Walking With Dinosaurs: Fails to Deliver on Series’ Wit and Humor

The intriguing history of the enormous reptiles that roamed the earth millions of years ago came to life in BBC’s very successful series, Walking With Dinosaurs. Sadly, the film adaptation, which goes by the same name, fails to deliver a work of equivalent creative gusto and intelligence. The series’ informative and fun nature is replaced with a ho-hum script and cheesy children’s humor, although it may even be too cheesy for the kids.

The movie’s biggest problem lies in the unvaried and unexciting plot. Dinosaurs migrate to the south during winter. Dinosaurs migrate back to the north after winter. When winter comes again, dinosaurs go to the south…again. After winter they head back to the north. That’s the story in a nutshell. Oh, and there’s a little bit of romance in between all the migrating. Patchi (voiced by Justin Long) falls in love with Juniper (voiced by Tiya Sircar). There, now that’s the story in a nutshell.

Our main protagonist is lovebird Patchi, the runt of the Patchyrhinosaurus pack. But who cares about the Patchyrhinosaurus? Where’s the T-Rex: obviously the only dinosaur that matters. Kids want a real villain that’s going to devour heads, tear off limbs, and make these Patchy dinosaurs bleed their guts out, right before our eyes. Okay, maybe that’s a little too much for kids, but, really? A Gorgosaurus for the villain? He’s got the tinniest arms in the world and nothing really exciting ever happens in their fights. I want to see at least an attempt to a fight…and a musical score to accompany that makes me cry of fright for Patchi’s life.

From the very beginning the movie is jinxed by its obnoxious cheesiness. It opens with a silly story about a teen, Ricky (Charlie Rowe), a kid girl, Jade (Angourie Rice), and their paleontologist uncle, Zack (Karl Urban), who takes them into the wilderness of Alaska to search for fossils. The girl is excited about going fossil hunting and the teen isn’t, so he opts to hang out by the car and play with his iPhone. A raven starts talking to him and all of a sudden transforms into Alex (voiced by John Leguizamo), a prehistoric bird from the Cretaceous period. He gives Ricky a pep talk about exploring fossils, and then flies into Dino world. It’s a really foolish entrance into the Dinosaur era and the kids and uncle are completely forgotten, till the very end, when they finally return. Alex the bird, who should also have also been forgotten, remains close by throughout the entire journey, not missing a single opportunity to crack a silly joke about poop, or laugh at the villain Gorgossaurus’s midget arms.  

What could have saved this movie, but didn’t, is the animation. The graphics in Walking With Dinosaurs are bland and do not live up to the quality of animation we have grown accustomed to. Pixar Studios has raised visual standards with its impressive animation skills, and this movie certainly does not come close to a comparable quality. It doesn’t even pass the visual standards of the series it is based on, which is actually strikingly beautiful. The background for most of the movie’s “migration” scenes is composed of green trees, one after the other, and not lush green, or a dazzling, hypnotic green, just plain green, making it a visually monotonous journey. As for the animated dinosaurs, they lack attractive colors, as well as proper timing in their mouth movements and dubbed voices.    

Watching this movie’s bland and unvaried landscapes, over and over again, followed by one “poop” joke after the next, was torture. But the movie’s main and biggest disappointed lies in its empty storyline, which not only fails to grasp our attention, but also fails to inform, unless you consider learning about the dinosaur’s “exciting” migration patterns useful.

So if you’re up for migrating south with these uninspiring dinosaurs, then back to the north again through the bland landscape, then south again with a few “poop” jokes tossed in…and then…ah, who cares…maybe it’s just better to say home.