Dinosaurs vs. Aliens

[Drz]

Thoughts & Rambles on Dinosaurs vs. Aliens

Barry Sonnenfeld is best known from adapting the Men in Black into big screen box office hits, now he has teamed up with the superman of comic books and my personal favorite writer Grant Morrison, with the artist Mukesh Singh to tell his visionary story of how Dinosaurs we’re actually smarter than we thought, and they saved our planet from an Alien invasion, this is the secret war of the century, and how awesome is it?

Well, what the marketing nor Sonnenfeld/Morrison never told in any way, this is actually just part one of an ongoing graphic novel series, learning that with the last page, left me sorely disappointed, after all this book is selling for around 20€, luckily I managed to get it for mere 10€, but still you kind of feel cheated on for learning only after reading the book that there might be a sequel, after all this book has to sell to make it affordable for the sequel to ever happen, so why couldn’t Sonnenfeld just make this into a single big hardcover story? If this book doesn’t sell, it might only receive a sequel after the actual Dinosaurs vs. Aliens movie comes out, and that might take a few years.

Now on the actual book, it is utterly gorgeous and majestic. The Dinosaurs come out as these larger than life beings, with majestic tribal tattoos, flower necklaces and different color paints over their bodies to show their hierarchy society, the book informs the reader that despite their brains, they have a more complex brain structure and thus are much smarter than we humans ever could have thought. The narrator of the story is an Alien scout named Kit, the story is mostly narrated and told by the Alien invaders’ perspective.

Now the Aliens are desperate, very desperate. Their home planet is long gone, most of their race is dead due to the great migration, and thus they finally find a planet suitable for them, with just standing in their way are the millions of Dinosaurs, but that’s not all. The Aliens are practically nothing more than machines now, tentacle wired arms, nothing biological on them from what the story tells us, and we also learn they can’t even naturally produce children, but do them via jars, but every new generation is more frail, more sickly, but the answers are found on Earth’s mammals, using the mammal’s DNA could strengthen theirs, but the Dinosaurs are too populated and thus the Aliens cannot harvest them without first having to deal with the Dinosaurs, this is why the war must happen. However things won’t be easy at all for the Aliens, as the protagonist of the book, the one-eyed Tyrannosaurus named One Eye as Morrison describes in the scripts is the Clint Eastwood of “Unforgiven” for the Dinosaurs, things will get very nasty in the next volume.

Reading this book made me think, is this Morrison & Sonnenfeld’s symbolic war between the forces of nature and technology? Are these humans so transhumanist that there is nothing human about them? Are the Dinosaurs symbols for nature and purity? Will this series end with a twist that we Homo Sapiens evolved from these Aliens as a result?

Rating: 83/100 – Despite the fun concept, which I wonder how much is Sonnenfeld and how much is Morrison is left to be seen, and while the art is absolutely stunning and just flat out gorgeous storytelling, I really can’t rate this book any higher due to my personal disappointment on the fact this is merely just the 1st volume of an series, how many more volumes are there? Two in total? Three in total? It’s just disappointing to learn this after making the purchase, because I’d honestly just wait for a big oversized hardcover to be honest.