A documentary by Marc Fafard. Rated G. At the Imax Theatre at Canada Place

How many of you have been to high school? Then you'll appreciate that education, while good to have, is often difficult to enjoy. This is as true of documentary-film viewing as it is of taking French 11 at Burnaby North.

Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia begins with a premise suspiciously foreshadowing of well-meant earnestness. It shows us Rodolfo Coria, paleontologist, driving through the endless Argentine plain in his gleaming pickup (a Ford, causing a momentary disconnect from the narration by Donald "Voice of Volvo" Sutherland). Although Coria has helped discover a dozen of the 700 known dinosaur species, and exudes the raffish charm of a young Omar Sharif, it is a bit worrisome to see him kneeling down amid a cache of half-excavated bones in the desert. Even at a compact 40 minutes, the film is in danger of seeming rather dry. (Har.)

Thankfully, director Marc Fafard brings an exultantly B-movie sensibility to the proceedings. Coria's learned reflections and Sutherland's poetic rumblings wind up being largely decorative, since each chunk of information is immediately translated into computer-animated action. It's called dumbing-down, and I like it. You don't go to 3-D Imax movies to listen. You come to see humongous dinosaurs running toward you, biting the hell out of stuff!

Fafard gets that. He hauls out an impressive array of tricks to keep the show going, from the brisk pace and thriller music to epic compositions and top visual effects. Fafard focuses on three particular species discovered in Argentina, giving them cute nicknames and projecting the types of interactions that might have occurred. This makes the film appealing for kids and movie critics with ADD, while imparting a lot of information about these beasts–scale, longevity, ubiquity, and even something of their behaviour. Since they've become characters, instead of merely lessons, their sudden end in meteor flame and black-sky winter takes on tragic qualities. One hopes that our successor species can do as well for humans.