Walking with Dinosaurs

Walking with Dinosaurs yields an alluring mashup of divergent facets, a cinematic Frankenstein that engrosses with vigor as it repels with inanity. Even the project itself is a hodgepodge of odds and ends. Produced by the BBC Earth team that created the similarly named documentary series that aired on U.S. educational outlets like NatGeo and the Discovery Channel, the film, which cost north of eighty million, almost didn’t get made as studio problems threatened to kill the funding, but aggressive ticket pre-sales carried it through. How great is that, a film that has paid for itself before even hitting theaters? And that’s probably why we’ve been seeing the trailers for it since mid-summer.
The craftsmanship is a visual wonderment, almost on the level of Gravity. The blend of live shot backgrounds filmed in Alaska and New Zealand (the latter where everything Tolkien is shot) and computer-generated dinosaurs is gorgeously seamless and about as real as you’ve seen a dino rendered—it’s up there with the Jurassic Park films. The directing tandem of Barry Cook, who was one of the directors on Mulan, and Neil Nightingale, who comes from the BBC side of the house, bring diverse and complementary skills, but just as with Gravity, special FX wizardry and a keen artistic eye don’t earn you a pass on story.
To move from the flat, remedial nature of an educational platform to something that would hit the “family-oriented” entertainment market (those ticket sales again), BBC Earth ostensibly layered in the cutesy animal voices and personas. The writer of the film, John Collee, happens to be an expert at such commercially aimed cinematic thuggery. He transmuted March of the Penguins into Happy Feet, and his efforts here are about on par with the latter feel-good film. The awkward plot wrapper has a modern day family out on a paleontological expedition (Karl Urban ill-fitting as the Indiana Jones uncle) and the doubting Thomas of the group (a generically generic Charlie Rowe) are sent back in time via a whimsical daydream trigged by a molted old crow and a petrified dinosaur tooth (don’t ask).