MESOZOIC
PLOT OUTLINE:
An ordinary person who is fascinated by dinosaurs but lives in poverty and has no chance to learn about them wakes up one morning to find his house is completely overgrown with tropical jungle. He looks outside to see that his entire city has disappeared and in its place is a treetop civilization, run by hostile reptilian creatures, who keep mammals as their slaves. He narrowly escapes a group of slavers and races into a room, only to read on the wall that the entire room is in the process of being teleported back in time, to the Mesozoic era, 130 million years ago.
The room fills with smoke and explodes, but the man survives, jumping out of the smoking ruin to find himself on a huge plain covered with ferns. Above him, he can see a beautiful ring in the sky. Suddenly, one of the reptilian creatures screeches for help, before dropping dead outside the remains of the room. Next to it, a seemingly fully-functional four wheel drive has appeared. The man investigates it carefully, but then notices a huge predator racing towards him. He jumps into the car and speeds off into a nearby forest, leaving the remains of the reptilian creature to be eaten.
The man figures out that something has gone wrong in Earth’s history, and that must be what caused his town to disappear. He doesn’t have long to think though before a small herbivorous heterodontosaur jumps through the open window to his car. He quickly closes the window just before a raptor tries to jump in. It bashes its head on the door and is knocked out.
The man and the heterodontosaur breathe a sigh of relief and then investigate each other. The heterodontosaur quickly locates food in the back of the vehicle and starts eating it. The man tries to take the food away but it cries out sadly so out of sympathy he decides they should share it, much to the little dinosaur’s delight. The dinosaur then calls out happily and soon the car is overrun with a whole clan of heterodontosaurs. The man laughs, opens the doors and gives up his food, before searching through the supplies for anything else useful.
He finds a strange device that detects nearby lifeforms – he points it directly at one of the heterodontosaurs and the word “heterodontosaur” appears as a green hologram above it, with information on its species, gender, age, diet, size, when it was alive and its habitat range. Excitedly, the man begins pointing the device in all directions, detecting birds, pterosaurs and early mammals – but suddenly it picks up a pack of velociraptors. The man tries to chase the heterodontosaurs out of the car, but they won’t leave, and he sees the raptors in the distance, so he quickly pushes them all into the back, slams the doors shut and speeds off, the raptors chasing close behind.
He goes skidding back onto the plains, where a sauropod is in the middle of an epic battle with one of the giant predators from earlier. He crashes into the sauropod’s food, causing it to get distracted – the predator takes the chance to bite its neck and the sauropod crashes to its death as the car skids away and the man looks back in horror. The large predator chases off the raptors and the car goes skidding into a volcanic cave, where it crashes into a wall, causing the engine to catch fire and the car to stop working. The man, shoving the device he found earlier in his pocket, flings the doors open and quickly jumps out, the heterodontosaurs close behind. They race away just in time before the car explodes.
Another one of the lizard creatures from earlier falls out of the car’s bonnet, presumably having been stuck there after the teleport failed. The man scans it with the device, and it turns out to be… a theropod dinosaur, just like the big predator. In shock, the man suddenly realises what he has just done. He got a free meal for a theropod, which could have caused the whole species to do better, and maybe even evolve intelligence, escape the meteor strike and take over the world – it was all his fault. He falls to his knees, sobbing quietly, and though they don’t understand, the heterodontosaurs try to comfort him, licking his face and making cute squeaky noises. He pets them reassuringly and they decide to sleep for the night. Outside, the moon is seen shining behind the ring beautifully, and the silhouette of a sauropod is seen looking up at it and roaring almost magically.
The next day, the man and heterodontosaurs begin to explore the cave as a group, moving along a pathway that appears to spiral up the inside of the mountain. Suddenly, a rumbling begins in the mountain, and an explosion is heard. One of the heterodontosaurs trips and appears to have broken its leg. As it struggles to get up, lava begins rushing up the pathway below. The man quickly grabs the dinosaur and hauls it over his back, he and the heterodontosaurs then race for the top of the mountain. They just get out in time, and hide behind a rock as lava comes spraying out the top.
The man notices the theropod feasting on the dead sauropod, and suddenly has a crazy idea – if he can direct the lava towards it, he’ll stop the lizard people ever evolving in the first place. He places the injured dinosaur on his back carefully on the ground and starts shifting rocks to redirect the lava, and the heterodontosaurs join in, not really understanding why but lining up rocks with his anyway. The lava gushes down the mountain, but to the man’s despair, it melts through some of the rocks, and begins flowing directly towards him – and the injured dinosaur. He yells for the other dinosaurs to run, which they seem to understand, as they race down the non-molten side of the mountain.
The man hugs the injured dinosaur and apologises, but just before the lava reaches him, there is another huge explosion like the teleport caused before, and he finds himself, and the dinosaur, alone at sunrise in a huge desert. His device beeps, prints a piece of paper, then vanishes into thin air. He picks up the paper confused – it says “final destination reached”. He looks up to see the ring is twice the size it was before, and the moon is much larger than the modern day, just behind the ring. He realises this is a period long before the dinosaurs – the Permian.
This era was supposedly ruled by the ancestors of mammals, but there were none in sight. He notices some shadowy figures in the distance, and then realises they are the lizard people. The lizard people notice him too, and they race towards him, about to attack him with taser-like devices, when the Heterodontosaur screeches angrily and lunges at them. They zap the dinosaur, seemingly to death, and the man runs for his life into the desert, where he comes across a cage, filled with synapsids, “mammal-like reptiles”, of all different shapes and sizes.
He bashes the cage door until it opens, and the animals inside come racing out. They race, teeth bared, towards the reptile creatures, who flee in terror – they then surround the motionless Heterodontosaur but don’t attack it, instead nudging it gently. The man slowly walks over to them and sits down beside them, amazed by their behaviour. He then realises, the reptile people were the ones who changed the past – not him after all. They were trying to stop the first mammals from ever existing, to protect their own existence.
The man, mammal-like reptiles, and Heterodontosaur then teleport to a spaceship, 1.5 billion years after the present day, where the man is overjoyed to see the whole clan of Heterodontosaurs from earlier surrounding them – and even more overjoyed to see crew of humans – and strangely otters and numbats as well. One of the otters thanks him for saving their existence and touches the injured Heterodontosaur, bringing it back to life with some kind of advanced glowing technology. The man, crying with happiness, thanks the otter and hugs the Heterodontosaur tightly.
The man then says there’s still something he doesn’t understand – why did the reptile people ever exist in the first place – and why didn’t he get changed like the rest of the world? The otter says there’s always something we don’t understand, he then pauses before saying, that’s why we have this to find out! He points to a brand new teleportation device, with a safety assured sticker on the front. The man smiles and looks at his prehistoric companions, who look back eagerly in agreement. The movie ends here, open for a sequel.
(In the sequel, Mesozoic 2: Back To The Past, it would be explained that the dinosaurs were from another universe, and were trying to take over this one too. The sequel would show the giant bugs of the Carboniferous, and the amazing ocean life of the Late Cretaceous, as well as the most intelligent dinosaur, Troodon, which the reptile people are trying to kill off in their second attempt to take over, by diverting the meteor, then taking Troodon’s place. The question of why the man had survived all this would remain open for a 3rd and final movie, the man would also start to become more confident time-travelling, learning how to train animals like Plesiosaurs and Arthropleura, and there would be a lot more focus on the time periods, how they contributed to our Earth with the first reptiles and birds, but also how they were so alien, with different atmospheres, continents and so on.)
(The 3rd movie, Mesozoic 3: War For Time, would involve the reptile people directly invading the universe as a last ditch effort, and the man going to every time period one by one, getting every animal he could from Earth’s history to team up as one huge army and strike back. Our universe wins the war, but as the portal between the universes closes one last time, the man and his favourite Heterodontosaur are trapped on the other side. They discover the reptile peoples’ planet is in ruins because of a decades-long war against their rebelling mammal slaves, that had left the oceans slowly boiling away and all farmland rendered useless, and they had no choice but to attack. The man convinces both sides to work together to save their planet and in return, the reptile people put a special protection on the man, preventing him from ever being destroyed by their time travel devices. This is why he survived back in movie 1. The man then contacts the otters and informs them it’s safe to remove the boundary, and both universes finally live together in peace and prosperity)
