Post by StevePulaski on Mar 26, 2014 8:00:40 GMT -5
Walking With Dinosaurs (2013)
Directed by: Barry Cook and Neil Nightingale
Directed by: Barry Cook and Neil Nightingale
Our protagonist Patchi beneath his gigantic father in Walking With Dinosaurs.
Rating: ★½
Walking With Dinosaurs is a juvenile excuse for family entertainment; an eighty-seven minute slog masquerading as competent entertainment involving dinosaurs for children and an enthralling visual and thought-provoking experience for adults, the film winds up being neither stimulating nor entertaining as it takes the BBC miniseries from over a decade ago and cheapens it into something about as healthy as a Saturday morning cartoon.
The first perplexity is how this adventure even kicks off. It begins with an atrociously acted prelude by showing a paleontologist named Jack (Karl Urban) taking his niece and nephew along to hunt for fossils. When they get there, his nephew is given a Gorgosaurus tooth by his uncle, who tells him to hold the tooth near and dear to him. The nephew goes to a bay where fossils are commonly found before meeting a talking crow who, I suppose, teleports his consciousness or our consciousness seventy million years back to the Late Cretaceous period, where we are created with visually stunning dinosaurs, who have the unfortunate luck of being able to talk in their own story. "Talk" is a strong verb in this case because one will notice overtime (or maybe immediately) the lips of these dinosaurs do not move, so perhaps the appropriate word in this case is "telecommunicating." The process of animal communicating in this film reminded me of Bob Saget's comedy Farce of the Penguins, which deserves to share the bottom-drawer along with Walking With Dinosaurs.
The story then centers on the underdog of a large Pachyrhinosaurus named Patchi (voiced by Justin Long), who finds his size nothing but a burden and his naivete the butt of every joke. Patchi's father, however, is Bulldust, a towering behemoth who protects his family and children by roaring a deafening roar to scare off species like Troodons and other harmful creatures. A good friend of Patchi's is Alex (voiced by John Leguizamo), an Alexornis bird who guides him along this story, so one day he can be a strong, dependable dinosaur just like his father. In addition, because this is a coming-of-age story with animals, of course a love interest has to be introduced, which comes in the form of a female Pachyrhinosaurus named Juniper (Tiya Sircar), along with a bully by the name of Scowler (Skylar Stone of the largely-forgotten, short-lived Comedy Central show Con).
If you're observant enough, you'll notice that many of these species' names are just shortened names of their given species, which makes it quite odd and perplexing. Also, I've name every dinosaur character in the film in that short little paragraph; the remaining species are just background characters to their own story, never telecommunicating and never chiming in for conversation whatsoever. Furthermore, a few times the dinosaurs reference future periods of time in their lifespan - how do they know their own current time period and how do they know of future ones as well? The list of puzzlements in Walking With Dinosaurs are very disconcerting, especially since this was based off of, from what I've seen, a very competent and enjoyable miniseries.
In this regard, making the dinosaurs telecommunicate was a horrible miscalculation, especially seeing as they have nothing interesting to say. I can't say I know what dinosaurs would telecommunicate about if they could, but I'd hope that animals would provide more interesting insights than what is on display here. The amount of scatological humor, jokes about vomit, goofy jokes that have no purpose, and directionless verbal puns that have no purpose are astonishing. I'm faintly reminded of the animated film Foodfight! and how characters in that particular film seemed to speak in nothing other than puns and ridiculous jokes.
Then there's the plain and direct fact that the film just gets to be a slog through neverending and horribly uninteresting material. The film occasionally wants to be a documentary by including pop-up descriptions of the dinosaurs like what their biological name is and what food they eat. However, it's not five minutes before our newly-introduced dinosaur begins talking about something horribly insignificant like the size of a dinosaur's butt or making another meaningless and frankly uncomfortable scatological joke. The saving grace when things like this happen are the evocative shots of sheer visual beauty, from the acres of forestry to the nicely-rendered CGI creatures of this wild-gone-past. But why take all this time to do animate these creatures and infuse a film like this with visual brilliance if you're going to make the characters horribly flat and depressingly childish? That's like creating a hologram of Elvis Presley and Tupac Shakur for them to sing nursery rhymes. If anything, conduct it like a DisneyNature documentary and let the visuals do the talking?
Speaking in terms of its core audience, who knows how Walking With Dinosaurs will fare amongst children? I'm not even sure that "dinosaur" phase still exists with children, what with the internet and technology in the mix now. Even if your child is still invested in the idea of dinosaurs, feeding them this is the equivalent of feeding them fast-food for breakfast; it fills them up but you could do so much better.
Starring: Karl Urban, Charlie Rowe, and Angourie Rice. Voiced by: Justin Long, John Leguizamo, Tiya Sircar, and Skyler Stone.