Journey to the Beginning of Time

Intro:

This is a series on old dinosaur movies. Specifically, I am looking at anything released before 1990; before Jurassic Park revolutionized cinema with its CGI animation. I will not be covering anything "dinosaur-adjacent", such as kaiju monsters like Godzilla or the creature from The Giant Behemoth, which are perhaps inspired by dinosaurs, but clearly not meant to represent any real world genus. I will also be skipping over films that are heavily dependent on "borrowed" footage from other films, such as the Valley of the Dragons / Prehistoric Valley.

Also known as:

Journey into prehistory

Cesta do pravěku

Runtime:

1 hr 33 min (Czech)
1 hr 24 min (North America)

Background:

Journey to the Beginning of Time is a 1955 Czechoslovak film produced by Filmové Studio Gottwaldov. The film's imagery was heavily inspired by paleo-artist Zdeněk Burian and used full-sized models for the prehistoric animals in conjunction with 3D models that were animated in real time. 2D profiles of living animals were also used and spliced with footage of the real thing in select scenes. The movie would go on to win awards at the International Film Festivals of Venice and Mannheim. Footage was also later used in the 1961 British television series, Pathfinders to Venus.

The U.S. version replaced the opening and closing scenes with new footage of American boys visiting the American Museum of Natural History and entering the adventure through a dream sequence.

Plot Summary:

Four young boys named Peter, Toník, Jenda, and Jirka are intrigued by a trilobite fossil. Intent on finding a living one, the boys imitate the novel "A Journey to the Center of the Earth" by Jules Verne, and travel along a "river of time" in a rowboat. They pass through a cave, emerging to an ice age that forces them to drag their boat across stretches of the frozen landscape.

"He was sad he would never see one alive. Dead bones and artist's impressions just aren't the same. Jirka wanted to see them move."

They spot a living woolly mammoth along the shore and after camping for the night, follow a game trail they believed was created by the mammoth. The path leads to a cave with the remnants of ancient man's habitation. The boys are fascinated by the size of a megaceros antler and impressed by the ancient tools and wall paintings scattered about the cave - admiring the craftsmanship, artistry, and skill early man possessed. Toník tries following the caveman's trail in order to take a picture but accidentally falls into a mud-pit. Peter, Jenda, and Jirka who are watching woolly rhinoceri battle, are momentarily startled when Toník returns covered in mud.

"He hunted deer and bison, but he could also paint them like a master. We'd all seen the mammoth by the river, but none of us could have drawn it like he did. The caveman stopped being a butcher of animals for us."

They row into the tertiary period (now called the Paleogene Period and the Neogene Period) which forces the boys to remove their sweaters because of the increased temperatures. They see vultures, flamingos, gazelle, okapi, giraffe, uintatherium, deinotherium, and a saber-toothed cat. They stop to build a canopy on the boat, during which Jirka wanders off to fish. The night is spent on the boat and in the morning they flee from a jaguar.

"Science needs names, so they make them up. They always use Latin or Greek, so they can be understood all around the world. Made-up names sound okay in science, better than ordinary language. I mean it wouldn't be good if it was called "bumpy head" or "bubble nose" or whatever. "Uintatherium" sounds a lot better."

After a brief encounter with a phorusrhacos, the boys spot pteranodons flying overhead, signifying they have entered the mesozoic era. Surveying the land, they spy a herd of ornithomimids, a styracosaurus, a stegosaurus, two trachodon (now considered lambeosaurine), and a brontosaurus. The stegosaurus is attacked by a ceratosaurus, but it manages to chase off the predator with its thagomizer (tail spikes). However, the stegosaurus was wounded in the battle and in the morning, when the boys see that it hasn't moved since the previous day, they decide to investigate.

"In the past whenever people found parts from these animals, like a talon, they figured it was from some flying demon. So we have all these legends about places with dragons and basilisks, and how strong and powerful they are. We are about to enter just such a world of dragons. Not the legendary ones, the real ones, in the flesh."

While surveying the stegosaurus carcass, Jirka discovers that their boat has been destroyed by the ceratosaurus. Temporarily setback, the boys build a raft and row into the wetlands of the carboniferous era, but the thick vegetation forces the group to walk the rest of the way. Jirka wanders off to chase a meganeura, sees an orthacanthus, and protects their (now soggy) logbook from an ichthyostega. After a nights rest the boys walk into the silurian era, a time when there was no life on land, but seaweed and shells indicate life in the sea. With a little searching Jirka finds a living trilobite.

"Laying there side by side and yet so far away from each other. Between them lay 500 million years. That stone was a piece of the history of our earth."

Thoughts:

This one is special. It manages to capture the innocent curiosity and whimsy of a bygone era when children wanted to play outside and could do so without constant parental supervision, lest someone call CPS. The kids in this movie aren't interested in product brands, luxury goods, or the latest cell phone either. There is a genuine interest and appreciation for the natural world. I don't think any of the other movies I have viewed in this genre have displayed such genuineness and respect for its subject matter. Where most movies of this era play up the dim-witted brute angle of the cavemen, Journey to the Beginning of Time reminds the viewer that cavemen were smarter than they're typically given credit for. And where the savagery of nature is emphasized, this movie instead leans into the wonder without downplaying the danger.

The documentary style used in the film was unique to the genre for the time, although, some of the information has inevitably become outdated, such as sauropods and hadrosaurs being semi-aquatic, or stegosaurs and brontosaurs having two brains (one in the skull and one in the hips). The models still hold up remarkably well, and dare I say, are on par with the works of Ray Harryhausen. The scaling on skin, blood dripping from wounds, and other small details are just phenomenal. They're the sort of thing that has become a lost art. Even watching how the effects were made, if you can find the footage, is a thing of beauty.

Related Articles:

• Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955)
  
• One Million B.C. (1940)  / One Million Years B.C. (1966)
• Dinosaurus! (1960)
• Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965)
  
• The Last Dinosaur (1977)
• Legend of Dinosaurs & Monster Birds (1977)
• Planet of Dinosaurs (1977)
• Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985)