Ever since I was young, I was always fascinated with dinosaurs. A trip to the dinosaur museum was the coolest thing ever for me. Even to this day, I have no shame in letting my inner child show when it comes to dinosaurs. Jurassic Park is still one of my favorite movies, and I will easily admit to you that Jurassic Park 3D was one of the best theatrical experiences for me ever. Thus when I first heard about this movie, I was immediately intrigued. However, after poor reviews followed some less than impressive trailers, I proceeded with caution. Coming out I was amazed at one aspect. How did the makers of movie look at the final product and consider themselves pleased enough to release this into theaters? Walking With Dinosaurs is a pretty bad mess.
The idea behind this movie is a good idea. That idea is to make a movie with realistic CGI dinosaurs and throw people right into that story. The problem? How they went about doing it. We start off with two kids and an adult driving up to a dinosaur skeleton. The three of them get out of the car, and the boy decides to stay behind. As he's playing his Gameboy, a bird lands on the car and starts talking to him. No, I take that back. The bird wasn't talking at all. But it was supposed to be. There was this voice we started to hear that we were supposed to believe was the bird, but it just didn't belong to the bird. Then this voice that was supposed to belong to this bird took us back in time to tell a story. The story was about a herd of Pachyrhinosaurs. The story itself was pretty bad. All we got was a story about our main Pachyrhinosaur growing up to eventually become leader of the heard. They migrated back and forth a lot. And then for most of the movie we got this weird love triangle story between our main character, his brother, and a girl Pachyrhinosaur that they meet. And that's it. No substance at all.
And yes, back to the voices. Only four characters could talk; the bird and our three Pachyrhinosaurs. But once again, the voices were out of place. The mouths of the characters rarely moved and definitely weren't synced to the voices. But the voices were there and we were supposed to just believe they belonged to the characters. Remember Mystery Science Theater 3000? It was as if that gang got together and did a dinosaur documentary as one of their gigs. Except instead of making fun of it, they tried to be completely serious the whole time. It was rather ridiculous.
Was this movie complete trash? Well, not exactly. The CGI dinosaurs were actually done really well. It was much better CGI than a certain other recently released movie that took place in Middle Earth, if you know what I mean. Also, it introduced several different dinosaurs and paused to explain them really quick. As far as I can tell, the information was accurate. So for a small portion of the movie, it was actually fairly educational. However, the movie is actually based on a documentary also called Walking With Dinosaurs, and I actually hear that it's a pretty good documentary. If you want to be educated, just go watch that instead.
Overall, I can see Walking Dinosaurs as a movie that really young boys may enjoy. Like boys ages three to six. And it seems like the type of movie that you would find on Netflix in a few years and put on for your younger kids either early in the morning or just before bedtime in order to keep them preoccupied for a bit. But this is not a show for adults. And it's definitely not one you want to spend money on. Don't even bother Redboxing it. If you want to watch a good dinosaur movie, just re-watch The Land Before Time or Disney's Dinosaur. I give Walking With Dinosaurs a 5 out of 10. And that's just because of the good CGI and enjoyable credits music. Movie quality itself would be a lot lower.
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