Walking With Dinosaurs

Walking With Dinosaurs

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Movie Reviews of Walking With Dinosaurs

Movie Review: Raised my expectations for anything else
Summary: 5 Stars

Walking with Dinosaurs was made for people like me.

After rafts of popular books and more documentaries than any one dino-crazed kid can possibly have watched, this BBC series managed to approach the whiz bang subject of dinosaurs in a strikingly new and fresh way. The accomplishment is exhilarating to watch -- engagingly, intelligently written, and visually stunning. I skimmed past the listing when this was originally released in the U.S. -- "Yeah yeah, another dinosaur special." My loss. This series and its sequel, Walking with Prehistoric Beasts, are just plain wonderful.

Basically, "Walking with Dinosaurs" is a faux wildlife documentary. Rather than interspersing brief snippets of dinosaur images and animated sequences with paleontologists, perhaps a popular news anchor, maps, and images of fossils, the program gives us nothing but "footage" of dinosaurs and their world. The six episodes in the series obey the narrative structure of an animal documentary show like PBS's "Nature"; each one is thematically written around a single species or (sometimes) one particular animal. So, we follow a diplodocus as it moves though the stages of its life, moving away on tangents to explore other sides of its world but always coming back to touch on the same individual.

There's a reason regular nature specials get produced this way. It gives the viewer a lens through which to see the larger world. It provides the show with a narrative direction. For dinosaurs those advantages, along with modern cgi effects, work like magic. Partly the effects are quite good, though they were made on a comparative shoestring next to big time effects movies these days. Partly the production here is just so smart, so thoughtful, that it blends just the right admixture of nature show conventions -- camera angles, story arcs -- with those great effects. It flows right, you know? It works.

And yes, of course there's going to be a downside. Because we're seeing thematically composed stories, here, rather than brief shots and cuts away for a learned discussion, we have to rely on Kenneth Branagh's narration for a lot of exposition. We can't see that animated map of plate tectonics in action, no. ("Meanwhile, while our baby diplodocus eats those ferns, Antarctica is moving southward...") There's quite a bit of speculation, too - unavoidable speculation, when you're working this way. If you're discussing T. Rex on another program, you can waffle about a few different ways it may have hunted. If you're going to write a show around the animal and show it for maybe 30 minutes on screen, it's gonna have to eat something. You can't put that dithered censorship smudge over the moment of the kill to avoid committing yourself to one interpretation or another. You also shouldn't have your narrator break in on the dramatic moment to point out each potential "reach" by the scientists who consulted with the producers. ("Or maybe this didn't really happen. Some people think...") That'd break the form of the shows. And finally, it's very hard on a budget to make the whole, messy world come to life. There are times when it seems like we're seeing a limited range of the bigger, more interesting animals, and maybe there wasn't the money to animate more.

All of which is to say: No, this isn't perfectly respectable, bet-hedging, responsible academic science. (The accompanying "Making of" program on the second DVD does tie it back to that world very securely.) This is popular science. It also isn't a major motion picture, though in a lot of ways it's better. Did you notice it was on TV? It does gloss over some murky evolutionary relationships in favor of easier-to-understand offhand lines that help the viewer along. No, it isn't going to get every postural detail just as the latest journal article had it. What it does do is provide us with some truly amazingly good television to watch.

Anyone could nitpick at this for a few different reasons, it's true -- but if you're enough of a dinosaur buff to nitpick, your expectations will be raised by this program. It's that good.