Walking with Dinosaurs

TLDR: it’s watchable, but it’s not WWD.

I’ll get the palaeontology sequence and CGI hate out of the way first. Like most of you, I didn’t like the palaeontology sequences. There were too many and too close together, interrupting the story too much. They felt extremely staged and dumbed down - for example, the whole bit about palaeontologists uncovering a Tyrannosaurus leg bone to answer how they hunted. Don’t treat the experts here like they still don’t know how a Tyrannosaurus hunted lmao. Even in Death of a Dynasty 25 years ago it showed it being an ambush predator, with the mother catching the Didelphodons off guard at the nest and the bait and switch with the Anatotitans (making it seem like the crocodiles were the main threat to them). Also yeah the CGI was a bit dodgy at parts, and I missed the charm of close ups to physical puppets.

Anyways this just doesn’t feel like Walking With Dinosaurs. It is a palaeodocumentary pretending to be Walking With Dinosaurs, but it is only labelled as such. I know there would be royalty issues reusing the old intro music, but I felt disappointment even with the intro. Kenneth Branagh might not have been available, that’s fair, but to not even ask Ben Bartlett to compose is very stupid. The new narrator isn’t bad, but he’s not Branagh.

For the most part storytelling is decent. I actually found myself caring for Clover, they managed to make her quite cute. And my heart broke seeing the Edmontosaurus baby killed, even if it was only on screen for a couple of minutes. However, they did the one thing that every palaeodocumentary needs to avoid - turning the Tyrannosaurus into a movie monster. Apart from the pterosaur at the beginning, there was no other carnivore, it was like there was this one Tyrannosaurus constantly stalking Clover. I know Time of the Titans made the Allosaurus quite villainous, but I suppose that was balanced out by The Ballad of Big Al, and the encounters took place with different individual Allosaurus over the span of 10 years. This seemed like it was the same Tyrannosaurus the whole time. Even the introduction for the Tyrannosaurus looked overly Hollywood-ised - Clover randomly hiding in a log and watching it eat the pterosaur, like it’s the sneak peek cutscene for the final boss in a video game. I think Death of a Dynasty and Prehistoric Planet handled the Tyrannosaurus rather well, showing other aspects of their lives other than killing everything. To depict them in any other way is rather risky territory for documentaries when they are so heavily associated with the likes of Jurassic Park.

I didn’t actually mind the Tyrannosaurus design. The lips weren’t as big of an issue for me as it is for others, and I appreciate that they seemed to try and keep the colour scheme similar to that of 1999. I still prefer the Prehistoric Planet design, though. I also appreciated the return of the false eyes on the Triceratops frill, which was an iconic design for the Torosaurus.

I feel like this is quite heavily infantilised, or at least aimed towards children. I know a lot of us watched the original series as kids, but you could still tell there was adult content in the brutal realism of it all. The Coelophysis cannibalism, Ornitholestes eating the sauropodlet, Liopleurodon biting Ophthalmosaurus in half, Utahraptor sticking its face in the Iguanodon ribcage, polar Allosaur beheading Leaellynasaurus, the baby Torosaurus being entirely stripped of flesh from the neck down by the raptors. Meanwhile this seemed to do what Prehistoric Planet is also guilty of, hiding kills behind camera cuts and foliage disguising carcasses. The worst we saw was the Triceratops bull having Tyrannosaurus blood on his face and horns at the end. The childishness stood out to me as well when the palaeontologists were looking at the fossilised dung and the narrator said that it comes from a meat eater, rather than saying carnivore. We used to say meat and plant eaters as kids, but it feels infantilising to see it in a palaeodocumentary. I’m also not looking forward to what looks like another episode about a baby ceratopsian. Two in one series is a big much, especially when the 2013 film was also that same premise.

Overall, it isn’t terrible. There’s definitely worse out there, and I fully intend to watch the whole series. But it definitely feels like it lacks a soul, that the BBC saw the success of Prehistoric Planet, and wanted in on that dinosaur cash cow, so has tried to appeal to nostalgia to make it work. I’d have probably preferred if they just made a series identical in storytelling to the 1999 series but used more up to date models and science. This is a dinosaur documentary, but it isn’t Walking With Dinosaurs.