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caffeinatedsquirrl · 20 days ago

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Walking With Dinosaurs 2025 is bad, and here's why

I was so excited for Walking With Dinosaurs 2025. So Excited. I called up some friends, I ranted and raved online, I rewatched the originals, (all of them (yes all of them)) I made up a cheese platter and got myself prepared to have a good time.

I did not have a good time.

It’s bad, it’s really, truly, horrendously bad. Not only is it a bad documentary on its own merits, it has managed to completely miss the point of what made the originals special! When I ranted to my Father on this topic, him, knowing my childhood obsession with this series, said to me “well, it’s a bit naff, but you’re not twelve anymore, they aren’t making it for you,” and I am here thinking, bi-eloved Father, if they aren’t making it for me then who the fuck are they making it for? Certainly not anyone who liked the original series! And if the original series didn’t hold up then, you know, maybe it wouldn’t have been viewed by tens of millions of people, and kicked off a revolution in paleontological documentary making, and spawned three additional tv specials, a sequel series, a prequel series, another sequel series, another worse sequel series, a feature length film that I am Not going to acknowledge ever again, another entire series of mockumentaries that were only tangentially related, a sequel to that, a fictionalised drama spin-off of THOSE mockumentaries, then a Canadian spin-off/adaptation of THAT series, a video game, and a multimillion dollar Live Arena Spectacular with diesel powered lifesize sauropod puppets? The Walking With- franchise did not become what it is because it’s audience was twelve, it was because it was good, and they endure because they were well made, and did something bold and interesting that no one else had done, and this new spin off has just, shat all over that, and because I have a blog now I guess I’m gonna rant into the void about it until I feel better.

To start with I’ll get down to the biggest issue of all, the format. The defining thing of the Walking With’s was that they presented themselves as a “live” documentary. Instead of showing us fossils, and talking about what could have been, they showed us an animal, and say this is what is. This is a dinosaur, here is its life. It was all framed as if made about something “alive.” It did not waste time with quibbles about how arrived at their interpretation of the fossils, or justify their decisions, they never broke the illusion that these animals alive, hence “Walking With-” were walking with them, in their footsteps, following their lives. They expected you to use your critical thinking skills to know that it is supposition (and they released a comprehensive book detailing why they made the decisions they made and the science behind them if you cared that much.) WWD 2025 takes all of that and throws it in the bin.

It opens on silhouette of a cow person in Montana, not a great start, and then finally moves to a dig site. In what formation? Not important, apparently. What geological era? Who cares? It’s not like anyone watching a documentary about dinosaurs will care about something as trivial as that, right? Then a pair of mysteriously made up and sweat free paleontologist dig up a bone that has been mysteriously cleaned and prepared ahead of time. We are told it is an infant triceratops that they have named Clover, and she is on her own. They could have told us this by just showing the “live” dinosaur, but, they get to the point pretty quickly so I could have lived with that. Oh, if only I had known what was to come.

This is how you get fossils out of the ground right? Just pick them up? So nice of them to glue themselves together in situ.

We finally see Clover and, she looks terrible. Don’t get me wrong, the model and texturing is very good, she looks beautifully scaly and her body is plump and fat as you’d expect a young dinosaur to look, but the movement is just terrible. All the dinosaurs, outside of a few key scenes, have this incredibly stiff, rigid movement, they turn their head, stop, blink, flinch back to the first position, then repeat. They look and move like animatronics, almost more so than the animatronics of the original did at times when the camera decides to focus inexplicably on the same sequence of short looping movements. Her nostrils do not flare when she investigates the nest of eggs, her pupils do not pin when she is playing, her plump, fat belly does not sway or jiggle as she frolics, she leaves no footprints in the sand, no ripples in the water, she does not pant or cry or emote in any way beyond jerking her head back and forth and leaping with her feet out of frame to save money on animation. She is stiff, and unyielding, and unalive. Then, after a whole three (3!) minutes with her, we’re back at the digsite digging up another fossil that was definitely prepared earlier.

Get prepared to see this lifeless head bobbling a lot.

It’s her jawbone. It’s a very beautifully prepared jawbone too. They’re so proud of this find that the narrator introduces us to the palaeontologist who prepared it, all this only six minutes after they picked up the perfectly prepared femur out of the ground like it was just like that, right in front of her. Why? Do, do you think our memories are so short that we’d forget? Either you’re pretending it came out of the ground that way, or this lady prepared it, you can’t have it both ways because the only way to have that is to excavate it, send it away to be cleaned and prepared, then bury it again, and that’s just a stupid thing to do (so of course they did that) and why did they do this? To show us that her teeth weren’t worn down yet, so we can tell that she is definitely babby :) This is all after showing us her femur that already confirmed her size, showing us the animated model contrasted against insects and plants for scale, and stating, in the narration, that she is a youngster the size of a dog. It’s just pointless filler. If you wanted to show off her teeth that bad, maybe tell us about her diet? Just a thought.

Yeah, you totally cleaned and prepared that fossil onsite with that immaculate, never used hand tool.

The show goes on like this for a while, three minutes of babby dinosaur jumping around, not doing much of anything, four minutes of freshly showered, not-sunburnt paleontologists digging up preprepared fossils and padding the run time by talking about things we already know, because the show just showed it to us (hence why we call them shows) but they have no faith in us to remember things for more than three minutes.

Then the T-Rex shows up for the second time (the first encounter with the infernodrakon was so silly and jerkily animated I’d rather just forget it) and you can get a tiny glimmer of the spirit of the original. Its shot at night, so the pain points of the animation are hidden by the dramatic, shadowy lighting, and it sets up an interesting premise, T Rex has excellent night vision, triceratops does not, so now we get to see one of the most famous and beloved predators of all time in their natural element, lets go!

They do look so lovely in the moonlight.

She steps on a stick immediately, and Clover sees her in the dark, despite the narrator telling us that she can see extremely little, and manages to outrun a bloody T-Rex without any apparent struggle at all, then she runs into a convenient hole in the ground (without being able to see it, somehow) and we spend the next two minutes watching the T-Rex ram it’s face into a hole it can’t fit it’s body through and snapping on air while its legs kick uselessly behind it. This isn’t Walking With Dinosaurs, this is the one good scene from Meet the Robinson's, only we aren’t supposed to be laughing.

At this point I have officially checked out, and the paleontologist decides to whip out their 3d printer and print up a brain case of a T-Rex, and tell us about how they aren’t very smart and how their senses are very sharp and yada yada, just rehashing and justifying the decisions they made three minutes ago because they have less faith in their audience’s intelligence than I do in the Trump administration’s and they need to pad the runtime. It continues in this manner, three minutes of dinosaurs, four minutes padding, and I begin to daydream of fossilisation.

Finally Clover finds a small group of Edmontosaurus and herds up with them for a while, mixed herds are pretty accepted science at this point so I don’t see any reason to be surprised, but then the animation gets really, really bad. The trees the Edmontosaurus are eating are clearly animated over the top of the environment, and as they graze these branches squash and stretch in a way that is really obviously unnatural to the eye, and as they tear leaves off there’s no refuse, no needles fall, no dust flies up into the light. In the original, they would make a point to film the environmental interactions they needed in the actual environment, they’d wear dinosaur foot shaped boots to kick up dust and make footprints in the sand that would be animated over later, use poles to splash the water as their dinosaurs drank, they’d dress men up in black bin bags and send them into the swamps to jump about and make ripples and splashes, they’d tie fishing line to branches and pull and shake them to make the trees move and shed needles as they were eaten, but fishing line wasn’t in the budget apparently, nor particle effects.

If any gif makers out there want to rip and gif this I would appreciate it. The sheer levels of ps2 on display here cannot be captured in screenshots.

Thankfully they don’t dwell on it for more than a few seconds, because all that money they saved went toward making a baby edmontosaurus model! One conveniently just Clovers size in the herd that is her playmate and after interacting for ten seconds they nuzzle like this:

No, no fuck off. They did not do this. I refuse to believe it. Not because I don’t think dinosaurs could have nurturing and complex social relationships, but because this fucking show has put in none of the work. We don’t see any other pair of dinosaurs interact in this way. When Clover meets another Triceratops she head-butts it with her face and bleats, the adult edmontosaurus almost never interact with the baby at all, and this is by far the smoothest and most natural motion I’ve seen two dinosaurs make in this entire episode, and it’s a meaningless, baseless contrivance they made so they could put a cutesy clip in the trailer. The playmate gets eaten in the next three-minute segment, and the edmontosaurus “move on” and Clover just doesn’t go with them for some reason. They don’t bother explaining why, it’s a thing that needs to happen so it happens. What a joke. Then the paleontologists are back with a huge coprolite and talk about how they know that T-Rex must have eaten small infant dinosaurs because of the bone fragments in the coprolite, as if we can’t intuit that from what we were just shown, when the T-Rex avoided the large, strong adults to attack the weaker young, or, from the fact that that’s how almost every living predator behaves. What a load of coprolite.

When the Edmontosaurus “move on” and Clover does not, she is once again alone and vulnerable, how sad! But, we're running out of time, so they decide to throw everything they just set up in the bin by contriving a confrontation between the T-Rex and a bull Triceratops to end the show on a bang, and the T-Rex just, does this. It's not trapped, its not in some sort of hormonal cycle or injured and unable to chase down prey, they just decide to make this animal, which they just took great pains to show to be intelligent enough not to pick a fight with a healthy adult dinosaur when there were other options, stand its ground and fight this Triceratops, just, because. So there is a painstakingly slow, awkwardly animated, gunslinger style stand-off with the Triceratops (which they interrupt twice to explain that Triceratops have these frill things, ya see, like we haven't been looking at one for fourty minutes,) and then it just stops, and stands there, and the triceratops skewers it to death, because that’s what we wanted right? The good herbivores to triumph over the evil carnivore? That’s how nature documentary’s work, right? White hat vs black hat? Is that not how you wanted this to end?

God I wish this were me.

Then they wander into the distance, with the narrator comfortingly telling us that while we don’t know what happened to Clover, we know that she wasn’t eaten by a T-Rex because if she had been she wouldn’t be a fossil. No, she’s just going to slip down a muddy river bank in the next few minutes and drown to death on a nice bed of alluvial sediments. They already told us she died very young, they showed us her bones! Bones that were the same size as her animated model. This is not a happy ending, because we are capable of remembering the things we are told, for long periods of time, even! The only thing that’s changed is that we have two dead dinosaurs now, along with any joy that was left in my soul.

It’s just bad, so very, very bad. It’s bad at everything it tries to do and those elements combine to make a whole that is uniquely worse than the sum of it’s parts! It insults the original series by using its name for a product that has none of its soul in it at all, and it insults the intelligence of its audience by wasting their time, explaining and explaining the same obvious fun-facts over and over, and trying to stretch a twenty-minute experience into fifty minutes of runtime and hoping we won’t notice that they have nothing to say.

What really gets me is that the whole “digsite to recreation” style of dinosaur documentary is already a thing, and a popular thing! When done well it’s very, very interesting, because the practice of paleontology is interesting! The first one that comes to mind is Dinosaurs: The Final Day as presented by the treasure that is David Attenborough. It shows us a dig site, a real dig site, the tedious, and difficult art of excavating it, the joy and wonder of the paleontologists as the splendor within is revealed, and then goes into detail about what these finds are, what we can learn from them, and then, and only then does it show us what that might have looked like with a recreation. This order of operations is important! By showing us the evidence first we are better able to understand what we’re being shown to us in the recreation, and it builds the tension, we wonder what does this mean, what can this tell us, what was it like? and then the show answers our questions in a big, climactic, and satisfying way. By showing the recreation first, then breaking the flow of the story to show us their contrived reasoning behind it, not only does it erode any ability I had to care about the story being told by the recreation with the constant interruptions, it’s no longer answering a question, because we don’t have the time to really ask any! We are showed a narrative, and then we’re pulled out of the narrative so that the author can show us his citations and talk about how very hard he worked and how smart he is and how good his movie is, because it is correct as well as cute, and it does this every three minutes. Imagine if you were watching The Godfather, and every five minutes That Guy who is sitting next to you pauses it to mansplain about the symbolism in the background that you absolutely must understand if you want to enjoy this movie properly, because it’s so deep you know, here have you done the reading? Oh you should watch this video essay first so you can understand the subtext here, just let me…

They just, do everything wrong. If they only had the budget for twenty minute episodes, then make twenty minute episodes! It would have been easier to swallow than this. Maybe its excessive to spend more than two thousand words rambling about this thing, but damn it, I care about this franchise and I know I’m not the only one! I’m almost curious about the second episode. They’re doing Spinosaurus, a dinosaur with a famously controversial and divisive history, and I’m curious if they’re going to go digging up any other prepared fossils when the Spinos only type specimen was famously blown to smithereens in WW2, it would be quite a feat, that. Though, if I’m honest with myself, I think I’d rather watch Nigel Marvin drive his ute through time again. He treated his audience with so much more respect than this show does.

#walking with dinosaurs 2025

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