Walking With Dinosaurs
Starring Justin Long, John Leguizamo
Directed by Barry Cook & Neil Nightingale
Considering they have fascinated human beings for decades and once ruled the planet in mighty fashion, the dinosaurs deserve better.
Walking with Dinosaurs earnestly attempts to navigate the tricky waters of education and entertainment but fails on nearly every level. Starting with a pointless prologue featuring two kids accompanying their paleontologist uncle (a sadly underused Karl Urban) on an Alaskan bone-hunting excursion, we are thrust into the prehistoric world of the thunder lizards and join a young Pachyrhinosaurus named Patchi (Long) as he struggles with identity issues amongst his herd of herbivores. The beasts soon embark on a long migration full of dangerous carnivores around every corner.
One of the films glaring problems is the pandering screenplay which is clearly geared to six-year-olds and employs all manner of hip contemporary lingo and scatological humour. The other issue is the disjointed narrative, which shifts from fictional dino plot to cartoonish Saturday morning science lesson. Technically speaking though, Walking with Dinosaurs is quite the feat in impressive 3D animation; the filmmakers shot actual landscape footage in New Zealand and Alaska then added the highly detailed computer generated dinosaurs to the live action backgrounds.
However, the movie adds up to a rather pedestrian experience for adults and is either too silly for older kids or too scary for young ones. Though aesthetically very satisfying, this should have stayed a BBC TV miniseries instead of just another predictably uninspired tale of finding your courage and standing up for what you believe.
