3D Film "Flying Monsters" Wins BAFTA Award

Flying Monsters 3D, featuring British naturalist Sir David Attenborough, just became the first 3D movie to win a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award. The film won in the category “Specialist Factual.” The film will air on Christmas day on the UK’s Sky1 television as well as in IMAX theaters around the country. Sir David sets out to solve “one of the greatest mysteries in paleontology: how and why did pterosaurs fly? How did creatures the size of giraffes defy gravity and soar through prehistoric skies?”2

According to publicity, Sir David shows “the marvel of pterosaur flight has evolutionary echoes that resonate even today.”3

Sir David glides “majestically over green English fields as the vast beak and flapping wings of a special effects pterosaur, a—Quetzalcoatlus—the size of his glider and which in real life could go halfway around the globe in a single flight—looms up behind him.” By evolutionary reckoning, such flying reptiles dominated the skies 200 million years ago.

“It’s an unprecedented film with incredible impact because looking at creatures and fossil bones becomes hypnotic when you can see it in 3D,” says Sir David. “You can actually lift the bones off the rock and reassemble them as a 3D skeleton.” The film tells “the story of how leaping lizards around at the same time as the dinosaurs evolved into these vast flying creatures” and apparently succeeds at being “so lifelike that you feel you can touch the clouds of insects they gobble as they drift through the air.” But realistic graphics are only part of the evolutionary propaganda.

“Credibility is a vital part of the Attenborough package.” Sir David says, “I am trusted. When I say something it’s because I think it is so. I don’t do commercials and I’m in the business of telling it as it is. . . . I’m at pains to maintain the standards of honesty and I would be very upset if I was guilty of producing something that was untrue or misrepresented. I’m not an actor speaking lines.” He adds with a laugh, “The pterosaur is very romantic and exciting — and let’s face it, dinosaurs have been done to death. Even my brother Dick had a go at those when he made Jurassic Park” (he played park creator John Hammond).

Although fossils cannot fly, analysis has revealed clues suggesting pterosaurs were able to change the shape of their wings for fast efficient flight. In fact, evolutionist Paul Sereno has noted, “Their most primitive relatives are fully transformed as capable fliers.”4 As Sir David points out, “It’s been really exciting having computer-generated images playing a part in this 3D film because we’ve been able to show how these prehistoric creatures take off and fly.”

When the charismatic Sir David shares the evolutionary story countless evolutionists sincerely believe, backed up by convincing graphics, he doubtless earns the BAFTA “specialty factual” film award for appearing to present “the facts.” Yet when it comes to telling the evolutionary tale, Sir David’s role involves as much “story-telling” as his brother did acting in Jurassic Park.

According to evolutionists, “Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to achieve true flapping flight.”5

The information Sir David shares in the script he wrote tells the pterosaurs’ saga. Sir David doesn’t suggest he reveals any hitherto unknown information. He says, “I’m not a walking encyclopaedia in the least bit. I wrote the script for Flying Monsters 3D from the top of my head, but none of it is rocket science and anyone who knows about pterosaurs could do it.”

The ability to line up fossils with homologous features does not prove they evolved.

But the ability to line up fossils with homologous features does not prove they evolved one into the other. The real facts include the pterosaur fossils preserved along with those of dinosaurs in the fossil record, but “time tags” and transitional fossils are missing. Conventional dating is based on unverifiable assumptions and uniformitarian principles, ignoring the catastrophic worldwide Flood that reshaped the earth, and those conventional dates attach faulty interpretations to the geologic column. The geologic column in which these fossils are preserved was largely created by the Flood and is totally consistent with the biblically documented history of a recent creation about 6,000 years ago. That history includes the creation of dinosaurs on the sixth day and flying creatures like the pterosaurs on the fifth day. God created the pterosaurs as fully functional flight-capable animals the day before He created “leaping lizards,” and no evolution was involved.

Additionally, evolutionists maintain people did not coexist with dinosaurs or pterosaurs. Sir David, after describing the 3D realism, hastens to add, “But of course, we need to make it clear that theses images are not real, otherwise people won’t trust what I say.” And while it is important that children understand these creatures are extinct, history does document accounts of human witnesses to pterosaurs among drawings and stories from aboriginal peoples.

Furthermore, Herodotus (484–424 BC), the “father of history,” traveled the world and collected in Egypt an account of “winged serpents” whose “wings are not feathered, but resemble very closely those of the bat” flying in from Arabia and being attacked by ibises.6

Sir David Attenborough is a highly respected naturalist, but neither he nor any other evolutionist was eyewitness to the origin of the pterosaurs. God was. And God has provided His eyewitness account in the Bible. Graphic simulations and glowing stories do not change the truth God gave us in Genesis. “Let God be true but every man a liar (Romans 3:4).”