy and the herd’s search for Sid both point toward Lava Falls. The film has the pieces for a strong finish. It spends them on noise.
What the Cast Is Given to Do
Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Josh Peck, Seann William Scott and Queen Latifah all reprise their roles from the previous two films. Simon Pegg joins the cast.
| Performer | Character | Status in the franchise |
|---|---|---|
| Ray Romano | Manny | Reprising |
| John Leguizamo | Sid | Reprising |
| Denis Leary | Diego | Reprising |
| Queen Latifah | Ellie | Reprising |
| Josh Peck | Eddie | Reprising |
| Seann William Scott | Crash | Reprising |
| Simon Pegg | Buck | Joining the cast |
| Chris Wedge | Scrat | Voice cast |
| Karen Disher | Scratte | Voice cast |
The returning cast is not the problem. The problem is that the script gives most of them one note and asks them to hold it for 94 minutes. Leary’s Diego gets a genuine arc and then fades. Latifah’s Ellie has little to do once the herd goes underground.
Chris Wedge voices Scrat, the saber-toothed squirrel, with Karen Disher as Scratte. The wordless Scrat sequences remain the franchise’s most reliable material. Here they are also its most disposable — cut off from the main plot and used as punctuation rather than story.
How Dawn of the Dinosaurs Sits Against the Series
Dawn of the Dinosaurs was produced by 20th Century Fox Animation and Blue Sky Studios. It is the sequel to Ice Age: The Meltdown, released in 2006.
| Film | Release date | Position in series |
|---|---|---|
| Ice Age: The Meltdown | 2006 | Second installment |
| Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs | July 1, 2009 | Third installment |
| Ice Age: Continental Drift | July 13, 2012 | Fourth installment |
| Ice Age: Collision Course | July 22, 2016 | Fifth installment |
The series kept going for two more films after this one. That is worth noting, because Dawn of the Dinosaurs is the installment where the formula starts to show its seams.
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Theatrical release | July 1, 2009 |
| Sequel, Ice Age: Continental Drift | July 13, 2012 |
| Sequel, Ice Age: Collision Course | July 22, 2016 |
Mixed on Arrival, Reassessed Later
Dawn of the Dinosaurs initially received mixed reviews from critics. The praise went to the animation. The criticism went to the story. That split is the right one.
The animation is genuinely good. The lost world under the ice is a real creation — humid, green, and full of scale the previous two films could not attempt. The dinosaurs have weight. The jungle has depth. Blue Sky could clearly do this work.
The story is where the film stalls. The premise — a hidden world of dinosaurs beneath the ice — is a premise, not a plot. Once the herd arrives, the movie has to generate its own momentum, and it does so by running the characters through a series of encounters rather than building toward anything.
Retrospective reviews have since called Dawn of the Dinosaurs the best sequel in the franchise. That says more about the sequels than about this film.
The Box Office Says Something the Reviews Did Not
Dawn of the Dinosaurs grossed $886.7 million worldwide. It became the third-highest-grossing film and the highest-grossing animated film of 2009.
That is a remarkable number for a movie that opened to mixed notices. It is also the clearest evidence of what the franchise had become by 2009: a reliable global product whose audience did not wait for critics.
The money is not a defense of the film. It is a fact about the market. Families showed up. They showed up in enough numbers to make this the biggest animated release of the year.
What the gross does not tell you is whether anyone remembered it afterward. The retrospective reassessment — the idea that this is the best of the sequels — reads less like a rediscovery than a settling.
What Actually Works, and What Does Not
Buck is the film’s best invention. Pegg gives him a voice and a vendetta, and the character is the most fully drawn addition the series has made. The mother Tyrannosaurus bond with Sid is the second-best thing here, a stretch that trusts its own animation.
The rest is filler. Manny’s anxiety fades without much cost. Diego’s crisis is raised and then set aside. The lost world is a setting in search of a story. The film’s tagline asks what killed the dinosaurs. The honest answer is that nothing in this movie does — they are set dressing, not antagonists, until Rudy arrives.
For a 94-minute film, Dawn of the Dinosaurs spends a lot of it moving characters from one set piece to the next. The set pieces are well made. The connective tissue is not.
This is a 5 of 10. It is a watchable, handsome, occasionally charming movie that never becomes more than the sum of its parts. The animation earns its keep. The script does not.
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